There has been a lot written lately about the needs of boys and men. Two of the most important experts are Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway. Richard is the Founding President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and author of the book, Of Boys and Men: Why The Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Scott Galloway. Scott is professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and author of the book, Notes on Being a Man.
My recent article, “Scott Galloway, Richard Reeves, and Jed Diamond on the Future of Man Kind,” detailed some important facts that are becoming increasingly significant in today’s world including the truth that boys are struggling at school and men are losing ground in the labor market.
- “The data around boys and young men is overwhelming,” says Professor Galloway. “Seldom in recent memory has there been a cohort that’s fallen farther, faster. Why? First boys face an educational system biased against them — with brains that mature later than girls,’ they almost immediately fall behind their female classmates.”
- “The gender in college degrees awarded is wider today than it was in the early 1970s, but in the opposite direction,” says Richard Reeves. “For every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men.”
- “The wages of most men are lower today than they were in 1979, while women’s wages have risen across the board,” says Reeves. “Men account for almost three out of four ‘deaths of despair’ either from suicide or overdose.”
Neither Scott Galloway or Richard Reeves minimize the truth that there are significant problems that continue to undermine the health and wellbeing of girls and women. Their goal is not to pit males and females against each other, or determine who has it the worst, but rather to recognize that men’s problems and women’s problems are opposite sides of the same coin and must be solved by bringing men and women together.
What Boys and Men (as well as Girls and Women) Need Most
After more than eighty years of life and sixty years as a healthcare provider, I believe our major problem is our mistaken belief that we are separate from nature and the community of life on planet Earth. According to Robert Waldinger, M.D. professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School,
“We live our lives as if we are separate islands — distinct, independent, bounded by our skin. I wake up each morning as the protagonist of my own story, moving through a world of other separate things: my coffee cup, my neighbor, the tree outside my window. This perception feels so obviously true that we rarely question it. Yet what if this most basic assumption about reality is fundamentally mistaken?”
In many ways our modern life is an illusion of separation, an illusion that is causing boys and men and all humanity to suffer and sicken. It is time we woke up and embraced the truth.
The truth says Dr. Waldinger is that: “Nothing exists in isolation. Nothing is truly independent. You exist because your parents existed, because the food that sustains you exists, because the sun exists to make that food grow, because the conditions that formed our solar system billions of years ago existed. Nothing can be ‘ripped out of the fabric of being’ because everything is thoroughly woven together.”
Our failure to understand the truth of our interconnectedness is not only at the core of our failure to thrive but is endangering our very survival. Historian Thomas Berry offered this reality check and call to action.
“We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”
Our Biological Roots and Evolutionary Journey
When I attended U.C. Santa Barbara between 1961 and 1965, I had the good fortune to meet the preeminent philosopher Paul Tillich, whose words moved me then and have stayed with me through the years.
Tillich said, “Every serious thinking must ask and answer three fundamental questions: What is wrong with us? With men? Women? Society? What is the nature of our alienation? Our dis-ease? (2) What would we be like if we were whole? Healed? Actualized? If our potentiality was fulfilled? (3) How do we move from our condition of brokenness to wholeness? What are the means of healing?”
I also had the good fortune of learning from biologists, psychologists, anthropologists and others who helped me begin a lifelong search for answers to the questions Tillich challenged us to address.
I am an only child, raised by a single mother when my mid-life father took an overdose of sleeping pills because he felt he was a failure as a man when he couldn’t support his family doing work he loved. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to keep it from happening to other families. I wrote about my father’s healing journey and my own in my book My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound.
When I interviewed Richard Reeves and read Scott Galloway’s book Notes on Being a Man, I realized what all three of us had in common was the importance of the birth of our sons. I believe that all of us, regardless of whether we have children need to connect with our evolutionary lineage. We all had a father and each of our fathers had a father.
I wondered how far back does this lineage go? I discovered that our sexual evolution is ancient. Getting in touch with the roots of our maleness is the key, I believe, to what we need in order to survive and thrive.
Embracing Our Billion Year History of Maleness
To understand and heal our boys and men, as well as all humanity, we need to get back to the roots. According to mathematical cosmologist, Dr. Brian Swimme and historian Dr. Thomas Berry, in their book, The Universe Story, life first evolved on Earth about four billion years ago.
Prior to the evolution of sexual reproduction, cells divided into individual sister cells. Swimme and Berry call this first living organism Sappho. But one billion years ago, a momentous change occurred. The first male organism, they call him Tristan, and the first female organism, they call her Iseult, were cast into the ancient oceans. Here’s how Swimme and Berry poetically describe this first sexual adventure:
“These special cells were then released by Sappho into the currents of the enveloping ocean. They were cast into the marine adventure, with its traumas of starvation and of predation. Able to nourish themselves but no longer capable of dividing into daughter cells, such primal living beings made their way through life until an almost certain death ended their 3 billion-year lineage.”
But Tristan and Iseult possessed great fortitude and were willing to face adversity and danger in search of a potential lover, no matter the odds of failure.
“A slight, an ever so slight, chance existed that a Tristan cell would come upon a corresponding Iseult cell. They would brush against each other, a contact similar to so many trillions of other encounters in their oceanic adventure. But with this one, something new would awaken. Something unsuspected and powerful and intelligent, as if they had drunk a magical elixir, would enter the flow of electricity through each organism.
“Suddenly the very chemistry of their cell membranes would begin to change. Interactions evoked by newly functioning segments of her DNA would restructure the molecular web of Iseult’s skin, so that an act she had never experienced or planned for would begin to take place — Tristan entering her cell wholly.”
This billion-year-old story takes us back to the emergence of the first sperm, the beginning of maleness, and our first male ancestor. Think about the fortitude and courage it took for the first male to overcome the adversities of life in the primordial ocean to find a female who would allow him entry into her body. This is the first love story and the beginning act to a play that continues to unfold today. But as evolution continued, and the first multicellular animals appeared 700 million years ago, we started on the long journey to becoming the unique men we are today.
I will be writing more about our need to understand the biological and evolutionary truth about who we are. If you would like more articles like these, please let me know. I appreciate your feedback and support. If you are not already a member of our community and receiving my free weekly newsletter, please sign up here.
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