Google Earth has captivated The Green Man and clearly the artists at The Glue Society. Here are a couple of their images of biblical scenes as they may have appeared from Google Earth.
Noah's Ark as the time of floating approaches
The parting of the Red Sea for Moses.
The crucifixion
Having problems with your marriage? Do you think that divorce is the answer?
Well it probably is but don't expect to be happier afterwards. New research has shown that as a person approaches divorce their happiness levels drop and following the divorce they rebound but NOT to the level that they were before the whole divorce incident happened. That's right, you end up unhappier. It may not be a reason not to divorce but don't think you are doing it to improve your happiness.
Masculine overcompensation is the idea that men who are insecure about their masculinity will behave in an extremely masculine way as compensation. I wanted to test this idea and also explore whether overcompensation could help explain some attitudes like support for war and animosity to homosexuals.
Says Robb Willer, a sociology doctoral candidate at Cornell University. Guess what he was right. Threaten your ordinary man's masculinity and the most common outcome is that his support for the war in Iraq grows, his distrust and dislike of homosexuals increases and he starts looking to buy himself a SUV.
The irony of this, in Australia at least, is that the SUVs ("Four Wheel Drives" we call them) are too expensive to run to use to commute to work so the wife gets given the SUV to drive the kids to school. I gather from a recent episode of The Simpsons, our window into the lives of middle America, a similar phenonemon exists in the USA.
Not only did men who felt that their masculinity was threatened behave in an overly gung-ho manner but they also reported feeling ashamed, guilty, upset and hostile. Doesn't sound like the ingredients for a rewarding existance.
"So does this overcompensation extend to violence against women in these threatened men's lives?" I hear you ask and the answer is probably and Robb Willer intends to extend his study to investigate this aspect of male behaviour.
Much of this insecurity that exists in contemporary men about their masculinity can be directly attributed to the lack of objective milestones in masculine development in modern society combined with few and perverted masculine role models. To a female it may be completely incomprehensible however for a young man the question of when you become a man and how do you prove to yourself and others that you are one is the cause of much of the anti-social behaviour that this demographic exhibit. In primitive societies this was not a problem because there was specific trials and initiation practices that boys undertook, with the guidance of adult males, that aided them in this transition. Clearly it is inappropriate to try and artificially reintroduce these ancient practices but it is important to young men, and to the broader society, that some form of transition ceremony is undertaken.
Returning to the findings of Robb Willer's research, it is clear that measures taken in the name of femininism to advance the status of women within the society will be most effective if they do not threaten men's masculinity. From this research we can see that such threats, even if they are unintentional, damage the progress of women's rights because they make men more macho and less inclined to embrace change.
Anyone who has met Phil of Signposts , and more recently of GeekyInfo, could not accuse him of being on the girly side. He is not exactly petite or femine for that matter. It doesn't matter for him because he is a minister in his church. It is about the only post in the modern church that still has a serious masculine feel. The church of today is a feminine domain. The workers and employees are women, the congregation are women. The modern church reeks of estrogen. There is a small niche for quiet introspective men but they are more tolerated than embraced. Here are some interesting factoids, they are from an America study but they are probably just as applicable here.
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The typical U.S. congregation
draws an adult crowd that is 61 percent female, 39 percent male -- a gender
gap that shows up in all age categories. |
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On any given Sunday, there are 13 million more adult women than men in America's churches. |
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The majority of church employees are women. |
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According to a 1999 study by Christianity Today magazine, inner church leadership tends to be mostly female, even in churches that have male ordained leadership. |
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Ninety percent of boys raised in church will abandon it before their 18th birthday. |
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More than 90 percent of American men believe in God, and five out of six call themselves Christians. But only two out of six attend church on a given Sunday. |
David Murrow of Baylor University believes he knows why, he says
the modern church is too chatty, too touchy-feely and full of hokey rituals that don't affirm a guy's manhood. In short, the faith founded by one man 2,000 years ago needs a testosterone shot
Of course you could argue that this is precisely the role of the church. You could argue that the church is not so much about worship and more about the sugar coating that makes worship pallitable and the sugar is laced with estrogen. It is precisely why every self respecting testosterone filled adolescent male feels he must make the choice - desert the church or desert his masculinity. Most choose to desert the church.
