In dysfunctional families there is something called “the no-talk rule.” Talking about the source and cause of the dysfunction is prohibited. If one of the parents is an alcoholic, then no one is allowed to speak of the drinking. This rule is rigidly enforced by a variety of means, including invoking family loyalty in an “us versus them” mentality. “We” must stick together because “we” are all each other have in our struggle against all of “them” in the outside world. The no-talk rule is in effect regardless of whether the problem is alcohol/drugs, abuse, incest, gambling, or any other uncontrolled behavior by one member which affects the family as whole.
Both sides of the gender war have their own set of no-talk rules. Women cannot and will not talk about violence by women, the lies they tell, or their manipulation. Men are much more willing to tear into and attack each other, but there is one subject which does assume a bit of the status of a sacred cow – fatherhood. Out of deference to our brethren who really are good fathers fighting tooth and nail for the smallest opportunity to remain part of their children’s lives in the face of the anti-male, anti-father, feminist onslaught, the subject of fathers who left a lot to be desired in how they fulfilled their roles is seldom discussed.
This is extremely unfortunate, because there are a lot of issues around fatherhood which would behoove men to address as we endeavor to get our own house in order. A man’s relationship with his father has a very profound influence on his life and how he will choose to conduct himself as a man. Men with good fathers get a head start, because they have a model to follow. Men without a good father, either totally without one or with one who for various reasons (including not having a good father of his own to teach him) does not do a very good job, may be able to substitute brothers, uncles, or other mentors. But there is an emotional bond between a boy and his father which is unique and for which there is no substitute.
Here at the Spearhead we talk about things which men are not encouraged to talk about anywhere else, and in most places are actively discouraged from talking about. In fact, some of us take a bit of perverse delight in breaking the no-talk rule, and spitting in the face of the mandate “you can’t say that!”
It is too bad that the lame-stream media did such a hatchet job on the mythopoetic men’s movement, because I think it had a lot to offer men to help them understand and put in proper perspective both their own internal experiences and the expectations and demands placed on them as men by their cultures. Mythology is full of examples of the complex relationships between fathers and sons – the competition, the love, sometimes the hatred, and a great deal about the tension between a man’s sense of loyalty to his mother versus his father.
The power that a father has in a young man’s life and to affect his sense of himself can be illustrated by fairly contemporary example as well as a biblical one. The actor Burt Reynolds was once asked “How does a boy know when he has become a man?” Reynolds’s answer was short, sweet, and to the point – “You know you are a man when your daddy tells you that you are one.” The power of, and need that a boy feels for, his father’s blessing is illustrated in the biblical story of Jacob and Esau. Even though fathers generally lack the social power today that they had in biblical times, they still have a great deal of psychological and emotional power over their sons. Few things matter more to a boy than his father’s blessing. Boys will often turn themselves inside out to hear their father say “You are good. You have done well.” Even seriously defective fathers – rogues, drunks, compulsive gamblers, etc. – often hold their sons in thrall, chasing the approval and blessing of the most significant man in their lives.
And when that happens, a whole host of stresses and distortions enter the picture. In a story that goes back to Hesiod’s Theogony composed circa 700 BC, the creation myth of the ancient Greeks, the primordial god Uranus came every night to cover the earth and mate with Gaia, but he hated the children she bore him. Uranus imprisoned Gaia’s youngest children in Tartarus, deep within Earth, where they caused pain to Gaia. She shaped a great flint-bladed sickle and asked her sons to castrate Uranus. Only Cronus, youngest and most ambitious of the Titans, was willing: he ambushed his father and castrated him, casting the severed testicles into the sea.
There certainly are men who want to “lay with” (or just “lay”) a woman but who hate the children she bears as a result. Perhaps such men would be better described by the breeding-stock term “sire”, representing a purely biological role, than by the honorific term “father” which has positive social connotations that simply getting a woman pregnant do not earn a man.
And, there are women like Gaia who love their children greatly, but despise the men who fathered them. And frequently such mothers will enter into collusion with the sons against the fathers. Seldom is the castration physical, as Cronus did to Uranus. But, boys and young men who sense that their fathers are destructive and not using their male power in a constructive and responsible manner will seek to psychically and emotionally castrate them and take away their power.
