Men and the Work of Mourning

The other night I watched Florian Zeller's 2022 film The Son, based on his stage play of 2018. I now wonder whether I saw the same film that Rotten Tomatoes gives an approval rating of 29%. Nothing I've read of the film on the web matches my experience of its portrayal of how patriarchal masculinity wreaks havoc in men's lives by forbidding them access to their own grief. 

Peter (played by Hugh Jackman) is the loving father of a newborn son by his second wife, Beth. The unfinished work of fathering his deeply troubled seventeen-year-old son Nicholas from his previous marriage to Kate breaks through this idyllic frame. Peter longs to connect, and at key moments succeeds in expressing his love toward Nicholas. Yet at every turn, he blows past acknowledgement of the psychic pain that lies behind the boy's troubling behaviour. The central trauma that's swamped his son's life--Peter's desertion of his first family--simply falls below the bar. 

Everyone in Peter's high-flying, over-achieving, overwhelmingly male professional world exudes a perfunctory warmth devoid of genuine empathy: inquiries about the state of his family are hollow gestures soliciting equally hollow responses that all is well. 

Later in the film comes Peter's devastating meeting with his own narcissistic, emotionally sadistic father, a conversation over lunch that quickly descends into a recapitulation of the heartless abandonment Peter himself suffered as a boy. In light of that scene, we understand more vividly his acknowledgement, near the end of the film, that for all his attempts to be a better father himself, his behaviour toward Nicholas has reproduced the patterns of his own upbringing.

Despite Peter's self-recriminations over a disastrous turn of events, the ultimate catalyst of tragedy subtending the whole plot is the web of emotional denial in which nearly every character is enmeshed, and in which nearly every character colludes, women as well as men. It's an ingrained pattern that goes on forbidding the deep recognition of loss. 

Without that recognition, the life that lies ahead for Peter is likely to admit of no more redemption than what has transpired to that point. His failures as a father aren't a matter of personal culpability, but of a system of relations in which he's trapped, of which he's a victim as well as a perpetuator. Throughout, it's the injunction--the quinessentially patriarchal and capitalist injunction--to get over it, solve the immediate problem, and move on with life that destroys the hope of either restoration or atonement.

The power and privilege that patriarchy accords men is a devil's bargain from which no one escapes with their life intact. Renouncing patriarchy isn't as simple as wishing it so: that's the lesson this film conveys. And perhaps that at least partly explains why audience reaction hasn't been more favourable, and why some reviews have more or less missed the point--a notable case being Nell Minow's dismissive assessment. 

As viewers we hate it--men hate it, and women hate it too--when men don't suck it up and soldier on. Insistence on easy, masterful resolution of loss is wired into our culture, just as it's wired into the fictional world of the film. Perhaps we're uncomfortable that the film too effectively holds a mirror up to our own intolerance of unresolved emotion, exposing our own reluctance to witness consequences that can't be easily ascribed to individual guilt or negligence. We're all for a sensitive male protagonist, but only as long as he holds it together, and isn't too flawed or damaged himself to save the day in the end.

The undoing of patriarchy is far from completed--in the world, but also within ourselves. Perhaps it can never be completed, because the allure of impervious mastery and the denial of vulnerabiltiy are too universal  ever simply to disappear, Perhaps there will always be wounded sons who go on to become clandestinely wounded and openly wounding men--some of them fathers in turn. Toxic masculinity goes on attracting a new generation of proponents. The construction of alternative masculinities is a work in progress. We're not there yet. We're only on the road.

Some Light on Solstice

These days, I'll take any and all good news that comes through in the morning paper. And today, a federal judge in Arkansas striking down that state's law prohibiting gender-affirming care for trans kids.

Eighteen other states have followed Arkansas's lead in passing such laws. All of them are now in plausible jeopardy of being struck down.

I'm grateful for the courage of the plaintiffs in the case. I'm grateful for the Arkansas ACLU for taking it up. I'm grateful for a federal judge who makes a reasoned decision in the face of the specious justifications spouted by proponents of the law.

When we come together, we're strong. When we recognize that none of us is safe until we're all safe, we claim our dignity and our power.

A Town Hall Meeting

 

Please join an open conversation, this Tuesday, June 20, in a town hall meeting sponsored by the Body Electric School. You can register here.

In the Garden

Our bodies are our gardens, to the which

our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles,

or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up

thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or

distract it with many, either to have it sterile

with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the

power and corrigible authority of this lies in our

wills.

