Words&Dirt

Summary:

Robert Masters’s To Be a Man is a passionate text that challenges men to grow and heal in ways that will generate what Masters calls “true masculine power.” Focusing on the topics of shame, anger, aggression, relational intimacy, and sex, Masters explores the dysfunctional patterns that pervade modern models of masculinity, offering alternative frameworks that can improve the processes of gender socialization, identity formation, and relationship navigation for boys and men. By embracing all aspects of masculinity and aligning “heart, guts, and head,” Masters claims that men can liberate themselves from the constraints of conventional masculinity and step into ways of living that are truly heroic.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• This is the first of Masters’s book I have read. He’s a good writer with a flare for poetic language. His prose conveys a masculine verve that I found appealing, especially early on.
• A central theme of the book is that healthy masculinity is a balancing act between seemingly-oppositional qualities. Masters invites men to explore what it means to be “both hard and soft, penetrating and fluid, finely focused and panoramic” (78). In doing so, men can learn that these qualities are in fact not oppositional but opportunities for synthesis, leading men to discover “wholeness” and “true masculine power”: “When head (thinking, rationality, analysis), heart (caring, compassion, love), and guts (resolve, resilience, bravery) all inform each other and work together, a true healthy manhood cannot help but arise” (xiv). I find this to be a novel and useful way of articulating healthy masculinity. I also think it’s incomplete, which I’ll explain later in this review.
• Another main theme is that Masters consistently advocates for self-acceptance, even of the parts of masculinity that are often caricatured or demonized (e.g. anger/aggression). For Masters, it’s all about noticing and becoming intimate with various forms of male energy, then learning to channel them in ways that are productive and socially sensitive rather than destructive and socially harmful.
• The particular components of healthy masculinity that preoccupy Masters are shame, anger, aggression, relational intimacy, and sex. Each of these gets a detailed treatment, with Masters explaining how he thinks men tend to suffer unnecessarily and how they can develop better relationships with their self-concepts and romantic partners. With the exception of sex, I generally found Masters’s observations to be correct and helpful. He is especially adept at describing how shame, anger, and aggression operate in the male psyche, along with the importance of “shadow work” in addressing dysfunction and opening the path to healing. His definition of reactivity as “the dramatization of activated shadow material” is excellent (88).
• Another aspect of the book that I truly enjoyed were the sections of film analysis. I don’t often see psychologists spending much time critiquing popular movies, so these parts were surprising and fun. I especially appreciated Masters’s discussion of James Cameron’s Avatar, a film for which I have deep love and that I think doesn’t always get the credit it deserves for being more than simply an impressive step forward in computer imaging technology.
• Hopefully I’ve made it clear that I found some of this book valuable, but unfortunately I also had a lot of problems with it. The first of these is that, while the writing is artful, it’s also extremely verbose and repetitive. I’m learning that this is the norm for psychology books written by therapists, and it’s really starting to drive me nuts. Almost all the books I’ve read in this niche could be reduced to a single long essay. After the first few chapters, the quest for genuinely new content is not a rewarding one. One gets the sense that writers and editors are just adding filler to get a text to a certain length that publishers want, rather than asking whether the author actually has enough to say about a topic to justify an entire book. Masters begins repeating himself almost immediately and never stops.
• Another related problem is that this book makes absolutely no effort to engage with contemporary scientific literature or other writers in the field. If this was the first book you read on the topic of healthy masculinity, you might conclude that Masters is the only person to ever tackle the subject. In fact, the most common references are to Masters’s other books, and the text contains not a single citation, no list of references/bibliography, and no index. The level of scholarship is incredibly lazy, and will leave readers rightfully wondering why they should treat Masters’s views as anything other than mere opinion.
• From a theoretical standpoint, I think Masters makes several major errors. The first is that his conceptualizations of healthy masculinity and “true masculine power” seem to lack any substantial connection to service or leadership. Masters talks a lot about the importance of gaining inner strength and achieving relational intimacy with romantic partners, but very little about how those qualities can benefit children, communities, workplaces, or governments. So his view ends up feeling inward-facing and self-centered, which isn’t bad in itself but doesn’t feel balanced. In both my personal and professional experience, men need a way to connect their personal growth to something greater than themselves in order to truly mature. Such ideas have been articulated beautifully by many writers, with Terrence Real and Scott Barry Kaufman being two of my favorites.
