Men's mother-need is a cause for understanding not shaming

Men spend most of their time trying to deal with the need for a mother. You either become a dick, and cut off your need for intimacy with a kind of rage and abusive materialism in your approach to sexuality, or you become a dependent, someone completely at the mercy of your need for emotional fulfilment in women. Misogyny and 'playing nice' are the same thing at the root – a way of distracting oneself from feeling helpless in the face of feminine sexuality.

As with all things in life, a balance between the two is needed. Not for the good of women, but for the good of ourselves. The aim, and it is not small feat, is to recognise the primal nature of the mother-need. It isn't going away. It is basic, and it is essential to us. The need for the mother is a yearning for the source.

The shame about the mother-need is a popular issue in post-feminist culture. It is often relayed to a man that 'he just needs his mummy' or 'I am not your mother' etc. etc.. And this is done with a sneer and scorning smirk. However, the motivation behind such accusations should not be taken as some neutral intellectual barb. It is a form of manipulation.

The truth is, whether we like it or not, we as men function under the pressure of having to negotiate a number subconscious desires and needs which we feel threaten to overwhelm us. One is the need for the mother, and one is the procreant urge for sex. 

 

The need for the mother should be nothing to be ashamed of. The need for the mother, when repressed, is what creates sexual abuse, fear, power-games and dishonesty. Contrary to what people like to think, shaming men for the mother-need does not force them to 'mature' or 'become a man'. Rather, it requires them to bury the most natural desire of all, an already complex urge that becomes quickly toxic if it is not integrated into the personality.

The mother-need is an ambivalent thing. It captures the true nature of love – where hate, passion, need, desire to be independent, helplessness and power all converge in one attachment. If the complexity and emotional conflicts of this attachment are not faced up to and recognised and, as I say, integrated on a conscious level, relationships with women are going to be an impossibility for men.

The Freudian desire is not as relevant as the simple conflict of need and desire for release. This conflict holds men in a double bind for most of their lives, and a failure to face up to it imprisons them in either blind co-dependence, or an aggressive and often misogynistic aloneness.

Post-feminism's attack on men, the denigration of male sexual urges, and the shaming of the male mother-need and its use as a form of social manipulation are threatening to bring about deeper and deeper crises for the culture of masculinity as a whole.

Why does this happen? Power. Sexual politics uses the language of feminism, and liberation, and equality, but actually it entrenches the worst of so-called patriarchal values.

What is more, it puts up ever widening barriers to the reform and evolution of masculine psychology. It deepens the hold of the original disease of masculine abusive tendencies towards women, rather than liberating them. And it does this in the name of feminism. This is Orwellian, and grossly dangerous.

The sad fact is that for all the posturing of third-wave feminism, what has happened is nothing more than a false revolution. True reform of masculine pathologies, and this blog recognises these as being pathologies and abusive to women, requires a wholesale revolution in sexual awareness. That means helping men to understand and face up to the true power of of the mother-need. Sarcastic, debonaire whining about men's dependency on their mothers is not going to help this. It is, in fact, part of a wider attack on masculinity, entrenching repressive tendencies in the male mind.

Surely the great feminist revolutionaries would want us to reform male culture, rather than entrench the abuses in the name of silly sexual power games and gender politics?