Empowerism: Reflections on Integrative Masculinity, Feminism, and the Gender Wars

By Adam J. Pearson

When I consider the state of male-female relationships today, I feel a strange mixture of sadness, frustration, puzzlement, and wonder. Here in Canada and the United States at the least, we are in the midst of a state of cultural confusion and readjustment with regard to the way men and women relate to each other. This, I believe, is a positive thing; it’s a necessary phase in our ongoing social evolution as we adapt to change (allostasis) and shift into a higher state of harmony (homeostasis) that aligns with our best values and thinking. In our contemporary historical moment, femininity is striving to assert itself against centuries of oppression, masculinity is in crisis, and trans, genderfluid, and intersex people are boldly speaking their truth after being marginalized for so long. Currents are shifting in the sea of gender. Old frameworks are crumbling and new discourses and concepts are emerging amidst the rubble of the old.

In short, we are in a state of transition from a more oppressive, dysfunctional system to a more empowering and functional system for all. Where do we stand right now with regard to the ‘gender wars’? What could a healthy masculinity look like for the contemporary man? Can we reinterpret the movement for gender identity empowerment to get feminists and men’s rights activists on the same side? These are some of the fascinating questions that I’d like to tackle in this article.

I sincerely hope that my intelligent readers will that resist the urge to preemptively label me a “white knight” or an “anti-feminist” to dismiss what I have to say before hearing me out. The simple truth of the matter is that these ideological labels aren’t actually helpful; they don’t support new thinking and free discussion, but rather attempt to shut it up.

I’d also like to state from the outset that I do not claim to be a spokesperson for feminism, for women, for intersex, transgender, or genderfluid people (although I certainly am their ally), or for any particular men’s group. My social standpoint, as standpoint theory sociology would say, is that of a modern heterosexual man and I speak here for no one but myself. All I would like to do in this article is to be as authentic and real as possible about what I see in the world around me. I’d like to share some personal reflections on the flow of culture around gender, on what integrative masculinity means for me, and why I feel we need a new word, a new way of thinking, and a new movement, to unify us as people of all genders.

“This is the world we live in /
And these are the hands we’re given. /
Use them and let’s start trying /
To make it a place worth living in.”
~ Genesis, “Land of Confusion“

As we look at the vast sweep of human history, it soon becomes clear that in the course of our cultural evolution, we developed cultures and societies that rigidly controlled the masculine and the feminine and created ways of thinking that pitted them against one another. We learned to think in simple male/female binaries that marginalized, excluded, and even pathologized the experiences of transgender, intersex, and genderfluid individuals.

Complex patterns of power, control, oppression, conformity, marginalization, and social conditioning emerged as we moved from traditionalist to modern scientific to postmodern values in the development of Western thinking. We created our social and cultural contexts in our own image and were–as sociology and social psychology have extensively shown–influenced and molded by these contexts in turn.

Because cultures are only larger patterned pictures of shifting values within individuals who progress along various lines of development at different rates, this diversity naturally produces many contradictions. There are many positions–from magical-animistic to traditional to modern to postmodern to integral–that men and women can take on what it means to be a male, female, transgender, intersex, or genderfluid individual.

As values clash and the positions that flow out of them do too, a great deal of conflict can follow. The result of this jousting of positions is what some commentators have called “the war of the sexes” or “the gender wars,” an unfortunately confrontational relationship that has left many people of all genders feeling alienated, isolated, conflicted, and frustrated, and for very understandable reasons.

The feminist deconstruction of patriarchy was a necessary step in our evolution; the marginalized, disempowered feminine voice had to be reawakened in all of its authentic power and unique insight. It had to shake itself free of ways of thinking that silenced and controlled its flowering for generations.

This reawakening, liberation, and empowering of the feminine is not over; it’s still unfolding. Feminism has passed through many waves from first to second to third into intersectional and beyond and it continues to evolve in response to changing discourses, terminologies, and value systems in a dynamically shifting world (the cultural chronosystem of Uri Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory and the changing “Life Conditions” of Spiral Dynamics).

And it’s a beautiful evolution; women are finally claiming their rightful space to be authentic and vulnerable in a world that suppressed, repressed, oppressed, and limited them for countless generations.At this point, I can hear some of my male brothers exclaiming “white knight alert! white knight alert!” But not so fast. Like Kanye West to Taylor Swift, let me finish.