Robert Bly, in one of his videos, goes into great depth about the glee he used to get from sticking it to older men. Boys, deprived of the blessing of an older man they admire, often carry a deep and seething resentment against the way that their own fathers failed them, and will often get trapped in alternating between knocking themselves out trying to gain the blessing of an older man – a father figure – and hating them for the psychological and emotional power they have over the younger man.
The sins, and failures, of the fathers do, indeed, get visited on the children unto the 3rd and 4th generations.
Such men are sitting ducks for women, because in the absence of approval and blessing of their fathers, they sought it from the only place they could get it – their mothers. And thus does an unholy alliance of emotional incest often form between boys and mothers, with the boys displacing the fathers as the emotional mate of the mother. For many of them, being a “good man” involves both making “mama” happy, and being as unlike their fathers as they can manage to be.
What does not work, and never works, is to replace “blessing” with “beratement.” Nothing will alienate a boy from his father faster, or more thoroughly, than a sense of being unfairly attacked by the older man and used as a whipping boy for the old man’s rage. As Cronus castrated his father, and Oedipus killed his, a boy left without a means to form an emotional alliance with his father will become his enemy, and seek alliance with his mother.
I think that if you look around today at the effects of feminism on the culture, and the wholesale loss of allegiance to manhood and manly ideals, you will see a lot of the effects of men feeling betrayed by older men – sometimes their own fathers, and certainly by powerful men in the culture in general. The emotional allegiance to women we see today is an inevitable result of boys and young men who lose the ability to trust older men. In every man-bashing advertisement created by a man, and in every sitcom where the man is portrayed as a clueless buffoon, we see the traces and lingering after-effects of a boy who never had a man he could respect and admire, tell him that he was now a man.
In fairness to some of the men who dropped the ball on handing off the mantle of manhood to their sons, many of them were set up. From the Industrial Revolution onward, and even before, men were isolated from their families for the workday and when they returned home at night were often stressed out, angry, tired, and had little if anything left to give their families because they had given it all to the role of being the breadwinner. For many kids, all they ever saw of their fathers was their temperament. And, being children, they did not see the stresses and pressures which caused it.
But, under such stresses to be the sole providers of their family’s survival, many men did a poor job of making a distinction between being dominant and domineering – or between leadership and being a petty tyrant. Their frustration and rage at their own sense of being entrapped came out at the most convenient targets, the ones close and present – their families. And, sons in particular often bore the brunt of it.
In my own specific case, my old man’s two favorite sayings were “YOU AREN”T WORTH A PINCH OF SOUR OWL SHIT!!” and “I’M GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS “TILL YOUR NOSE BLEEDS!!” – both delivered from a state of red-faced, bellowing, rage. He never actually succeeded in kicking my ass until my nose bled, but he did succeed in kicking it until I absolutely hated his guts.
Many men today have mixed and conflicted feelings about their fathers, their own roles as fathers, and fatherhood in general. Most men do love their kids with all their heart and soul and the news is filled with stories of men who give their lives protecting their children.
Nothing I say here is intended to give fathers a hard time, nor to denigrate fatherhood in general. But I have some serious questions and reservations about certain elements within the generalized Men’s Movement who have attached a certain mystique to fatherhood in the same way our culture idealizes motherhood. Some parents are not good parents – both mothers and fathers. But, having either a toxic mother or a toxic father will skew a person’s perceptions for life, and often lead to them following a very roundabout path to maturity – if they ever achieve it.
It is easy to lay blame, but often difficult to move forward. A great many men of current and future generations are suffering and will suffer from what the mythopoetics call “The Father Wound” – the loss of the part of themselves which the father represents. I’m not big on obsessing about “wounds” because in today’s chaotic world we all have them. But, I think it will benefit everyone – men, women, and children – to give good fathers their just due and recognize how vitally important they are to both future men and future women, as well as their future spouses and future children.
Because some fathers give children little choice except between being destroyed by them or repudiating them – and along with them, most if not all of the good things which fathers do. And those are things we cannot afford to lose.
