Against my gut, I went to a men’s group a few weekends ago. I was under the impression that, because the idea of going made me nauseous, there was something worth exploring. I was right, and I was wrong.
A men’s group: you know, men get together and are honest about their anger and their insecurity, and they support one another and hug one another and cry. It’s beautiful and it’s stupid. I felt called for reasons of insecurity. I think sometimes I think I’m broken and I need to be fixed. I have been wanting to step into my “manliness” and my patriarchal stature as the head of my ever-growing household. I thought this would help. It did, but only because it reminded me how fucking grown I am and how much work I have done already. I can probably slow down on the personal work and just let the work work for a bit.
I appreciated the space holding, I watched grown men break down and cry for the first time in years, admitting how they were negligent fathers, lovers, brothers.
And then there was all the stuff I knew would make me nauseous: the whiteness of it all, the appropriative Native American grunts, the fire building, the relentless eye contact.
On day one I found myself inspired mainly by seeing how hurt so many people were and how so full of love I was. I wanted to go home so bad. I love my wife. I love my family, I feel at peace with them. All these men felt unhappy and searching up each other’s asses for happiness rather than in the eyes and hearts of those closest to them.
Atop a mountain that it was illegal for Black or indigenous people to be on less than a century ago, we sat in a yurt, complained about how hard it was to be a man, and never once mentioned the root of every man’s issues: Christian, white-supremacist capitalist heterosexual patriarchy.
As Jaylen Walker was shot through 60 times at a routine traffic stop and as the Supreme Court affirmed that over 150 million women should be giving birth against their will, we sat in a circle and talked about how hard it was to be us and how society didn’t give us space to be vulnerable. We were right and wrong. Instead of feeling grief for the women and people of color in our lives, what they must be going through at this exact time, and how to hold them closer, we felt grief for ourselves.
The joke of course, if it’s not obvious to you, is that it is white, Christian, male-dominated society itself that keeps men quiet about their feelings—not women, not Black people, not anyone in particular. It’s a systemic oppressor that tells them if they cry and are weak, they will not win the macho-capitalist championship. Be a stoic, shove it all down.
All these men were there because a society run by us wants nothing to do with the reality of us. Out in the world, we wanted nothing to do with ourselves. Most men don’t want to talk about their feelings with their friends and their friends dont want to talk about their feelings either.
We act as if we need permission to be honest about our feelings, but since we are at the top of the food chain, there is no one to give us permission except ourselves. Until men grant themselves that permission, they will live in resentment and take that resentment out on everyone else.
When I say white, straight men are at the top of the food chain, I feel some resistance come up “in the audience.” It’s curious that when white men1 are told you are powerful, strong, top of the food chain, the kneejerk reaction is to say, “No I’m not. I’m powerless, everyone is mad at me, I’m the one being oppressed.”
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
The logic and emotional murkiness behind the phrase “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is probably the most blatant example of the dissonance that men live in. While we usually think of this phrase in regards to the protocol about gay people serving in the army, I think it’s not a stretch to say that much of the army’s actions are indicative of male, colonialist thinking. Like all humans, men do want to be seen, but they also live in crippling fear of being seen. This, I think, is the best way to contextualize much of the pain and confusion we see around us. Imagine an internal don’t ask don’t tell protocol inside everyone’s minds.
Are you having troubling thoughts or intense feelings? Are you feeling a bit lost, unseen, and unsupported? Don’t ask anyone about them, don’t ask yourself about them, and definitely don’t tell anyone about them. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is just another way of saying, “Shut the fuck up.”
After all, if you’re not asking questions and you’re not expressing your feelings, you’re just suffering in silence.
bell hooks was brilliant for many reasons but one of my most poignant takeaways from her teachings was the importance of using the phrase “white-supremacist, capitalist, heterosexual, patriarchy.” I like to add “Christian” to the front. More than just a phrase, these terms are invocations of powerful spirits and systems; that is why they are probably triggering you right now in one way or another. Some of you might even have a voice inside telling me to “shut the fuck up about it.” I offer to you that this voice is not you, it is the spirit of these terms themselves which do not want to be seen.
These are very, very important concepts whether you think they are “a problem” or not. They all hold deep existential symbolism for each of us:
Christian: our relationship to the divine.
white-supremacist: our relationship to our own identity
capitalist: our relationship to value and self-worth
heterosexual: our relationship with one another as men2
patriarchy: our relationship to control
So, we’ve got divinity, identity, self-worth, community, and control. What do these mean to you? What’s your relationship to them? Not your opinion of them. Are you comfortable with some but not others? Why?