Othello, Act 1, Scene 3

In Loving Memory of Glenn Fox

Musician

Tantrika

Trickster

Survivor

Healer

A Teacher Nobody Asks For

I've been free of chronic intense pain since a hip replacement in 2009. Until about a week and a half ago.

A stiff neck one morning intensified by midnight into pain severe enough it woke me and kept me awake, walking the floor and eventually waking my husband in panic. Finally I found the one position that seemed to alleviate it. A visit to the emergency room the next day. Then two days later, because of the underlying crappy state of my spine, an MRI. A week from now, an appointment with the spinal surgeon who's kept track of me now for over fourteen years.

Ten days into the current adventure, I find myself drawing on the wisdom of Buddhism. In short: make friends with the pain. Accept the pain as a teacher you never asked for. 

I'm not suggesting this is always possible. But taking the pain as an object of scrutiny, I can move toward understanding it as my own share of the pain--the general pain of being an enfleshed consciousness. In other words, the common lot of all humans, and beyond that, of all sentient beings. It's possible to understand it as "the price of the ticket." Or as Annie Dillard would put it, "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the cancer cell." Joy, energy, agility are profoundly human experiences. So are sorrow, grief, illness, and pain, both physical and emotional.

It's possible to stop living in denial of this fundamental truth: that at some point in your life, you'll likely endure significant sustained pain. And eventually, you'll die. It's possible to face the pain not only as a reminder of the real nature of life in a body--not always buff, not always horny, not always strong, not always agile--but as a path into growing compassion for the suffering of others, as an entrance into solidarity with their pain.

It feels a little odd to be saying all this in the middle of the Christian season of Easter. Except that the Risen Christ appears still bearing the wounds of a horrible death. Resurrection happens not as an end-run around suffering, but straight through the middle of it. There's no choice between death and resurrection. Easter is an invitation to reframe suffering, not to escape it.

I'm being a little bit of a drama queen here. What I've experienced the last ten days is hardly sustained agony. Most of the last week, I've been capable of going about a relatively normal routine. But the deal is, we're all on a continuum. There's no reassuringly sharp boundary between the well and the unwell, the able-bodied and the disabled. We act like there is, and we cordon off disability, weakness, illness, and aging as though they had nothing to do with the way the able-bodied, the strong, the healthy, the young live their lives. We accept and celebrate only strength, youth, beauty. We fall, in other words, into a kind of "body fascism," as Brian Pronger put it in his last book before his catastrophic illness, sustained disability, and death. 

As the Buddha would tell us, all life is shot through with pervasive dissatisfaction, and the cure for pervasive dissatisfaction is non-attachment. As Jesus would tell us, when we try saving our life--when we can't let go of what we think our life should be like--we lose it by refusing to accept it with at least some degree of gratitude as it actually unfolds. When we take the uninvited discomfort of life as something we share with all flesh, we're capable of transforming it, at least sometimes, into a flicker of insight and freedom.

Portrait of the Penis as an Erection: A guest post by Tantrika au Naturale

On a recent visit to the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology, in HaNoi, I encountered these priapic guys. 

What is more startling than their erections is that the figures are part of a “tomb house” built over the graves of “up to thirty people” to be intentionally abandoned after completion of the burial rituals. This particular tomb house was built in 1998 by five men of the Giarai (or Jarai) Arap minority ethnic group in their south-central Vietnam village intentionally for display purposes. It was then disassembled, transported to HaNoi, and reassembled among other ethnic-minority domestic and functional buildings in an open-air architectural garden. 

There are 27 three-dimensional figures mounted on the fence surrounding the “house”: most are sexually mature male and female (some of whom are very visibly pregnant) pairs,  along with a couple of child and animal figures. There is one solo man who is clearly masturbating.

The tomb house is designed to be beautiful to appease the spirits of the dead so that they do not become angry and trouble even harm the living; the overt sexuality of the figures is to ensure fertility and births.

While it's a little startling at first to see erections portrayed in public space that are not graffiti, during my visits to Asia I've noticed two- and three-dimensional portrayals of the erect human penis in the open for all to see in a number of different countries and cultures: India, Thailand, Cambodia and Bhutan, in addition to Vietnam. The purported intents for these turgid penises include fertility, pacification of potentially dangerous spirits, warding off the evil eye, and worship of Shiva.