This is a serious problem for the church and some radical thinkers have been proposing alternative models to spirituality that go to the core of being masculine. John Eldridge in his book Wild At Heart says
If Christian men are going to change from a pitiful, wimpy bunch of "really nice guys" to men who are made in the image of God, they must reexamine their preconceptions about who God is and recover their true "wild" hearts
John Hall and David Brown created Warrior Heart Ministries based on Eldredge's premise: that men were created to be wild, to take chances and to act when God calls them to act even as modern society calls them to be tame, predictable and reliable and to reason things out before acting on anything.
Part of the problem is that young men require "male-only" space. It can be found at the football club or in the surf but the Church rarely provides this. In its rush to embrace equality the Church has, from a male perspective, created an very unequal space. Instead of providing an environment where young men can learn to be male through guidence and modelling themselves on the strong adult men of the church all they can hope for is clones of their mothers treating them in the substantially the same way their mothers do. When you are 16, 17, 18 who wants that.
Is there a solution, well maybe, but the church as been dominated by women and feminine culture for so long it is difficult to see it happening quickly, if at all.
It may be, of course, that for most men the church is simply unnecessary, or at best, irrelevant. Spirituality is an extremely personal thing and exists entirely separately from the Church. To discover and practice their spirituality and worship men may simply not need the nurturing and support that the Church offers.
It has been observed that people with a low BMI (body mass index < 25) are generally healthier those who have a high BMI, that is classified as overweight or obese. However new and intriguing findings by researchers at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki and Copenhagen University Hospitals, Danish Epidemiology Science Center and National Public Health Institute in Finland have shown that those overweight individuals who wish to loose weight and succeed have a higher mortality than those who do not loose weight.
Similarly those who had a low BMI and gained weight also had an increased mortality.
It seems that the thing that damages health the most is fluctuations in weight rather than the actual weight of a person.
Critics of studies of this nature in the past have pointed to weight-loss associated with illness, in particular cancer, as confounding the results however the Helsinki study removed those subjects with illness from the study.
They say
In people who have medical conditions related to obesity, losing weight is obviously desirable, emphasize the researchers. But overall, preventing people, especially children, from becoming overweight in the first place seems crucial, since this work suggests that once weight is gained losing it again may not be good for health.
Read a little bit more here.
Or a lot more here (if you speak Finnish)
If you are talking anger then you need look no further than the Maori. They have taken anger and turned it into an art form, called the Haka.
Here is a photo of the New Zealand All Blacks performing a traditional Haka, as they do at the start of each international rugby match they play. It is an awe-inspiring sight and if you have never seen it take time to tune into the start of an international rugby game in which the All Blacks are playing (They are playing the British Lions on 25th June 2005).
Let's face it, Rugby makes most other football codes look positively effeminate and the All Blacks have embraced the sport and added a layer of Maori ferociousness of which the Haka is a most graphic expression. Click on the image to learn more.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with article, which is on anger in the west. Below are some interesting factoids that have been gleened from new research by Economic and Social Research Council in England.
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Children from lower social classes are more likely to be reported as frequently irritable or having tantrums. |
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Women are more likely than men to report being persistently angry in adulthood. But boys are more likely than girls to be reported as frequently angry. |
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Thirty-somethings with no partner are more likely to report angry feelings than people with partners. |
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Anger seems to wane with age in both childhood and adulthood. |
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People now in their 40s, were less angry as young men and women than younger people now in their 30s. It is not clear if this is because anger was measured at slightly different ages or because the younger people were more stressed and depressed as well as more likely to 'act out'. |
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Angry children do not necessarily become angry or unhappy adults. But there does appear to be a raised chance that people who were persistently angry as children turn out to be frequently and persistently angry as young adults. |
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Similarly, anger in adulthood is not always associated with adverse health outcomes. But anger in adulthood is positively associated with poor self-reported health after controlling for gender, parents' social class and ethnicity. |
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People who were not frequently angry in the adult surveys had better self-reported psychological health than those who reported anger. This mildly supports the idea of anger having negative (though perhaps not deadly) associations. |
Source Economic and Social Research Council in UK
Well here is an opportunity, under the guise of science, to post a bit of porn on The Green Man, specifically an image of a naked woman with a number of naked men with huge erections, and for the highest and noblest of reasons. Namely boosting the failing sperm count of the men of the western world. Sadly however The Green Man happens to be at work at the moment and trawling the net for images of porn as detailed above has become somewhat unfashionable in the comtemporary Australian workplace. Consequently you will just have to cast your mind back to the last time you "accidently" stumbled on images of this nature.
