Chpt. 8

The Incredible Hulk...is a man always on the run, unable to develop lasting ties or intimacy. A Scientist by training, the ultimate personification of the rational man, when he experiences anger he turns into a creature of color and commits violent acts. After committing violence he changes back to his normal white male rational self, he has no memory of his actions, and therefore cannot assume responsibility for them. Unable to form sustained emotional bonds with friends and family he cannot love. He thrives on disconnection and disassociation...he is the symbol of the ultimate patriarchal man, alone on the road, forever drifting, driven by the Beast within.

Chpt. 9

Women are fearful of hearing men voice feelings. I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner, because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he himself was wounded, then how could he protect me? As I matured, as my feminist consciousness developed to include the recognition of patriarchal abuse of men, I could hear male pain. I could see men as comrades and fellow Travelers on the journey of life and not as existing merely to provide instrumental support.

Talking with men, I've been stunned when individual males would confess to sharing intense feelings with a male buddy, only to have that buddy either interrupt to silence the sharing; offer no response; or distance himself. Men of all ages who want to talk about feelings usually learn not to go to other men, and if they are heterosexual, they are far more likely to try sharing with woman they have been sexually intimate with. Women talk about the fact that intimate conversation with males often takes place in the brief moments before and after sex. And of course our mass media provides the image again and again of the man who goes to a sex worker to share his feelings, because there is no intimacy in that relationship, and therefore no real emotional risk. Being "vulnerable" is an emotional state that many men seek to avoid. Some men spend a lifetime in a state of avoidance and therefore never experience intimacy. Sadly, we have all colluded with the patriarchy, by faking it with men, pretending levels of intimacy and closeness that we do not feel. We tell men we love them, when we feel we have absolutely no clue as to who they really are. We tell fathers we love them, when we are terrified to share our perceptions of them, out of fear that if we disagree we will be cast out, we'll be excommunicated. In this way we all collude with patriarchal culture to make men men feel they can have it all; that they can Embrace patriarchal manhood and still hold their loved ones dear. In reality, the more patriarchal a man is, the more disconnected he must be from feeling, and if he cannot feel he cannot connect, if he cannot connect he cannot be intimate.

Before most men can be intimate with others, they have to be intimate with themselves. They have to learn to feel and be aware of their feelings. Men who mask feelings, or suppress them, simply do not want to feel the pain. Since emotional pain is the feeling that most males have covered up, numbed out or closed off, the journey back to feeling is frequently through the portal of suffering. Much male rage covers up this place of suffering, this is the well-kept secret. Often when a female gets close to male pain, penetrating the male mask to see the emotional vulnerability beneath, she becomes a target for the rage. Shame at emotional vulnerability is often what men who are closed down emotionally seek to hide. Since shaming is often used to socialize boys away from their feeling selves, toward the patriarchal male mask, many grown men have an internal shaming voice.

You create intimacy when you shift from the pursuit of external power: the ability to manipulate and control, to the pursuit of authentic power: the alignment of your personality with your soul.

There is no denying that our happiness is inextricably bound up with the happiness of others. There is no denying that if Society suffers, we ourselves suffer. Thus, we can reject everything else; religion, ideology, all received wisdom, but we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion.

In chapter nine, the most interesting quote was about "loving" men who we fear, men we do not understand, men who are disconnected. It is interesting to think that collusion with the patriarchy can manifest itself as telling a male person that you love them (almost unconditionally).

I included part of the Dalai Lama quote, because it does speak about the suffering that people in society can see and feel from others around them.