Can Masculinity Be Bad?

The phrase 'toxic masculinity' gets me thinking.

It implies that some of masculinity could be bad, if not that masculinity is bad entirely (but that's the sense I get because of how people talk about masculinity/men nowadays). But like one's identity, I think of the words 'masculinity' and 'femininity' as talking about the core and good nature of men and women.

We talk of aggression as a trait of masculinity now, but it just seems utterly wrong to call that a masculine trait. Maybe it is a perversion of the masculine trait of strength/guard-doggishness/protectiveness. But I'm not sure it actually is- it seems to be like that good trait, but really something else entirely. (If I ever gather my thoughts properly on why I think this way, I will write about it- it relates to a lot of other topics as well, like sins-and-virtues. Proceed now to a load of waffle...)

The negative traits I can think of right now of both men and women appear always to be true perversions of human nature as God intended it. The examples I can think of right now seem cases where a person wishes to be seen as something- when there is a selfishness in him. Aggression and recklessness show up when people want to show off. Always to be seen as something, to their gods or to other people. They are not any more the useful traits humans possess to get through life holistically- they are self-serving absolutely with no practical end (we can rationalise them, of course). As an example, recklessness is not 'taking a risk'- a risk is only a risk if you are weighing the pros and cons, which if you're thinking of pros and cons, you've lost your 'reckless' status.

So then the traits that really define a true man, and thus are those that are truly masculine, are those neutral-and-good ones which are necessary to his life, and promote his and others' health.

There's this sense in mainstream dialogue that if you use 'masculine' descriptively, or goodness! as a compliment, you must be, uh, toxically masculine yourself, or for the Patriarchy.

It just makes me actually want to run around complimenting men for being masculine when they actually are, because masculinity seems on decline and I miss it, or the memory of it left in stories and history.

Some people do have a bad picture of what men should be like. But why, oh why, should them define 'masculine' for us? They are misdefining it. Do not give them the floor. Fight back and say what being a proper man really is. Saying 'be a man' doesn't necessarily mean 'impose your strength over all weaker people.' Some people mean 'take the initiative and find out when people need help and give it.'

Beauty, Poetically

The Lord of the Rings revealed to me the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Before that I thought that wanting things to be beautiful (which to me includes goodness and truth) was asking for perfection and too much. But also too much to ask for, without it being the true and the good as well. Asking for life to be too good. I must expect the worst.

Beauty awakens desire for goodness and truth and even beauty itself, in a circular way it calls up more desire for itself. Beauty strikes you and makes you notice something good, and somehow there is an expanding, and you find you see after that more things that are beautiful- you grow bigger and bigger, with more room to appreciate. You see more things around you that once you hardly noticed, or didn’t notice at all- you see how beautiful they are. Your eyes are opened. And you see how small you are, how little you do see, and are awed by how much more there is to see, and very glad, too. It is exciting when there is always more to find out. You are not ashamed of being small and mean, but simply glad that there is so much to gather, to collect, to appreciate.

The feelings of encountering beauty awaken a desire to get inside beauty; a desire to manifest beauty. To become beautiful so as to continue the communication of beauty to other people and the world. To praise God.

But no- perhaps it is not to communicate that one desires to manifest beauty. It is desired in itself, somehow. If you desired only to communicate it, perhaps you wouldn’t be wanting it at all. But then, in desiring it, you desire to communicate it; the love of it overflows in a loving desire for others to have it, too. You want others to feel as you do, because it is so good. So then you hope that you will become exactly and rightly like it just for that purpose: because it must be shared, it cannot be kept for one’s lonesome.

I don’t believe the encounter with true beauty can result in a selfishness… we cannot hoard it. Perhaps it is that it cannot be hoarded; one loses it as soon as one tries to hoard it. It cannot fit through the door into our hoard, and so must always be shut out when we go inside our hoard, even if we don’t realise we’re leaving it behind. So therefore when we love beauty, we never can hoard it, or else we immediately lose it. We then begin to love the things that shone with beauty rather than the beauty itself… we lust after the thing we thought contained the beauty- the beautiful picture, or piece of music. But those things are only the offspring of true Beauty, but are not Beauty itself. When we seek them, to hoard the beauty, we idolise the thing that glittered, but not the light that made it glitter. It is somehow easy for us to forget the beauty in our lust for the thing that evoked it, our desire to control and keep that beauty for ourselves. We are incredibly forgetful of our visions of God’s paradise.