If you are a woman it doesn't matter, you can think of dolphins frolicking or something, it is the men who have to keep these images of porn fixed firmly in their minds. Not that The Green Man has to ask, most of the male readership are probably doing that anyway.
On to the topic: Dr Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia in Perth, like all good academics, is focused on the challenging task of combining research and pleasure and what better way to do this than to initiate a study of the effect of pornography on males. Fortunately for Dr Leigh, he has ended up with some interesting results (as well as an exceptionally comprehensive image library of pornography). It seems that men exposed to images of a naked female in the presence of two or more naked males produce much higher quality sperm than those who are exposed to images of naked women only. He hypothesises
males (of many species, including humans) should produce better sperm when faced with a female who has other mates, because this stimulates them to boost their chance of procreation.
The study also found that
men who keep their mobile telephone near to their testes may be harming the quality of their sperm
The Green Man must mix in very conservative circles because he cannot think of one male acquaintence who keeps his mobile phone stuffed in his underpants. It raises some vexing questions,
Is this the real reason for the vibrate mode?
What is the ettiquette of retrieving said phone in mixed company if it rings?
What do you say if it is your companions phone that is ringing? "Excuse me but your crutch is vibrating." perhaps?
Dr Leigh says
further experiments and animal studies should be carried out to investigate the effects of mobile phones on fertility. At least one previous study has shown a possible link between phones and sperm count. But experts have cautioned that confounding factors, such as the fact that phone-users may have more stressful lives
The Green Man humbly suggests that not storing your mobile phone in your underpants might be a good first step at reducing the amount of stress in your life.
Tim Birkhead, who studies sperm competition at the University of Sheffield, UK is not at all happy with his collection of pornography he says
Good luck Tim!
Inexplicably and in spite of the fact it is Friday afternoon you may be interested in a drier, more academic, coverage of the research you can read it in Nature.
I dare say many of the readership have mulled over the related concepts of motivation/satisfaction/happiness. A percentage of the worlds deforestation has been for the purpose of printing self help books specifically on these concepts.
Those of you who have let your pop-psychology readings slip in the area of motivating sports people and business executives may be unaware of the fact that internal (or intrinsic) motivation has been touted as being far superior to external (extrinsic) sources of motivation such as money or material success.
Certainly money and material success have flowed to the authors of the books which may lead you to wonder whether they are truely happy, having derrived their happiness from such an external source. The answer is "To right they are". In spite of the mantra that "Money can't but happiness", I think it is fair to say that it is a lot easier to be happy when you have a full stomach and a warm, safe abode.
Professor Steven Reiss of Ohio State University goes even further, questioning the very existence of intrinsic motivation. He says
There is no reason that money can't be an effective motivator, or that grades can't motivate students in school. It's all a matter of individual differences. Different people are motivated in different ways.
Taking the example of children playing sport as compared to professional sports men and women he cites the assertions of others that the children find the sport inherently more satisfying because they are playing for the pleasure of playing rather than for external reward. Prof Steve argues that both may find it equally satisfying or dissatisfying because both are merely satisfying a need. The child the need for exercise and the professional the need for money to support his/her family.
So why are extrinisic rewards supposedly less motivating? Well quite possibly different the different value systems held by different people mean that for some these rewards have less value. For those who do not have much interest in possessing wealth above that which is needed for a simple life, then extrinsic rewards that are based on a desire for wealth will be quite unmotivating. If, on the other hand you are a person who judges your self worth by the amount of wealth you possess then these forms of motivations can be highly effective.
Life is so much more complicated than the view described cited in those personal improvement/self help books. There is no panacea, read the books with a degree of scepticism then put them aside and choose your own path. All the truely happy people have and they are not necessarily the rich ones.
