The Shape of Masculinity

Women have extraordinary power over the development of men. For good and for bad.

Every man is introduced to the world inside a female body, and therefore inside a female perspective. His mother’s experiences, thoughts and feelings throughout her pregnancy make up the backdrop for his growing awareness. He is bathed in her emotions about life. This soup of mixed impressions consists not only of present time happenings (during the pregnancy), but also of the vast lifelong collection of unresolved upsets his mother has grown up with. This is our emotional inheritance which begins from the moment we incarnate.

The patterning we receive will come more broadly from a collection from both parents and the wider environment, but proximity and exposure are key factors that determine the influence and there is no one closer at the outset than our mother. Her feelings tend to have the strongest initial influence in shaping a baby’s responses to both themselves and the world.

Baby boys begin to discover themselves through the filter of how their mother experiences men. This runs deeper than surface consciousness to include the more pernicious unconscious wounding. There is no protection that shields the baby from the woman’s unhealed issues. In the energetic experience in utero, for the baby, there is no distinction between the way she feels about him and the way she feels about males at large. Any negative feelings a man provokes in the mother will be experienced by the baby as if towards himself. A mother who fears violence from a man can transfer that to the baby as if it’s him who is dangerous. No matter the love she holds for the precious one she’s carrying, they can be susceptible to any flavour of ill feeling she harbours.

Whatever the individual story, there is a common theme of women tending towards controlling boys as a result of their fear of men. The control can be subtle or overt and usually seeps in unawares from the very beginning. Seems implausible for a mother to be controlling of her baby but these are the messy workings of subconscious patterning. From her fear, mothers can be prone to over-protecting girls and over-correcting boys.

The natural robust shape of masculinity has been radically compromised.

Men hurt women. Women are afraid of men. Unhealed women infuse children with their unhealed trauma and raise men who feel condemned. The story rolls on.

It’s a perpetuating cycle that men and women can both aggravate. It’s a chicken or the egg quandary. Was it Adam who started it, or Eve?

It doesn’t matter where it began. Either gender can stop it.

At the core of this tangle are two primary wounds:

    Women are prone to feeling overwhelmed by aggression in men.

    Men are prone to feeling criticised by women.

These wounds make it tricky for women to genuinely want to support men into their full empowerment, and tricky for men to listen to women.

A gender bind that holds everyone down.

Where to from here?

There’s a little phrase I seek to live by: Dare to be the one who loves the most.

The key to it lies in vulnerability. The willingness to expose the parts of us that feel most precarious. The parts of us that seem most dangerously insecure. With the ones we love, can we take the brave risk of bringing our deepest frailties to the fore?

When we find ourselves in tension with another, instead of guarding against the friction, can we soften? Where both parties are offended by the other and our inclination is to defend, can we drop our guard to reveal the fragility hidden below? In that place of shared tension, can we be the bigger person by volunteering our tenderness first? It can seem like the most dangerous thing to expose our soft underbelly in those situations, but such an unexpected move can completely disarm the other person and call them immediately into their heart.

Women, can we express to men when we feel scared and helpless?

Men, can you let us know when you feel condemned and made small?

As we share with the opposite gender, the deepest hurts provoked by that gender, we contribute to a powerful dismantling and invite a renewal of innocence between us.