• Another problem is that Masters repeatedly states that compassion can’t exist in the absence of empathy. This is just wrong in my opinion. It’s true that empathy often leads to compassion, but compassion can also be accessed through moral reasoning, duty, or as a learned behavior to help facilitate social harmony. In fact, writers like Paul Bloom have effectively argued that empathy does not require compassion and that empathy can sometimes undermine a person’s capacity for compassion. Empathy can be biased and emotionally draining, so for some people it actually makes compassion less sustainable.
• My enjoyment of To Be a Man truly fell off a cliff in the book’s second to last section, where Masters gives his views on sex. I can get behind his two core ideas about sex––that men ought to release sex from the obligation to make them feel better, and that sex ought to be an expression of already-existing connection rather than a bid to create connection. But many of the ideas he presents alongside these notions are narrow-minded and inaccurate. Below are a few of these that irked me the most:
• In general, Masters’s understanding of sex seems to overweight the influence of culture and underweight the influence of biology and evolutionary pressures. This is frustrating because earlier in the book Masters demonstrates an adequate understanding of biology’s role in generating sex differences in aggression, but for some reason that doesn’t translate to discussion of male sexuality. The most glaring problems here are (1) Masters doesn’t acknowledge that there are evolutionary reasons that men tend to be, on average, more interested in having many sexual partners, and (2) that, from a purely evolutionary standpoint, rape is one of many “successful” reproduction strategies that we observe in many species. These facts are of course not moral justifications for actions such as cheating or sexual assault/rape, but they provide necessary context for the ways that male sexuality manifests in the modern world. Masters’s failure to provide this context should reduce our confidence that his perspectives on male sexuality are valid.
• That confidence is further eroded by Masters’s discussions of pornography and sexual fantasies, which are myopic and presented with an unwarranted degree of self-assuredness. Masters depicts pornography use as always “avoiding real intimacy” and something that must be “outgrown” if men want to fully mature. He also appears to believe that use of pornography is always tied to some type of emotional wounding that the user hasn’t properly addressed. He defines pornography as “dehumanization in erotic drag” (225). This perspective misses several obvious points: (1) there are many different types of pornography, (2) there are many different reasons that men might use pornography, and (3) pornography use can play a variety of roles in a man’s sexual health, ranging from compulsive/addictive use to completely benign or beneficial use. It’s not that Masters’s views are incorrect, but rather that his perspective isn’t nearly broad enough; the result is that he pathologizes a behavior that has a variety of presentations, only some of which are actually pathological. The sad irony here is that men who take his arguments seriously but continue to use pornography are likely to feel ashamed, when instead they should be having a measured conversation with themselves about their pornography consumption habits, including ways that those habits might need to change to improve their overall sexual health.
• There’s a similar problem with how Masters addresses sexual fantasies. He repeatedly implores readers to “cease relying on sexual fantasy to get turned on or to stay turned on,” as if utilizing the space between one’s ears to alter or improve erotic life is a kind of sin (210). Again, it’s not that sexual fantasies can’t be dysfunctional, but they aren’t always. There is such a vast range of sexual fantasies, some of which play out internally and some of which result in specific sexual behaviors. It’s been clear for decades now that the way to judge the morality of these ideas and behaviors is through a combination of the harm principle (does the idea/behavior cause demonstrable harm?) and consent culture (respecting the rights of adults to consent to whatever types of sexual practices they deem acceptable). Masters never once brings up the harm principle, preferring instead to pontificate about the “inevitable” pitfalls of indulging sexual fantasies. And his only discussion of consent involves what he calls “the myth of consenting adults,” which he describes as “recognizing that the ‘yes’ of many is not arising from their core of being, but from their wounding, their fear of saying ‘no’ or of not being approved of or liked” (219). Of course there are instances where this might be true, but the truth of it can only be decided by the people who choose to engage or not in various sexual experiences; Masters himself should not and cannot sit in judgment here, but he seems all too comfortable doing so. Yes, sexual fantasies sometimes result in sexual dysfunction, and yes, people sometimes give consent for the wrong reasons or regret it after the fact. But does this mean that all sexual fantasies are problematic or that consent is just a myth? Of course not.
• To Be a Man is an uneven book that intrigued, annoyed, and bored me. While there are certainly lessons of value here for men seeking to craft their own versions of healthy masculinity, it should not be treated as an authoritative text.