How sad that the nursing home placed such a high price on their reputation. Boring young farts!
Here is a photo of a man that is typically a consumate political being. Skilled in the practice of manipulating public opinion and one of the Liberal party's rising stars.
His name is Tony Abbott and those on the left of politics dispise this man mainly because he is so good at what he does. No matter what side of politics you inhabit no compassionate person could do anything but feel for Mr Abbott and the emotional turmoil that has been thrust upon him.
Twenty seven years ago, at university, he was sexually involved with a young woman who became pregnant. Both thought he was the father. The decision was to place the child up for adoption, which is consistent with Mr Abbott's long held anti-abortion stance.
For 27 years he believed that there was a child out there that he had fathered and, whilst he and the woman went on to marry other partners, they retained a bond from this shared parentage. Last December a young man contact them to say he was their son that they had put up for adoption. It was a reunion that often happens and provides some answers for the couple and if Mr Abbott had been an ordinary person it would have ended there but he was not and it was spread across the media.
The media coverage allowed another man who knew the boys mother, obviously in the biblical sense, recognised the similarity of the young man to his own boys. A paternity test was conducted and Mr Abbott was informed he was, indeed, not the father.
Mr Abbott has said
To find the boy that I thought I had all those years ago. To go through a reunion and now to lose him like this is pretty shocking and I feel a bit numb about it all.
You may not like Mr Abbott but any caring person cannot help but feel for him in this predicament. It is at times like this that we must put aside our own normal feelings about him and hope that he receives support and counselling that he will need to get him through this.
We can choose to grow from experiences such as these and become more compassionate and wise or we can allow them to harden and wither us emotionally. Let us hope that Mr Abbott chooses the former.
Read more in The Age
It seems that when it comes to employing people we still have very different expectations of men and women. If there are a number of applicants for a job who, hypothetically have identical qualifications and experience and, as such, are all equally suitable for the job, here is how we hire/promote:
1. Married man with children
2. Unmarried (either sex) with no children
3. Married woman with children
If you are a married man with children you are likely to be first choice. If you are married woman with children then the expectation is still that you will be looking after them as your primary role and you can kiss goodbye to that job or promotion.
Our society, it seems, is still locked into the concept that women are primarily carers of children and men are the breadwinners. Which of course simply reflects the reality. In 2004 only 5% of married couples reported the woman as the "breadwinner" and in a large number of these cases it was because of a situation forced on the couple rather than one of choice, for example where the husbands earnings are reduced because of illness or unemployment.
Women can temporarily be the breadwinner, during the unemployment of the husband, or permanently the breadwinner within the household. Typically women only become the permanent breadwinner when they are capable of earning a significantly large amount of money to make this departure from the norm worthwhile. (79% of permanent female breadwinners fall into this category). Accordingly these households are, on average, significantly wealthier than those where the husband is the breadwinner. The poorest are those where the wife is temporarily the breadwinner, presumeably taking a rather lower paid job to support the family through the husbands infirmary or unemployment.
Supporting this general view is the fact that permanent female breadwinners are much more likely to hold a degree and be employed in a professional or managerial position.
Whether we like it or not, it is not usual for women to be the breadwinner and society still expects them to be mothers and housekeepers as well. It is clear that these women embrace these expectation because mothers who are breadwinners still spend more time with the children than the father (8.1/5.8 hours) and spend more time on the housework (15.3/8.3 hours)
The only real plus for the female breadwinner is that they work significantly less hours per week to earn their money than their male breadwinner equivalent (37.1/45.8 hours)
Read more on research gender bias in employee selection by Kathleen Fuegen, who is Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University (click here) and more on breadwinner characteristics by Robert Drago of Pennsylvania State University and David Black and Mark Wooden at University of Melbourne (click here).
It is drawing a bit of a long bow to equate levels of unhappiness with suicide rates but not completely unreasonable. That being said it is interesting to look at the general level of unhappiness in the USA.
