Hugo Schwyzer

This is the third post in a series that began with this one last Friday and continued on Monday of this week here.

The problem I’ve been writing about is perhaps not entirely unique to men, nor is it universal among them, even in our culture. But the problem — call it “numbness”, call it lack of resolve, call it a profound sense of disconnectedness from both the self and others — does seem to manifest far more often among men than women. Men, both as individuals and in groups, do far less healthy self-reflection than women do. To put it in terms that mytho-poetic types use, men do less “soul work” than their sisters. That doesn’t mean that young American women are growing up healthier, mind you, only that women are generally allowed more emotional resources to help them grow.

The first two posts were largely about sketching out the problem. Today, I’m offering some preliminary solutions. (I realize that in doing so, I’m part of a fairly large crowd: the “what’s wrong with boys and men today” sector is a fast-growing one in the media and publishing worlds.) Below Monday’s post, ballgame notes:

I think your suggestion that males need solely to ‘look within’ to combat the emotional consequences of this enforced isolation is rather like telling someone, “That poison is making you sick! Here, have some more.”

Indeed. The kind of transformation we’re talking about here can’t be done in solitude, or at least not solely in solitude. The journey within is a difficult one, and it requires both guides and companions. To state the obvious, young men desperately need mentors. But the kind of mentors that they generally find in our culture aren’t much help in doing this work: a schoolteacher may make you a better history student, but won’t automatically help you go “deep and inside”. A basketball coach may make you a better foul shooter, but he won’t necessarily mentor you in developing a vocabulary for your inner emotional terrain. And your first boss may show you the skills you need in order to succeed in one particular job environment, but that boss probably won’t help you answer the existential “why” that explains what you’re doing there in the first place.

So what does a mentor do? Here again let me quote Robert Bly’s “Iron John”:

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building an emotional body capable of containing more than one kind of ecstasy.

The “ecstasy” reference may throw some folks off. But Bly isn’t talking merely about the physical. The opposite of numbness, of emptiness, is authentic feeling — pain, pleasure, excitement, joy, grief, desire. All of these states, even grief and pain, have an ecstatic component. Real ecstasy isn’t just sensation, it’s feeling feelings so real, so acute, that they act as catalysts for transformation. On a small level, it’s what we mean when we describe a painful break-up or the loss of a parent as an experience so agonizing we had no choice but to become a different, deeper, emotionally richer human being.

Men, especially young ones, need older men who will model ecstasy for them. They need older men who will show them how to be both masculine, responsible, vulnerable, and — at times — ecstatically Wild, all at the same time. The hip-hop star with his guns, his bling, and his vulgar bravado models none of these things. The successful business mogul with his jets isn’t doing any better. And even the stable “all-American Dad” (celebrated by truck ads and by social conservatives as the bedrock of our culture) usually is depicted as outsourcing his emotions to his wife or girlfriend, the woman who invariably “knows him better than he knows himself.”

But where are we going to find these men? If the rappers won’t do, if the football players won’t do, if the politicians won’t do, who will? (And God knows, college gender-studies professors aren’t always the best candidates.) Many men lack the desire to mentor younger ones. More often, they’re afraid that if they do try and mentor, they’ll be revealed as frauds. They suspect that they have nothing to mentor with. How, they wonder, can you give away something you haven’t got? Bly again:

We know, moreover, that such initiation does not take place at any one moment or only once. It happens over and over. An Australian aborigine said something to this effect: “I’ve been doing this initiatory work with young men for forty years now, and I think I’m beginning to get it myself.”

If no one taught us how to go into our own deep places when we were young, it’s not too late. We get “deep” by leading others; we become, like Bly’s aborigine, initiated through the process of initiating. We learn by doing.

So what would this mentoring look like? Long weekend retreats with multi-generational groups of men (heavy on ageing white boomers), running naked through the woods, beating on drums, primal screaming? Well, there are worse things to do on a Saturday. But for any number of reasons, these kind of ritualistic retreats tend to appeal to only a few. And too often, the ecstasy that is experienced is short-lived. What good is it to go to the mountains and get in touch with cathartic Wildness if by Tuesday you’re back at work, griping and gossipping and grimly enduring?

Real mentoring is first and foremost about being present in the lives of young men. It means showing up to spend time with them, and it means modeling a variety of things for them. It means more than teaching a skill set (though learning skills together, like how to throw a ball or how to climb a rock, are compatible with good mentoring). It means being willing to model vulnerability. It means risking appearing “uncool”. It means being willing to make young men uncomfortable by lovingly, gently, but relentlessly pushing them to map their own emotional topography. It means insisting, firmly and reassuringly, that they develop the vocabulary to describe that psychic terrain. It won’t come naturally. Nothing good ever does.

We’ve all seen boys transform through boot camps or football practices. We’ve all seen how hard a young man will work to transform himself to win the approval of a drill sergeant or a coach. For that matter, we’ve all seen some otherwise lazy lads spend hours carefully mastering a video game to get to “expert” level. Provided the right incentive — and the best incentive is companionship, validation, cameraderie — young men can develop what Bly calls their “emotional bodies” just as well as they do their physical ones.

When I first got sober in a Twelve-Step program, I learned a tool I still use. My sponsor said to me: “Hugo, every week — better yet, every day — make sure you’re talking to three types of men. Talk to a man who has a lot of time (sobriety), more than you. Talk to someone who’s got the same amount as you do, and is going through similar experiences. And talk to a newcomer, some guy who is where you once were. Your growth and your sobriety hinge on talking to all three.”

My sponsor was right. And eventually, I decided that this “three guy” rule made a lot of sense whether or not recovery from addiction was the prime concern. For years now, I’ve made sure to have three kinds of men close to me: older mentors, peers, and younger guys. The older mentors in my life today range in age from 55-80 (my father was chief among them; his teaching continues today from beyond the grave.) I use the term peer loosely; it refers to guys from 35-50, in one way or another confronting mid-life. These are the guys with whom I joke about wrinkles and weight, with whom I rejoice and grieve most often. And as a teacher and youth group leader, I get to work with a lot of young guys — some still in high school, others of college age. I try and focus less on telling them what to do, and more on showing them the how.

I talked to a man of about sixty this week. He became a father for the first time in his early fifties (his wife was only a few years younger, they are IVF parents). As I am childless in my early forties, I worry about “lack of energy” and other issues that might affect an “older” Dad. My friend was honest about the drawbacks of learning to change diapers for the first time after he got his AARP card, but he was also comforting and reassuring. I needed to hear him this week.

Another friend is a couple of years younger than I (38); he’s divorced and wondering if he ever wants to get married again. He needed to hear about “starting over”. We shared stories of rage and pain and guilt, and laughed together about how much easier it was to connect to our anger than it was to our hurt.

And just yesterday morning, I met briefly with a former student on the verge of transferring. He’s struggling with that “waiting to be struck by certainty” phenomenon — unsure of where to go to college, unsure of whether to break up with his girlfriend when he does, unsure of what he wants beyond the immediate. He’s smart enough to be troubled by what Bly calls “the emptiness in the chest”. We talked quite a bit about how to make that emotional novocaine — the stuff we’ve been shooting into ourselves since the first time someone said “big boys don’t cry” — wear off. And I assured him it can wear off if we work at it.

As long as I live, I intend to be talking to these three groups — those ahead of me, those beside me, those behind me. And transformation happens this way, it really does.