While feminism has been so vital and powerful in evoking social change and transformations of value systems and cultural forms that have been tremendously beneficial for men and women alike, this very movement that sought to empower women by critiquing hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal social structures unintentionally left many men feeling rather lost. While feminism was so effective at dismantling patriarchy and traditional masculinity from within, it struggled to promote a clear alternative masculinity in its place. If the old way of patriarchal masculinity is no good, then who, as a man should I be? This is the question that thousands of men began to ask themselves. As a result, a crisis of masculinity ensued.

What form did this take? For some men, feeling lost and alienated in the face of the feminist dismantling of patriarchal values steeled them to embrace traditional masculinity with renewed vitality. For others, such as Men Going Their Own Way or MGTOW, it made them wish to renounce women altogether in order to focus on male self-development. Other groups such as the red pill movement and Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) decided to make covert or overt war on feminism, which they saw as a destructive force that did not achieve the equality it promised, but rather aimed to oppress and feminize men.

Many feminists have clashed with these movements or simply dismissed them outright. My purpose here is not to attack these movements or the men who support them because I would suggest that they are all expressions of profound yearning for a new way to conceive of masculinity in an age in which men feel alienated and confused by competing contradictory expectations of “what men should and shouldn’t be.”

Personal Experience With the Crisis of Masculinity

On a personal note, I understand this confusion very well because I grew up with it. I was told many conflicting messages in my boyhood by men and women alike. I was told that as a man, I shouldn’t feel. Vulnerability was not courage, but weakness. To be in any way feminine was indicative of failure. Homosexuality was feminine, and therefore, to be ridiculed. I should be sensitive, but not too sensitive. I should be strong, but not too strong. I should like sports and not like feminine art. I should love women romantically or close my heart and “pump em’ and dump ’em.” I should hide my feelings and play games, manipulate, lie, and pretend to be someone I wasn’t. I should seek validation of my masculinity through the quantity of notches in my bedpost or the money in my bank account. I should place my self-esteem in the estimation of the men and women around me. I should care about everyone or not care about anyone at all.

I listened to men and women for guidance and tried many of the ways of being a man in a post-postmodern world that they promoted. Because I didn’t absolutely know what masculinity should be and didn’t completely resonate with any of the views I saw people promoting, I was very open to the adventure of experimentation. I enjoyed the play of what the postructuralist philosopher Judith Butler called, in her book Gender Trouble (1990), gender performativity; the ways in which we perform gender like we’re acting out parts in a play.

In the end, I found myself confronting a sea of contradictory messages about masculinity and as I listened to them, I became, as David Deida writes in The Way of the Superior Man, “distanced from my own masculine core;” I looked to others to tell me what it meant to be a man rather than finding my own way. Although it was clear to me that there were so many problems with so much of these competing messages, that they simply weren’t true, that things didn’t have to be this way, I had no alternative illuminating way of thinking that would sort this all out for me. I tried many of these ways and analyzed what happened. And as I passed my mid-twenties, I decided that the time had come to draw on all I had learned to authentically define my own masculinity for myself.

A few exceptional authors in addition to those I have already named were pivotal in this process for me, chiefly among them were Brene Brown (Daring Greatly), Byron Katie (Loving What Is), Marcus Aurelius (Meditations), Ken Wilber (Integral Spirituality), Carol Dweck (Mindset), Aaron Beck (“The Past And Future of Cognitive Therapy”), Julia T. Wood (Gendered Lives), and Mark Manson (Models: Attracting Women Through Honesty).

In addition to the thoughts of these great authors, I learned a great deal simply by talking with men and women of all ages from teenagers to elderly ladies and gentlemen not only here in Canada and the United States, but all around the world from Asia to Africa to Australia to South America. In their insights and stories, I found the building blocks of a personal view of masculinity that I have found to work for me. I call this way the way of integrative masculinity.

  

Integrative Masculinity: A New Way to Be a Man in a Postmodern World

I can’t speak for a vision of femininity or a path for women in the world today because that’s not my place. I leave that to the wise women of the world to articulate from their own authenticity. Nor can I attempt to speak for trans, intersex, genderfluid, or any other modality along the gender spectrum; they are their own best advocates. Moreover, I do not even attempt to speak even for my fellow men; it is up to each of us to decide the way to live that is best for us. All I would like to do here is to share the way of living that I have personally found helpful as a man at this point in my life.