This is why when we are wrapped up in God, we desire to share, but left in our own devices, in our sin, we cower and hide from sharing anything and lose our bounty. We diminish and fade, even to ourselves. But when we let beauty come inside of us and overflow out of us, we become fountains of richness, wholeness, light. We overflow with God’s glory as He fills us. For if we desire to be filled with beauty, we will be filled with it. I ought to know this by now, but I forget, and I doubt, even after such glimpses as I’ve had.

For some reason to me manifesting the beautiful is the only way to communicate truth, goodness and beauty perfectly. One must become beautiful to be whole with God. Not in one's own power, but from an invitation by God to be beautiful… to be our true selves. We must not feel we must do it; we are allowed to do it.

Must We Learn That Truth Is Beautiful?

Glancing over my post titles, it occurred to me how it seems to take awhile for someone to find Truth beautiful in itself.

When I was a child, I didn't have any particular appreciation for Truth as a thing. I guess I liked trueness; I liked to know how things stood. But that isn't the same as loving Truth.

There were some things in my childhood that I just loved how beautiful they were. Not lovely, or charming, or glorious even, but just beautiful. Arthur Rackham's illustrations, and other very good book illustrations- real adult ones, as I saw it then. Of course these were for children, but they were illustrations you could love throughout your life. I loved that. And of course, they were beautiful... with the added benefit of not always liking his artistic choices and getting to disagree. There's nothing like disagreement to make you appreciate a thing. How strange.

So, I appreciated art. Of truth, though, I thought it was only about not lying, and all that. So it was at best unfreeing, if not downright restrictive. That is all in the connotation of a word, though- if I'd known that that word is what I now see as 'Truth', I would have loved it.

The plot device in all my stories will be 'Then I read the Lord of the Rings.' I'm in danger of losing people's interest, but that's, well, the truth.

I did read the Lord of the Rings, and it did seemingly rewire my thinking a bit. I guess I began to think of Truth as a great and wonderful thing, without realising it. I just realised I had always thought so. Those beautiful artworks I had liked- I liked them... because of Truth. I still don't know how else to describe this. The love of the things I love is a love wrapped up in Goodness, Truth and Beauty. It's a holistic thing. It is not even mine. It seems that it has come to be part of me, but it is not mine.

The funny thing is that it seems that one doesn't get to loving Truth until one has seen Beauty. I'm not certain of this yet, but what Stephen Turley has said makes it seem I'm not the only one to feel this way. Being hit by Beauty seems to have happened first to me, and it took a book analogising it for me to see Truth. I wish I could define Truth, but right now I feel the best way would be in some form of poetry. It is a very big thing, and a very beautiful thing. It is all that is good, which is to say all that really Is. It seems to me the very best way to talk about it is in poetry. And I've never cared greatly about poetry, likely because I was never interested in the poetry I read.

I feel I've gone and done a very bad job of saying what I mean to say. But the title helps: I feel I had to learn that Truth was beautiful by seeing true things and their beauty. It took being struck by the aesthetic for me to eventually, somehow, see beneath it to what was looking so wonderful.

How on earth can I explain it? The Lord of the Rings was like a guide to what is so beautiful, why anything is beautiful, because I wanted to know so badly ever since I was a child- I wanted to EAT the beautiful things, to consume them, to be one with them. What was beautiful? Truth. And of course, it would not be so beautiful were not Truth intrinsically Good. If Truth were bad, somehow it could not be beautiful. Somehow. I don't know why. It seems to be as plain as day, anyhow. Unnecessary to analyse. Or is that just me? And so I must analyse it, somehow.

What is Identity?

I want to say that I will probably do a terrible job of a title like this, but the title seems the best way to start.

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My dear friend Lady W. helped me along inadvertently.

1. Identity is whatever makes you you. Your core. Essence. Whatever. Hooray for lameness- it seems to show how ambiguous this topic is.

2. One's true identity can never include anything wrong- sinful, destructive to oneself or others in any way. (This is the idea that came from Lady W.)

3. Identity is not something we create or discover directly. By thinking of ourselves, looking in at ourselves, we lose any ability to really see ourselves. We look inside at the emptiness that is us, trying to find things in it, and not seeing any.

4. Our Selves can be seen only through our imprint on the world around us. Firstly we know our distinctness physically by the fact that our bodies get in the way of other things and can't take the same space like a spirit does- we are not all thought. Secondly we know our wills are there because they butt up against the wills of others.

5. Strangely enough, it seems that we stay mentally healthy largely by having an influence and impact on the world through creating things, changing things (for the better, I hope), and just generally making a nuisance of ourselves by affecting others. I seem to always think I'll have a negative effect, so I'm making fun of myself.

6. We know ourselves in relation to what is not us... even understanding ourselves through our affect on ourselves by understanding how others affect themselves (sorry if this is confusing; disregard if it is). I wonder if we couldn't know about ourselves without interacting with people- we know we exist because people exist which we are not. 

7. We see who we are by comparison with others. We know about our attributes because someone else doesn't have those attributes (it doesn't matter who does have the attribute). If everyone had all the same character, it would not be character- it would just be clumped in the definition of Human. The way we know that a thing is not another thing is through whatever element in that thing is necessary for it to be what it is, and either not present or unnecessary in another thing.

I don't know if those are all the points I have in my head about identity itself. There is always the negative, but the negative doesn't know when to shut up. There is a lot that can be said about what something is not, than what it is.

History of Identity (Sort of)

I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, so here goes for a starter post, made of confused, entangled thoughts.
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We've been obsessed with the idea of identity for around a century, with the invention of psychology (perhaps it was not invented, but it seems so by the history). It seems we get more and more obsessed as time goes on. It seems that before the 1700's or so, people thought of Who They Are far less than we do today. Especially with the invention of novels (late 1700's?) it seems people started to think more about our Internal Monologue. The importance we put on that monologue has grown over time.

It just doesn't seem to have mattered to people much before what you thought, which brings its own set of troubles, but if what you think doesn't matter that much, it conveniently means that what others think doesn't matter that much, either. However, I doubt anyone was particularly concerned whether or not what they or others thought mattered. We often infer upon the past that they might have been secretly controlling others, knowing that others could have given input, but most likely a lot of the usual chafing between people happened for mostly non-malicious reasons, not that there was no fault in what people did.

(It occurred to me today that that one thing is probably what would be the most culture-shocking about time travelling- the completely different way we think about Our Selves nowadays.)

I haven't yet decided how I rate that, bad or good- so far it seems it's a mix of the two. There is a lot of good in not minding much about your self, highlighted because of our current cultural fixation on Self, but there are some issues, such as advocating for personal needs. I'll leave this off, because there's a lot to go into here.

From what little I know of the past century, the idea of Self and Identity has grown a huge network of language and its own set of new concerns. It is amazing when I consider how things might used to have been contrasted with how we think about all this now. Our whole culture has radically shifted just because of our hyper-psychologised way of thinking. Everything surrounds and concerns the individual in a way unparalleled in the past... the little I can think of in comparison is what seems to be the self-indulgence of cultures in other times or places where the richest and most powerful people have been free to concern themselves purely with how they feel and what they want- where they have the time and energy to simply think of themselves.

We in our affluence nowadays have the luxury to think this way, possibly even more so than they did (although we do not have slaves and servants). We have convenience beyond all past ages because of the inventions and the infrastructure developed over centuries.

So therefore, in our freedom from bare necessity, from the mere struggle to live, we can think about our selves. And thus, we have begun to think about our identities, who we are, which I begin to think may be a culturally regressive thing.

It's fine to think about what you happen to be like- what your attributes are in relation to reality, but to define yourself by those things, to restrict your growth by saying you're just like this and can't help it, that is going too far. I don't mean that you can always change, but rather that we needn't restrict ourselves by our defining Boxes. They are simply useful explanations of whatever is.

I may have to prove that there is an epidemic of self-definition now. Ah, well.

Quote from Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I liked two quotes from nearly the same spot in the book as I was reading it just recently. I won't spoil what's going on in the story if you haven't read it, so you can find out yourself what the context is if you care to. I like the points in these quotes very much.

The pleasure (quite new to him) of being liked and, still more, of liking other people, was what kept Eustace from despair.

The pleasure of liking other people is greater than the pleasure of being liked, which Man seems to usually forget in his more conscious thought. I suspect that people who have had wholesome relationships with people know this deep down, unconsciously at least. There is a real peace and complete contentment in being able to really like other people.

So [the lion] came nearer and nearer. I was terribly afraid of it. You may think that, being a dragon, I could have knocked any lion out easily enough. But it wasn't that kind of fear. I wasn't afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it--if you can understand.

This I liked because my friend and I were talking about awe and fear of God and about the perhaps natural fear-of-His-power aspect, but then of course also I was talking about how I sometimes have a sense of fear-awe that is like fear, but not fear of having anything done to me. As in, I am definitely terrified, over-awed, overpowered. Partly it feels in those moments like my mind literally cannot grasp the object of its fear, and that's part of why it's afraid.


Both quotes are from Chapter 7 of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.