We are convinced that we men have the capacity for a loving relationship with our own masculinity. But few know what it feels like to share this need with other men.
Do you remember when you ever had an opportunity in everyday life to see men being loving with each other?
“Los hombres ‘no lloran’,
pero sí se suicidan
3 a 5 veces más
que las mujeres.
Expresa lo que sientes.
¡Por una masculinidad sana,
vulnerable y empática!”
“Men do not cry
but they commit suicide
3 to 5 times more often
than women.
Express what you feel!
For a healthy, vulnerable and empathetic masculinity.”
For more than 2000 years, religious or societal ideas of misunderstood masculinity have relegated much of our sensitivity to the background. Men hide the loving part of your being in a prison of aggression and shame and think they must also defend this prison with power and hate so that their vulnerability is not obvious.
The good news is that many men have started to rethink these learned behaviours and want to give more space to their smart side.
But how can they hold their own in a society full of patriarchism?
Es en la adolescencia cuando los chicos aprenden que para ser leídos como hombres en el futuro (además de separarse de…
Gepostet von Roy Galán am Sonntag, 3. April 2022
Roy Galán
It is in their teenage years that boys learn that in order to be read as men in the future (besides separating from their mother) they have to put up a physical barrier with their friends because if this barrier does not exist, the doubt of not being heterosexual may fall on them and in the construction of masculine identity a man who is not heterosexual is always a “minor” man.
Thus, boys do not touch each other, the hugs that are arranged are always loud: men greet each other by making noise to publicly demonstrate that they bounce, that the body of another man is not a place where they want to stay at all, because, hey I don’t like penises, the only penis I like is mine.
An imposed shame, a ridicule to tenderness, to sleep cuddled, to have tender gestures, to say I love you and if it is said to finish the sentence with a “bro” to remove burden.
The male body is thus vetoed from possible affection, caresses and the affection of friends.
Also from the possibility of going deeper emotionally, of talking about how they really feel, because when a man shows himself to be vulnerable (and he does not talk about current events, nor about sports, nor about series, but about himself) often what he receives is a joke from his friends, because male jokes are a way of expelling emotion from the frame.
This, together with the myth that men cannot have female friends because, of course, how can you be friends with a girl and not want to fuck her, or because if men have girlfriends they forbid them to have female friends out of jealousy, means that men are condemned to a terrible physical and emotional isolation.
An isolation that is only broken with the romantic couple, with romantic girlfriends who pick up the immense burden of being next to men who do not have emotional networks, who have not been able to diversify their affections, who can only, at times, show themselves to them, touch them, they can only rest from the disguise of man in one place, in the romantic couple, because they do not go to therapy, because their friends do not know how they feel and because they do not have any female friends.
And if we add to this the idea of romantic love that if a man who doesn’t express himself (because he doesn’t know how) opens up to you, it’s because you are special and he loves you more, then we have the perfect bombshell.
Reflecting on the codes of male friendship is essential for men to be a freer and happier man, to make the prison bars of masculinity visible, to break with all those structural mandates that usually leave only a trail of emotional corpses, their own and others’, in their wake.
“Being” a man is nothing more than being able to “be” who you are!
We have not yet found an answer to all these questions.
But it is a good start to ask ourselves these questions as men: where do we want to start with ourselves?
If we as men start to be mindful and loving towards ourselves and find a wiser way of dealing with our masculinity, this could be a significant step towards a better world.
Let us create a Future together where we can be real, authentic man without being assholes!