  Bali   

 

 Bhutan

 Cambodia

 India

 Thailand

Whereas in contemporary Western cultures, the erect penis is usually only seen in public spaces as graffiti, that was not the case in Classical Greece or Rome. Artists then portrayed both flaccid and erect penises as features of naked men engaged in athletic, military, mythological or straightforwardly erotic activities, as protective amulets, as signifiers of lust, or as pornography. While a few late 19th- and 20th-century artists have portrayed themselves masturbating, erect penises are few and far between in Western art. 

So when confronted with portrayal of a full or exaggerated erection, I ask myself: what did it signify to the creator? To its intended audience? And what does it now signify to me?

 

Kanamara Matsuri

In Kawasaki, about 45 minutes by train from Tokyo, today marks the Kanamara Matsuri. The festival started in the Edo period as an occasion for sex workers to pray for protection and renewal. It fell into abeyance--until the priest of Kanayama Shrine revived it in 1969. 

Devotees carry three phallic effigies through the streets--the oldest of wood, another of black iron donated by the Hitachi Zosen corporation, and the most recent addition, the hot pink "Elizabeth"--yes, the Elizabeth--donated by a drag club.

In other news, it's also Palm Sunday. 

Lazarus and Friends on the Fifth Sunday in Lent

 37 The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3 He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” 4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 

5 Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6 I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath  in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” 

7 So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. 9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” 10 I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

11 Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ 12 Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14 I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord. 

Coming for You. Coming for Me.

I've been blasted before for including unapologetically partisan political content here. But I'm about to do it again. And this is gonna be a downer.

Christian Nationalism is a real and present threat. Period.

It's a threat to women's reproductive health and self-determination. It's a threat to the ethnic and cultural diversity of any version of modern society worth living in. It's a brutal and deadly threat to queer and trans kids. It's a threat to economic and ecological justice. It's a threat to any man who likes to wear a dress. It's a threat to any woman who likes to wear a suit and tie. It's a threat to Jews. It's a threat to Muslims. Soon enough it will be a threat to Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Wiccans, and everybody else who hasn't bought the snake oil of a narrow, inauthentic, hypocritical, and repressive version of Christianity. 

It's Fascism Light. For the time being, until it reveals itself as just plain Fascism. It's The Handmaid's Tale waiting to come to a government near you.

If publicly available resources for mindful erotic self-development have changed your life for the good, it's a threat to you. Even if you're male. Even if you're cisgendered. Even if you're white. Even if you're economically privileged. The websites you access are already targeted. The organizations you belong to are already in the cross-hairs. 

Tennessee has banned drag performances on public property. Ron De Sanctimonious--for once, Donald Trump came up with a nickname I can get on board with--is attacking the health care of at-risk trans youth, rewriting the curriculum of Florida schools, scrubbing all references to sexual diversity and the history of racism from textbooks. Parents' rights groups are attacking libraries and librarians. Use your imagination about what's next, and don't kid yourself it won't go any further. 

If you think you can just sit back and hope it will go away, then you're not paying attention.

I'm not saying, "Go to the barricades." At least not yet. But I'm saying, wake up, and do some good in the face of all this. Find out about the work of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. And then support them: give up four coffees at Starbucks a year and send the $25 to one or another of those groups. Or maybe $25 each to all of them. Find out who's running for school board in your town next election cycle, and work for the candidate who's not a Nazi-for-Jesus.

But just as important as all this: in your own life, choose kindness. Every day, be swift to choose kindness. Choose community. Choose to affirm and validate those around you. As corny as they can be, model yourself on the cast of Queer Eye. Go to a drag show, even if you haven't been to a drag show for years. In fact, especially if you haven't been to a drag show for years, and offer a dollar bill to every lip-syncing diva who walks by your table. Smile at the sixteen-year-old non-binary kid you pass on the street. Talk to someone visibly glbtq whom you normally wouldn't think to engage.

For the last five or six months, I've been part of an informal cluster of erotic activists and writers working to discern what we can do, individually and collectively. We've gotten as far as calling ourselves "Men's Groups United," coming up with a logo, and creating an "elevator speech":

Who we are: We are a group of advocates, body workers, facilitators, and activists for men's mindful erotic self-development.

 

What we believe: We believe in the right of individuals to explore the possibilities of their lives with freedom of expression without interference from socially repressive forces. We are committed to the transformative nature of erotic empowerment.

 

What are we doing? We seek to raise the social consciousness among the people involved in the work that we do. We do this in solidarity with all people doing erotic work with all genders. 

 

Why are we doing this? Christian Nationalism and other right-wing activism is aggressively attempting to limit free personal expression. We know from history of the need to take action before existing rights/liberties are taken away. We seek to preserve and expand the civil liberties and rights of all people.