"Civilisation overcomes the dangerous aggresivity of the individual, by weakening him, disarming him and setting up an internal authority to watch over him, like a garrison in a conquered town."
Sigmund Freud
Guilt. Fear. Doubt. These are the three signals. These are the ways in which society has branded you, the forms of your enslavement. This is your make up, your false beauty, the male equivalent of false femininity.
Know that whenever you feel a sharp, stabbing shame, it is most likely that your are feeling the stirrings of an emotion of which you should feel most proud. It might even be a violent emotion. It might even be horrifying. It might even be nightmarish. But the worst thing you can do is repress it. The worst thing you can do is tame it, trick it and constrict it.
That which incites shame, demands to be looked at. Masculinity, in both men and women, is that energy which overcomes terror. Our fate is not that of Kurtz. Our masculinity IS those very dark places of the earth, the things we seek to deny, the night’s palete. It is the energy of confrontation. It is bravery. It is standing up to God. It is wrestling with the wind.
It is not our place in life to cower. Fear is not a warning. It is an invitation. Your masculinity is your rightful intoxication. Courage does not mean never fearing death. It is meeting the unknown and simply leaping towards it regardless. It’s not, never feeling lazy, down, depressed, weakened, wounded or inadequate. Your masculinity is the energy of confronting all that ugliness and doing the task anyway.
So the next time someone tries to call you on being fearful, or vulnerable, or tries to capitalise on your insecurities and weaknesses – laugh at them. Laugh at them and say, “Yeah. You got me. You pushed my button. Well done.” Say that and move on. Don’t give it a fucking second thought. Just know that your insecurities are the territory on which you build your manliness. It’s not about being invulnerable. That’s society’s most dangerous myth about masculinity. It is about how you deal with your shortcomings, your challenges.
This society would have you believe that you are wounded. That you are forever lacking. That there is something about you as a man, which is wrong, inadequate and irredeemable. This society would have you believe that you must spend the rest of your fucking life compensating, hiding your weaknesses. As men, we are born with the idea built into our cells that we must somehow make up for our sins. That we must work, punish ourselves and extend ourselves in order to make up for our crimes.
What those crimes are is never actually made clear. Like Original Sin, it is some unnamed quality that we are born with. If you think I am venturing into wild speculation take a look around you. There you will find a legacy. Skyscarpers, wars, towers, tanks, colonialisms, empires. Even violent abuse and crime. All these occur because man has built into him a shame. It is society’s way of keeping you from yourself. It is society’s way of taming the danger in you. The irony is, that this very danger of which civilisation is so afraid, is the very energy of survival. It is the music of the planets, and it is the genius of Leonardo Da Vinci.
When this energy is repressed, it no longer becomes power and skill, it becomes a twisted psychosis. A sickness. As men, we are a long way from where we need to be, because society has crippled us before birth. It is not our faults, but it is our responsibility to take up arms against whatever sea of troubles confronts us. To stop being so precious about ourselves. To pierce the sort of male super-ego that has grown over centuries and realise that without a confrontation of death, without facing up to failure, hardship and suffering, the human tribe will die out. This is what masculinity is all about. You wanted a definition. Well…there it is.
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