Favorite Quotes:

In their unhealthy forms, shame, power, and sex are at the core of male dysfunction, simultaneously possessing and crippling many men. Shame that crushes and shrinks, power (especially in the form of aggression) that inflates and dominates, sex that compensates and distracts––this unholy triumvirate usurps the throne of self in a great number of men, obstructing them from taking the journey that can restore their integrity, dignity, and capacity for real intimacy. (xix)

Manhood is not a matter of repression, of subjugation of what we fear or don’t like about ourselves, nor is it a matter of transcending such qualities. A healthy man neither hides in nor abandons his maleness. The power that comes with maleness is not his to decry or apologize for, but rather to harness, to ride, to enjoy, and to use responsibly. Claiming his full power does not make a man less of a man, but permits him to embody his real nature, in all its depth and wildness. Power asks only for a discerning hand, a taking of the reins that is both loose and firm, both fierce and gentle, both daring and tender, both muscular and sensitive. (9)

Shame is probably our most hidden and misunderstood emotion. It’s also the one most likely to motivate men to stay away from the help they need––and need to admit they need––which can range from psychotherapy to addiction programs. Performance anxiety is driven by shame; so is the drive to overachieve; so is the pressure to man up. Shame is behind the scenes much more often than you might think. Some shame is healthy––activating our conscience and capacity for remorse––but a lot of shame is unhealthy or toxic, flattening and slamming us with the message that we are defective, degrading us for not making the grade. It’s essential to know your shame well enough to be able to stay present with it when it arises, instead of letting it mutate––as it very commonly does––into aggression or emotional withdrawal. Much of our aggression and relational disconnection is simply an unskillful solution to our shame, a way of avoiding it or not having to feel it directly. The point is not to get rid of shame––an impossibility––but to develop enough intimacy with it so that it cannot crush or run you, regardless of its intensity. (16)

The sequence of aggression following shame––of letting shame mutate into aggression––must be seen through and broken if men are to to step into their full humanity. Staying present with your shame takes far more courage than riding it into aggression. Staying present with your shame, neither indulging it nor avoiding it, furthers the authentic warrior in you, the one who can sit in the fire of the challenge and difficulty, and remain present without numbing himself or disconnecting from others. Remaining present with your shame takes guts. Doing so deepens your capacity for vulnerability, and therefore also your capacity for being in truly intimate relationship.

Aggression militates against remorse; its pumped up righteousness binds and blinds us, dehumanizing those we are targeting. Shame––and I speak here of healthy shame––makes remorse possible, activating our conscience and spurring us into enough empathy to make fitting amends with whomever we may have heard. Aggression closes the heart; shame, once fully felt and not turned away from, can open it. (39)

Waking up in the midst of our reactivity is not so easy, but it is nonetheless doable with some practice. Taking action that’s aligned with such awakening is more of a challenge, but again is doable with some practice. It also helps to remember that reactivity is the dramatization of activated shadow material, which we are letting hold us hostage. (88)

Heroism in a man is a matter of doing what it takes to bring forth the very best in himself, enough so as to potently align him with what really matters in any given situation. This is what true masculine power is all about.

When a man awakens deeply enough to embody his full-blooded maleness without any dissociation from what’s tender, soft, and vulnerable in him, he is his own hero. Nothing special––just a man anchored, more often than not, in his core; a man uncommonly trustworthy, courageous, and emotionally literate; a man as grounded as he is open, not letting his flaws get in the way, and no longer haunted by the ghost of perfectionism or unshakable impeccability. A man who did––and continues to do––the work to make this possible. (143)

It’s essential for men to (1) become conscious of the double bind of successfully being a man in conventional terms and successfully being a man in intimate relationship; and (2) do what it takes to step into a different kind of manhood, in which strength and drive beneficially coexist with transparency, vulnerability, and emotional literacy. This is all about aligning heart, guts, and head––meaning in part that emotion and rationality get to work together––and finding the courage to cease submitting to the pressure to be other than ourselves. There is a deep dignity in this, an integrity of being that is inherently liberating.

It’s very helpful to realize that the things you need to do to have better relationships are the very things you need to do to further your own growth and evolution. To work on yourself is, in part, to make yourself more available for the kind of relationship that you, in your heart of hearts, long for, a relationship in which whatever arises can be used to strengthen and deepen the partners’ bond. (149-50)

A man…needs to develop intimacy with younger versions of himself, recognizing them when they show up, and compassionately relating to them without losing himself in their worldview. (150)

In the presence of awakened intimacy, conflict is just shit auditioning to be compost. The shovels are supplied; all we have to do is use them. (174)

Healing is about illuminating, opening to, and integrating all that you are, including the aspects of yourself that you’ve denied, neglected, ostracized, or disowned. This is far from a short-term process, asking that you move into and through it at a pace that doesn’t overstretch or unduly tax you, a pace that allows for proper digestion and assimilation. If you move too quickly, you’ll overwhelm yourself and lose perspective; if you move too slowly, you’ll lose momentum and passion for the process, increasing the odds that you’ll quit.

But move we must, if we are to heal––taking rejuvenating rests and breaks along the way, and doing our best to make haste slowly, both challenging and nurturing ourselves, honoring the bedrock necessity and importance of our healing.

Healing doesn’t necessarily mean curing. It’s not a matter of getting rid of your endarkened or less-than-healthy qualities––as if excising a tumor––but of openly facing, exploring, and making as wise as possible use of them. This is the essence of self-acceptance. Nothing gets left out. Everything has its place. The deeper your healing, the more you become whole, and the more capable of relating skillfully to everything that you are. (275)

Rating: 4/10