Greater than 14.92 suicides per 100,000
Between 12.55 and 14.92 suicides per 100,000
Between 10.41 and 12.55 suicides per 100,000
Less than 12.55 suicides per 100,000
It seems that west is a lot unhappier than the midwest and the east, with the exception of Florida which is the pits. If you are looking for the really unhappy people try Sierra, New Mexico with a whopping 42.21 suicides per 100,000 people.
Compare this with Rockland, New York that has only 3.63.
Suicide rates in Australia continue to fall, in direct relation to the uptake of anti-depressent drugs The Green Man assumes. Not that that is a bad thing of course, it is just that we don't want to assume that the underlying causes for the suicide have alleviated in fact they have probably got worse.
The number of suicides fell to 2213 last year, about 100 fewer than the 2320 in 2002 and down from an all time high of 2720 in 1997. 78% of all suicides were by men and men in the age group 30-34 were at the greatest risk. Tragically, we know that the vast majority of these men did not want to die it was just that they could see no other way out of their problems.
Here is the thing. Most people, at some time in their lives find that things are getting on top of them. Generally speaking women have better social networks to see them through these times than men do. Help is available to all but you have to ask for it. It does not diminish your manliness to seek help. You can find it at the Suicide Helpline Victoria on 1300 651 251, Lifeline on 131 114 (both 24-hour lines), SANE on 1800 688 382 or Kids Help Line on 1800 551 800
Go on get outraged (if you are a woman) or deny it (If you are a man).
A study in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior by University of Michigan academic Stephanie Brown shows that when men are looking for a long term mate they find subordinate women more attractive. Oooh look at that cute young thing that that older businessman has conquered.
Compare that to when men are on the look out for a bit of casual rumpy pumpy. In these circumstances they are quite happy to, well let's say, engage with more superior females.
We all know what an excellent hunting ground the workplace is when seeking that ellusive life time partner and Dr Stephanie found that in this environment men found women holding subordinate positions to themselves more attractive than those who were peers or superiors. Dr Stephanie says
Our results demonstrate that male preference for subordinate women increases as the investment in the relationship increases. This pattern is consistent with the possibility that there were reproductive advantages for males who preferred to form long-term relationships with relatively subordinate partners.
It all gets back to parentage of the womens future children. Evolutionarily speaking it is a big bummer to invest huge amounts of resources in raising another males offspring particularly in situations where the resources are relatively scarce. The more powerful and independant the woman the higher the risk of infidelity is perceived and this diminishes the womans attractiveness. Consistent with this hypothesis is the observation that adult males typically prefer partners who are younger and make less money.
To add to this rich tapestry of conflicting objectives Daniel Kruger, one of Dr Stephanie's compatriots at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, found that a woman who is out for a bit of casual action actually prefers your "screw around" sort of guy. As long as she has a reliable SNAG at home to raise the kids afterwards it is in her evolutionary interest to get impregnated with genes that are particularly good at getting themselves into the next generation. This may go some way to accounting for the fact that current paternaty testing results are showing that 20% of men are not in fact the father of at least one of "their" children.
Read more on Dr Stephanies research here. and Dr Dans here.
Who are the ones that are built to have babies? If you put ideology aside, if you have to, biology says it is young women. Yep, your average 16, 17, 18 year old female is built to have babies and she is at an age where it is simple and usually quite successful. As these young women age their suitability for the task diminishes, not only physically, but emotionally as well.
These biological facts are completely out of kilter with our current lifestyle and expectations. Fortunately IVF goes a long way to addressing the short comings that older women typically experience in the pregnancy stakes.
Last year one in every nine Victorian women aged 30 to 34 gave birth to a child, making them almost the most fertile group of women in the Australia. What is more, one in every 17 women aged 35 to 39 gave birth, and so did one in every 93 women aged 40 to 44. These women are typically much more risk adverse that their younger compatriots. One has to wonder on the characteristics of the next generation of Australians given that they are being raised by these ageing mothers.
Read more in The Age
Here is a photo of Karen Ellis. She is 36 years old and used to be a physical education teacher at a secondary school. Yesterday she was found guilty of having sex with one of her 16 year old students. She received a 22 month jail sentence, wholly suspended. Contrast this with Gavin Hopper, a tennis coach at a secondary school, who earlier this year was sentenced to 3.5 years imprisonment for having sex with a 14 year old female student.
