I often refer to what I do, professionally and avocationally, as my “work.” I talk about “youth work” and “pro-feminist work” and “men’s work”. I had thought that everyone would understand that what I meant was clear, but a recent comment by Toy Soldier below my “Sheer desecrated hurt and anger” post makes it obvious that I need to be more explicit.
I wrote:
Real men’s work is about reaching young men where they are. Not just the ones who are obviously willing to be reached, either. Real men’s work — especially in school settings — is about initiating relationship with the shy, the bookish, the brooding and the hostile. It is frustrating, difficult, painful, and very tiring work. It is also joyous, especially when the breakthroughs happen. I’ve been working to do this for many years now, with a wide variety of young men. And it may be the most important thing I do.
Toy Soldier replied:
If one considers it work to aid a young man in need then one has already missed the point. Speaking as a “brooding” young man from Cho’s generation, I think the above attitude is one of the many reasons why Cho’s hurt and anger remained suppressed. As John mentioned above, one must approach helping young men with the intent to actually help them because it is the right thing to do for them. It requires respect, which the above–no offense–selfish, self-serving attitude completely lacks.
Whoa, cowboy. I’ll ignore the “selfish and self-serving” bit and focus instead on the misunderstanding of what I mean by “work.”
Sometimes, it’s fairly obvious that (at least on my mother’s side) I am descended from a lot of Scots-Irish Calvinists and North German Lutherans. The “Protestant work ethic”, stripped of its theological nuances, is one of my family’s secular religions (the other being good manners). Somehow, early on in life, I picked up the idea that there was no greater sin than idleness. Sin was, I believed and still often do believe, more about what you didn’t do than what you did. From my cousins, I picked up a “work hard, play hard” ethos. As long as I was doing the former, I was allowed great (perhaps too much) latitude for the latter. Getting straight As or making money weren’t vitally important, mind you — but having focus and goals were.
So I end up talking about almost everything as “work.” I’ll be the first to say that my marriage is blissful. It is also challenging work. Indeed, if my marriage wasn’t sometimes a hell of a lot of work, I’d figure that there was something amiss. If I’m too comfortable, I’m stagnating; the only way to fight decay is to keep in constant motion, in near-constant effort. My teaching is work. I am good at what I do, I think, but I know I could be better. I could be kinder, more sympathetic, even more passionate. Teaching is joy — teaching is hard work.
I “work out” every day. I do it for the thrill of the endorphin rush to which I am most definitely addicted, but I also do it because I like working at physical things. I like pushing up mountain trails and doing ever-more difficult positions in Pilates. Is there an element of playfulness, of creativity, of fun in all of this “working” out? Of course there is. But is it also mental and physical work? Abso-flippin’-lutely.
And my youth ministry is also “work.” I work at being a better, kinder, more intuitive mentor to girls and boys. I work at new ways to reach the kids who are toughest to reach. Is it often exhilarating and fulfilling? Sure. But it is also often tiring and disheartening. If I only did youth ministry in order to be adored, to be wanted, and to be validated, I’d be a piss-poor volunteer. If I only did youth ministry with the kids whom it is easy to reach, I’d be a fraud and a coward. Every danged week, I have to push myself out of my comfort zone to try and connect with the sullen, the angry, the hurting, the defensive. I have to be willing to have my initial efforts at connection rebuffed, knowing that building trust with a wounded, alienated kid takes a long time and is frequently hard work.
Toy Soldier — and some other men’s rights activists — think that pro-feminist men have only one motive to work with boys: we want to make sure that they don’t hurt women. The implication, and it’s one that I hear often, is that men like me don’t really like or care for other men or boys. Yet because as pro-feminists we see the colossal harm men and boys inflict on women and girls, we apparently consider it our distasteful duty to reach out to our little brothers in the hopes of molding them into respectful egalitarians like ourselves. According to this theory, men like me have no interest in working with boys as boys, only in working to “defuse” their toxic masculinity. It’s a cute theory, but it’s simply not true.
I work with girls, and I work with boys. Ask anyone who has seen me do youth ministry: my time is evenly divided with all of “my kids”, and my joy in their growth and my concern at their setbacks is equal, whether they are male or female. I do youth work because I want these teens to grow up into empowered, socially responsible, authentically happy human beings who delight in their own createdness and who feel a strong desire to help heal the world. I want them to do justice and love mercy. I want them to know that they are loved and adored no matter what they do or who they do it with. And I am willing to do a hell of a lot of work to help get them there. And make no mistake, it is frequently very hard work.
There’s a lot of work to be done, people! The earth needs savin’, the animals need protectin’, the poor need housin’, the naked need clothin’, the rivers need cleanin’, the kids need lovin’. We need God’s help to get all this done, but we are His co-workers, His commissioned agents, His proxies. There’s too much pain in the world for us to be self-indulgent or lazy for too long. Let’s get crackin’.