In the Western world, all of these terms can be nicely folded up and summarized with one word: colonizer. While many people are gaslit into thinking otherwise, it’s clear to everyone that the story of the western world is the story of colonization, and its tools were always and continue to be the Christian white-supremacist capitalist, heterosexual patriarchy.
It helps me to write a paragraph about what comes up for each term. Here’s what it looks like for me:
Christian: I think of my Jewish roots but being raised in Florida and attending a Christian school. I think of how my experience of the divine was not at all present for the most formative years of my life. I’m only now being introduced to it, so I feel very much like a child who has just been told “there is a man in the sky.”
Up until now, the divine has been presented as soulless Bar Mitzvahs and genital mutilation at birth.
In my life, family, and community, we didn’t pray together, we didn’t meditate together, we didn’t say grace, there was very little time to elevate above the mundane. So, my relationship to the divine is…new.
white-supremacist: While I knew about the Holocaust and the plight of the Jews, I’m white-passing and spent most of my life hanging out and feeling close to white kids.
Though, in retrospect, I see that I was drawn more closely to Jews and never felt fully safe with white (often Christian) kids. It makes sense, their parents were at home saying things like, “Jews killed our savior.”
I’m now confident, sitting in a yurt for a men’s group for instance, that I can point out the Jews and the people raised Christian just by looking into everyone’s eyes. This makes me understand a certain level of aloneness I have felt my whole life. My relationship to my racial identity is also fairly new.
capitalist: I run a company, I love spending and making money, I’m no communist, but I am a casual anarchist. I would feel more excited than scared to see it all burn down rather than continue the way it’s going. I feel that my personal value being related in any way to money is problematic, painful, and confusing. I’m working on prioritizing a different value system. It’s hard.
If I’m being totally honest, my relationship with money and capitalism is very strained. I want my company to succeed, I want more money, but I also want …..
heterosexual: I was thinking this morning about how it may seem like gay or trans people are a small population, but if we lived in a world where heterosexuality was not given such weight, then people would be raised in homes where saying “I’m gay,” or “I’m trans,” would be not such an earthquake of an admission. I’m heterosexual, but I had to think I was gay for a few years in order to come to that conclusion, otherwise, I would have just stayed within the prescribed bounds of my upbringing and not really know what was on the other side of the fence.
Pausing here because I think about the forbidden fruit. The basis of all Christianity—and therefore Western society—is about how dangerous truly knowing yourself is. Don’t take a bite of the forbidden fruit—knowledge— or else the full weight of the universe will come crashing down on you for all eternity.
patriarchy: The masculine and feminine are in all of us, sometimes they dance, sometimes they wrestle, and sometimes they don’t talk to one another at all. In me, I’m aware of my skepticism of patriarchy and manliness. Contact sports, war, competitiveness, physical violence, all of it repulses me, I see no place for it. I also see how women’s power is questioned and denigrated at each turn in our society. They are just one of our ribs after all—we’re told to ignore the fact that they literally made every rib within their own bodies. They are actual Gods, we’re just sperm sprinklers.
I think I quiet my masculine side because I so badly want women to be more in control—or at least the feminine to be more in control of our world. I’m aware of something that happened in my life which made me scared of masculinity, in others and in myself.
Colonizer Spaces
Throughout the weekend, there were moments of catharsis, like a Family Constellation healing where people stood in for my father and grandfather and son and my 12-year-old self, and I got to say all sorts of things like “fuck my Bar Mitzvah!” and “Why did you cut off the tip of my dick?!” Tears poured down my face.
But it also all felt a bit forced. I had too many objections to the whole thing to really let go.
I was told that Family Constellation therapy had its roots in “African rituals,” a conspicuously non-specific phrase that immediately rang my alarm bells. I looked it up afterward, and, as expected, the German pastor who championed Family Constellation therapy was not quite a Nazi, but wasn’t anti-Nazi either. He spent his time during World War II as a Jesuit missionary in South Africa converting Zulu people to Christianity. Womp womp. There’s that Christian, white-supremicist patriarchy again. I’m getting so good at sniffing it out in people.
Now, in 2022, a white man-raised Catholic used this bastardized, Nazi-adjacent, colonization-inspired therapy method to help me sort through my Jewish past. I wasn’t able to reach full catharsis, and I think it’s because, in the back of my mind, I didn’t need to Google or Wikipedia any of this to know the whole thing was not for me. For lack of a better word, it left me feeling colonized.
I was thinking about the thesis of David Graeber’s book The Dawn of Everything. He claims—with lots of evidence—that much of what Westerners have presented as “indigenous stories” or “African-inspired rituals” were really just their own creations that they felt were given some credibility and mystique by attributing to non-colonizers. No one was fact-checking. The implications here are wild. Not only were they colonizing and stripping people of their cultures, but they were admitting that there was deep wisdom in the people they were colonizing and colonizing that wisdom itself—instead of just giving indigenous people the microphone and admitting their civilizations are superior or at the very least can teach us a lot.