It is always difficult to compare individual cases because there are so many factors. One factor is the "damage" done to the victim. The female victim of the latter case claimed that she had been permanently scarred by the incident. The male victim of the former claims that he has suffered no damage from the affair which he claims he initiated. Further he says he would be damaged if Ellis were imprisoned.
There are so many interesting facets to this case it is hard to know what to focus on.
Is a female teacher having sex with a male student not as bad as a male teacher having sex with a female student?
Does the claim by the male student that he was not harmed matter, given that Ellis had no way of knowing before hand whether harm would result?
Should the fact that the victim claims he will suffer psychological harm if Ellis is imprisoned alter the sentencing?
However a more complex issue, and one I would like to explore here, is the extent to which societies expectations affect the degree of harm experienced by the victim. With respect to the victim in the Ellis case I can say quite confidently that the first thought of most young males and many adult males is "lucky bastard". Most of his peer group will be in awe of him and our culture will view him more as a conquerer rather than a victim. He may have been damaged by the experience, even if he does not know or acknowledge it, but the support and admiration that he will receive will go a long way to fixing that.
The female victim of Gavin Hopper on the other hand is clearly viewed as a victim by the bulk of society. The spotlight has been on her victimisation and there is little or no opportunity for her to feel good about herself with respect to the whole incident. The legitimate psychological damage that she sustained will take longer to heal precisely because of societies expectations of teenage girls are so different to that of teenage boys.
One of the most complex issues that surround sexual abuse of this nature is the extent to which society causes the psychological damage that arises from the abuse. The initial damage is clearly inflicted by the perpetrator, whether that damage is minimised or exacerbated depends on how the victim is treated and the messages they receive from those around them and society generally.
Here is a completely hypothetical example which you can consider. Let us suppose a sexually mature teenage girl, say 15, has sex with a 36 year old male teacher upon whom she has a crush. She initiates the affair which lasts 6 weeks and ends amicably with her feeling really good about the whole thing. (This is exactly the Ellis case above except that the gender of the victim and perpetrator are reversed.) Society may regard the girl as a victim but she doen't think she is. Is it societies role to damage her by convincing her that she is?
Before you start flaming, let me state unequivically that I believe that the sexual abuse is inexcusable. We must however be careful that societies attitude and the process of prosecuting the perpetrator does not do more damage to the victim than the original incident.
Read more in The Age.
Below is a map of suicide rates world wide. It is interesting that many of the countries with the best social services also have high suicide rates. Whilst good social welfare programmes may be honourable they don't do much for the mental health of the community.
See the full list here.
Data sourced from World Health Organisation
Most of you will be aware of the concept of women getting "clucky" when in the presence of female friends who have new babies and are breastfeeding. Of course we all know what an essential precursor to pregnancy is and new research by Professor Martha McClintock of University of Chigago has identified chemical signals emitted by these breastfeeding women that stimulate sexual desire.
Tests show that women indulging in sex, that is those with a partner, experience a 24% increase in sexual desire when they have been in the presence of breastfeeding women for a period of 2 months. Those women who do not have regular access to an appropriate male reported a 17% increase in sexual fantasies over the same period.
Work is still underway to determine whether these chemicals are pheromones or some other type of chemical.
Ah there is so much good material here. The Green Man has the opportunity to outrage a significant percentage of the readership. Showing exceptional restraint however, he will merely observe that, as much as we like to pretend differently, we are still animals and our bodies still respond the way they have been programmed to through the millenia. Neither feminism or religion has succeeded in changing that.
This attractive potion on the right is good for more than a fun night out. Janet L. Stanford of Fred Hutchinson's Public Health Sciences Division has found that it is most effective in the prevention of prostate cancer. It seems that a bottle a week of the red stuff reduces the risk of prostate cancer by approximately 50% and, even better, the type of prostate cancer it prevents is the most aggressive sort. They are not sure why exactly but an antioxidant called resveratrol, which is abundant in the skins of red grapes but much less so in the skins of white grapes seems to be the most likely candidate.
They think that it works in the following ways
- As an antioxidant, it helps sweep dangerous, cancer-causing free radicals from the body.