For my masculinity at this stage of its development, the key word has become “integration.” For many years, because of my cultural conditioning, I was at war with the feminine in me and felt moved to control, eliminate, limit, and destroy it. I learned to suppress intuition in favour of logic, empathy in favour of self-contentment, spontaneous flowing in the now with rigid planning, vulnerability in favour of Stoic strength, authenticity in favour of public image, expressiveness in favour of solid stillness, love in favour of freedom. At the same time, I felt compelled to suppress the masculine in me because I felt disconnected from my masculine core and had no alternative to the hegemonic masculinity that feminism had systematically critiqued. I lived, in short, in a state of great confusion. And from confused thinking, as Theravada Buddhism and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy agree, confused action flows. I simultaneously felt somehow like an outsider to my masculine brothers and separate from the viewpoints of the women around me. I felt, in short, totally disconnected.

After years of struggling, stumbling, and contradictory actions and ways of thinking, however, I have found a way that works for me as a modern man. And this is the way of integration. In the context of gender, the way of integration means embracing my inner masculine and embracing my inner feminine. Instead of creating false binaries that try to suppress the feminine in me so that the masculine will always dominate, this shift in inner attitude involves valuing the contributions of both principles. In addition, integration means giving an honest ear to the best partial truths that all perspectives from the magical-animistic to the traditional, modern, postmodern, and integrative viewpoints have to share about gender and doing my best to integrate these contributions into a holistic sense of masculinity.

One benefit of an integrative approach to gender is that it frees up a lot of energy. Living in inner conflict and trying to force myself to conform to other people’s images of masculinity was to me incredibly exhausting. As psychoneuroimmunology researchers such as Zorrilla et al (2001) have shown, living in such state of constant stress and anxiety produces tremendous strain on the body’s immune system and redirects a great deal of metabolic energy into the body’s stress-management systems.

By shifting from a state of inner war to a state of inner integration, much of that energy has been liberated. In addition, I now feel freer than ever to “contain multitudes” or embody multiple ways of being in the world as Walt Whitman put the point in his Leaves of Grass (1855). I can train martial arts and enjoy sensuality. I can cultivate inner strength and vulnerability. I can develop reason, emotional insight, empathy, and intuition in tandem. I can flow from masculine stillness in the presence of consciousness to feminine spontaneous expressiveness. I can direct and be open to direction. I can embrace feminine insight and masculine insight and different modes of feeling and thinking from the marginalized voices of people in the trans, genderfluid, and other communities.

For me personally, integrative masculinity feels something like the following, which I will here only sketch out in the broadest of brushstrokes as a rich and energizing blend of masculine insight and feminine vitality. The masculine in me yearns for purpose, direction, and freedom; the feminine in me longs for beauty, expressiveness, and connection. The masculine in me trusts dispassionate reason and conscious presence; the feminine in me embraces intuition and passionate emotional intelligence. The masculine in me develops personal self-reliance and success; the feminine in me reaches out to others to bring them up with me. The masculine in me burns with love and sexual passion for the feminine; the feminine in me cultivates respect, empathy, and willingness to understand the standpoints of women, transgender, intersex, genderfluid, and other gender modalities.

Integrative masculinity involves a movement to welcome both inward truth (i.e. Kierkegaard’s “truth that is true for me for which I can live and die) and truth in relationship, both the subjective and the intersubjective, both the objective and the interobjective. The way of the heart and the way of reason speak to integrative masculine in harmony. The transcendence of consciousness and the immanence of the universe are unified in an integral embrace. The primal, energetic dimensions of gender and the dynamics of sexual magnetism that play out between men and women are welcomed and embraced.

Simultaneously, integrative men remain deeply interested in the ways in which the social constructions of gender both oppress and empower. They welcome the insights of the archaic, magical-animistic, traditional, modern, postmodern, and integral perspectives on gender, for all have valid partial truths to contribute. Self-development for an integral masculinity involves concurrently developing all life areas from education to career, to physical health and fitness, to sexuality, creativity, modern and postmodern cognition, emotional intelligence, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence, and so on.

Speaking as a heterosexual male, integrative masculinity approaches relationships with women through the principles of the seven guiding lights: vulnerability, authenticity, playfulness, healthy boundaries, sexual attunement, respect, and a growth-mindset. While I will express these principles from the heterosexual male perspective, they can all be easily adapted for relationships in any sexual orientation including same-sex relationships. The seven principles are as follows: