How are men made?

"If you can define your manhood in terms of caring, then maybe we can come back from this."

By Micheal Bernhardt

When he said them to Susan Faludi, I doubt that he had any idea of the impact that they would hit me with force they did when I read them for the first time. I was sitting on my couch in a living room that I hated, in a house that I hated, in an outfit I hated, well I think you get the point. Reading "Sltiffed" by Susan Faludi, these words were a hard pill to swallow and accept off the page because even though I had tried to be the best human I could be, I forgot to become a man and the story of Micheal and other men in this book was eye-opening. I, of course, saw myself in the men and their stories; I compared myself to them and judged their stories, evaluated them, men from all over. When I read that line, I started to see, men all face the same challenges, in fact, in primary fact. Where we all are different is the stories that we are writing in the boundaries of fact, a good example is the stereotypical fish story, the story contains all types of information size of the fish is up for debate and its weight, there may be a glorious fight, but if you are sitting at the table eating fish, then the experience speaks for its self right. That's in a crude sense the boundary of fact, and the magic of this book Stiffed captures the facts of the man inside the stories, she goes and collect and shares the stories without judgment and in a compassionate way and for the benefit of me and all men she gives stories full of fact about what a man is but more importantly the boundary of what a man is not.

Stiffed is a book written about the male experience and a broad look at forming modern masculinity from a value-formed identity to subjective symbolic masculinity. At the core, when pushed to a traumatic experience, a boy will be forced to become a man or die. The traumatic experience created does not have to be physical in form and can be created in the emotional world. The key concept that needed to be in place was that the symbolic man created in the mind of that man needed to be killed. The concept or the experience, either emotional or in the physical world, needs to be not of the making of the own mind because in this the mind cannot be manipulated and even when the experience is in the physical world like the experience that Micheal when through it will still take years before the experience or the facts of what happened will break the symbols that we have formed.

I am going to provide some context here (more detail here) Micheal was a part of the My Lai massacre, and by a part of I mean he was there, he watched as his platoon killed and committed horrid acts, the facts are people that were civilians died and from that Micheal had to decide what it meant to be a man. He suffered for years with the experience and the emotional trauma that came from the experience. He tells Susan of the path that he took and how his life was impacted when he struggled with the symbolic idea of a man that got growing up about and what, at his core what he valued about being a man. From that struggle, he comes to the quote above.

Caring, the most simple way to define being a man or becoming a man, be caring in the face of everything else. Stiffed is a book that does an intimate look at what masculinity was in the past for men and how it evolved from this deep-rooted value of caring for a community and caring for others to a consumer image that we wear or aspire to for the value of being a man. She explores these stories and at the same time uncovers that it isn't just men trying to discover what being a man is that is struggling; there is another group of men that are struggling because they are stuck trying to figure out what men are not. The symbols that they have learned are so hard to take that their story is like Sylvestor Stalone, where he faced death in his own way on the screen and in real-life on the polo field. His story about his experience is all about what man isn't; he destroyed the internal image of what man cannot be and, in the face of death, recreated himself to explore the other side of being a complex man. He talks about the role on the screen in 1997 Cop Land, where he departs from the normal ripped image we know and went to a chubby middle age cop. The insight that we get in this story about how a man can be open to feeling and understand a person's body shame is a blessing to any masculinity. Susan Faludi does a tremendous job of being an observer to the stories that she compiled for this book, and her uncanny ability to be honest and genuine makes it even more of a pleasure to read.

The book goes very deep with all the men, and in return, the men show courage in their honest conversations that include their feelings and the values created for them when faced with the death of their emotional, symbolic man. They provide experience after experience for you to read and learn from because without even knowing, the brain is connecting the facts in the stories; it's actively looking for it. In a way, Susan gently corrals man's masculinity into a self-defining or die spot with a series of stories that, because they are full of all successes, failures, and everything in between, we, the reader and me, the man, have no outs left. Even if I choose to let the man inside me die, a new man will grow in the new facts after some time. Humans are always trying to see patterns and see the recurring theme; it is one of the ways our brain becomes sure that we are "right". The statement of how to be a man was my moment when the brain just clicked for me, all the emotions and stories just clicked, and with that release, the book shifted, and becoming a man was the next step. I finished Stiffed, and it is a loved book in my library. I refer to it in my coaching, and I draw from it in my personal life. Micheal is one of my three personal hero's of masculinity, and I have adopted caring as a personal value and my number one masculinity value.

Hope that helps.

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