- As a potent anti-inflammatory agent, it blocks certain enzymes that promote tumor development.
- The compound also reduces cell proliferation, curtailing the number of cell divisions that could lead to cancer or the continued growth of cancer cells.
- It also enhances apoptosis, or programmed cell death, which helps rid the body of cancerous cells.
- It may act as an estrogen, reducing levels of circulating male hormones such as testosterone that fuel the growth of prostate cancer.
hmmm a bottle a week, that means The Green Man should be right until about 2050.
She found no significant effects – positive nor negative – associated with the consumption of beer or hard liquor and no consistent risk reduction with white wine. The Green Man will still be consuming it anyway. You can't be too careful can you?
Mrs Green Man is away on a conference at the moment so it was an excellent time to indulge in a little rescreening of The Lord of The Rings. "The Return of the King" got the guernsey on Saturday. Hard as it is to believe, rumours have it that some people may not have seen the movie and, even more unbelievably, not read the book. For the culturally deprived amongst you, the four main characters are male hobbits, meant to symbolise simple farming folk from Devon in England.
It is clear in the book and even more so in the film that relationships exist between these hobbits, Merry and Pippin seem bound to one another and Sam and Frodo share a deep long lasting bond. There is no suggestion that these relationships are sexual so to portray them as homosexual relationships is inappropriate however they go far beyond our notion of friendship. A one point in the novel/film Merry and Pippin are separated, Pippin being taken to Gondor and Merry remaining in Rohan. They are clearly grief stricken at this turn of events. Grief stricken in a way that most married couples would not even be.
Considering Frodo and Sam, when they return from their adventure Sam takes a wife. This fundamentally alters the relationship between Sam and Frodo. That fragile intimate bond has been broken. This perhaps more than the damage Frodo has suffered from possessing the ring of power is why he must leave. At the time of their parting the tenderness between the two is heart renching.
You can find these types of relationships between men represented in literature from the early classics through to relatively recent times but they are rarely portrayed these days. One of the few instances that springs to mind is in "Love Actually" where the ageing popstar leaves a party with Elton John to be with his manager on Christmas. The two men have shared their lives and he does not want them to be apart at this special time.
Our society today is very sexualised and relationships are assumed to have a sexual component. One can presume that these deep nonsexual relationships still exist between some men in our community but perhaps we have lost the ability to accept them. We certainly seem to be reluctant to represent them in modern literature.
You may question the wisdom of America waging a "war against terror", but noone could say America is not enthusiastic in its prosecution of the said war. This is manly business fighting wars and it is just not done to have any girlies getting in the way.
Now now, don't go getting your hackles up. This is not The Green Man's opinion. It is the opinion of the voting public in the USA. It seems that in times of war women may as well not stand for office, the public will just not vote for them. Surveying the unwashed masses Brown University found
95 percent indicated that men are better able than women to deal with military crisesVoters perceive male candidates as more competent than females to legislate on issues of military crises, crime, the economy and agriculture; voters perceive female candidates as having expertise when the issues are gender equity, education, health care and poverty.
Generally speaking the people interviewed had no opinion vis-a-vis foreign policy. "Foreign what?" was the general response.
Ahhh, The Green Man is in a mischievous mood this morning and what better science related topic to benefit from The Green Man's distorted view of the world than Viagra.
It is fair to say when you are using the terms "performance anxiety" and "man" in the same sentence then it is almost always in reference to their bedroom antics. It would be a brave man who claimed that this had never been a problem and so it was that the male 50% of the population of the developed world breathed a sigh of relief with the advent of this range of wonder drugs, Viagra, Levitra and Cialis. Not that they all use them of course but is nice to know they are there, just in case.
When Viagra was first released it was marketed as a chemical support for those men of later years who were having problems in the downstairs department. This was a serious marketing oversight since it seems that the demographic that is embracing biotechnologies gift to men, and indirectly women, is the 18-45 year old man. Suddenly, your average young man's staying power is in the same ballpark as those characters in the Mills and Boon romance novels. Usage rates by this group of Viagra alone increased 31% during the 1998-2002 period and it is still growing. Older men are still the biggest users but not for much longer probably.