I’m thinking now of “Yellowstone,” a television show that has become a conservative talking point because no liberals seem to like it and it’s always “snubbed” at the Emmy’s. Liberals don’t like it because it comes from a long line of Western-genre shows which are machinations of colonization in that the indigenous characters are adjacent to the story and actual indigenous people have little to no serious part in the storytelling itself.
It is an “indigenous-inspired” story, which is just code for “through the lens of whiteness.” Westerns like “Yellowstone” steal mystique from indigenous people while leaving white people in the driver’s seat and glorifying and justifying violence of all kinds. Actual indigenous stories—much like black stories—have no choice but to depict white people as violent colonizers, and this kind of honest storytelling—that is, based on the experience of victims of colonization—makes white people uncomfortable.
If, however, “Yellowstone” fans were watching indigenous-created shows like “Reservation Dogs” or “Rutherford Falls,” instead of seeing indigenous people through the lens of whiteness, they would see white people through the lens of indigenous people. And let me tell you, they would probably feel ridiculed. They’d feel like it was cruel and unfair—and maybe, if they have the faculties, they’d finally understand what existing in Western society is like for many BIPOC people. They’d finally understand why cheap Native American headdresses for Halloween are so offensive.
Turns out conservatives are the snowflakes, BIPOC have been putting up with this sort of depiction and treatment for centuries but white culture can barely handle it for a few years.
Back at the men’s group, another snowflake melted. In the spirit of openness, I told the organizer the whole thing felt a bit Christian for my tastes. He made a facial expression that could only be considered a snarl and told me “No, that doesn’t land. That doesn’t fit. I’m not Christian, I practice zen.”
This would be as ridiculous as me saying, “screw my bar mitzvah, screw Israel, and screw circumcision,” and thinking these beliefs meant that I suddenly wasn’t Jewish anymore. Every one of the weekend’s hosts was raised Catholic, yet they honestly believed that simply renouncing Jesus was all that needed to take place in order to rid their psyches of Christianity.
We live in a Christian bubble; even if we all become atheists one day, our relation to the divine, and one another, is steeped in Biblical teachings and simply saying “I’m against organized religion,” or “I don’t believe in God,” doesn’t even scratch the surface of the beliefs that have been implanted in us since birth. The inability to address the depth of our brainwashing is, to my mind, the biggest difference between the young generation and past generations.
I also expressed to the host how I felt that the one person of color attending seemed uncomfortable, and having heard stories from my wife of being the only person of color at events like these, certain amends needed to be made to make it a more accessible space for him. The host expressed that he had badly wanted a more diverse community and didn’t know why they never signed up after the initial meet-and-greets.
I wanted to tell him that he needed to offer BIPOC discounts or scholarships, and he needed to have some facilitators who were BIPOC. At the very least, he needed to understand that if it was a BIPOC-safe space, there is a slim chance that Jaylen Walker’s name would not have been spoken that weekend. I wanted to tell him that he lives on indigenous land— land that had specifically been integral in the systematic removal and colonization of indigenous people by Catholic colonizers not too long ago. He couldn’t simply say, “that’s bad,” and call it a safe space. BIPOC deserve amends made and gracious invitations, not simply unlocked doors. Chumash people should be able to attend the event for free. However, the space was just how he wanted it: filled with people of, in his words, “similar ilk.”
Overall, I appreciated being in a space where openness was welcomed, where tears were easy to come by, and where everyone was aware that if you’re talking about the weather with someone, you’re usually doing it to cover up some deeper truth or pain you really wish you were expressing.
I take these lessons back into my life with ease. I remain open; I remain respectful of my body and my boundaries, and my true feelings. But I know that the privilege of this openness, the ease at which I can practice this openness and boundary setting is a result not of my enlightenment or spiritual fortitude but of the safety that my sex, my health, my sexual preference, my skin color, and my bank account allow me. I suppose in that sense, I should be grateful for the white-supremacist, capitalist, heterosexual patriarchy and the freedoms it grants me to operate in this world.
And then there is the deep grief and feelings of helplessness that come with the understanding that, in our “civilization,” this freedom comes at the cost of someone else’s.
Reminder: Please don’t respond to these emails. If you have something to say, please leave it as a comment on Instagram or below, I look forward to hearing from you.
As usual, ending every post with a picture of my son and a picture of my breakfast.
including Jews who identify as white
While some could say heterosexual is more about our relationship to the opposite sex, I think the fact that heterosexuality is even a “boundary” in our society is indicative of homophobia, of our fear of other men.
Against My Gut, I Went to a Men’s Group