In 2002 in America more than five million men claimed Viagra on their medical benefits scheme. This represented 1.4% of the adult male population. (Presumably many more happily forked out for it out of their own pocket.)
Sadly economic rationalism has made it into the bedroom and the men who manage the large American Health Plans, instead of being happy for the increased performance that Viagra is delivering to their brothers are having their own performance anxiety. This time over the size of their performance bonuses as the supply of these drugs eats into the overall profitability of the health funds.
Already concerned with the impact Viagra has had on their pharmacy budgets, health plan sponsors now face the prospect of increased use among a younger, healthier generation of patients
Says Dr Tom Delate who conducted the research. Dr Tom works for Express Scripts, one of the largest pharmacy groups in the US who are laughing all the way to the bedroom, errr bank.
It sometimes takes an academic years of meticulous research to stumble of the blindingly obvious particularly if that academic is one of the beige cardiganed variety.
The gentleman who is pictured on the right is David Blanchflower who has recklessly cast aside his beige cardigan in response to a barmy Dartmouth afternoon. He is an economist with Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs and he has had an epiphany. David says
There's a growing body of research that is finding that more income does not necessarily correlate to increased happiness. We are learning that things like employment, marriage and good health contribute to happiness more directly. This report makes it clear that economic policies should not be divorced from social and health policies.
Wow, fancy that!
This flash of insight has arisen through his study of Scotland where he found that, although they are now significantly wealthier, the Scots enjoy little satisfaction in life and endure a variety of health problems.
Scots have high rates of obesity, AIDS, coronary disease, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, multiple sclerosis and asthma, for example. The rate of diabetes among people in Scotland younger than 15 is one of the highest in the world. Furthermore, more people in Scotland below retirement age were inactive (not working) due to sickness or disability than in the UK as a whole.
The problem, of course, is that in todays economic rationalist environment everything must be assigned a monetary value before it can be considered.
Here is the news flash, money means virtually nothing and being wealthier than you are now means nothing. Before you start protesting that you are poor consider that you have access to the internet and are literate enough to read The Green Man. This in itself means that you are one of the wealthier of the earths occupants.
How closely are we tied to our primative relatives? We might not think too much but there are pointers everywhere to the fact that we have not changed all that much in the last 50,000 years. One particularly unpleasant artifact of our primitive selves in the increase in risk of violence from their partners that women experience when they are pregnant. Sadly as many as 40% of women experience violence from their partner during pregnancy and for many this is the first time their partner has been violent.
For most women this is immensely confusing and upsetting. At this time where, more than at other times, they feel that they can command some degree of protection and safety from their partners they are the most vulnerable.
Rebecca L. Burch and Gordon G. Gallup Jr., in the current edition of Journal of Family Violence suggest that this phenonemon harks back to our most primitive of emotions. They say
Women endure pregnancy and childbirth, and as a result are certain of their relationship to offspring. However, because of internal fertilization men can rarely be certain that their children are actually their own. Unless the man consistently monitors his partner, or isolates her from other men, there is always a possibility, because of rape or infidelity, that the children she bears are not his.
This uncertainty can eat at the insecure man. Doubts of his paternity fester in his mind and he starts to see innocent and harmless events through the distorted lens of his jealousy.
the pregnancy, instead of serving as a marker of his own reproductive fitness, raises doubts about paternity and suspicions of infidelity. A man who thought he had reason to question his partner’s fidelity would also be more inclined not to invest in and possibly neglect the child once it is born, or even physically or psychologically abuse that child. In fact, some accounts taken from battered pregnant women suggest that their partner suspected that he was not the child’s father, regardless of actual paternity
All of this harks back to our primal days when survival of your genes was such a risky business that wasting precious effort in raising the fruits of another man's loins was completely intolerable.
Tut tutting and saying how terrible it all is or denying our animal past does nothing to help protect women. Understanding the risks that they face from their male partners at this most vulnerable time is critical for their wellbeing.
If you wish to read more on this fascinating and somewhat disturbing subject you can find the full article here but be aware you will need to pay $25 to read it.
A simple review of statistics from the Family Court in Australia will show the overwhelming bias against men when it comes to access and custody of children following divorce.
The Attorney General, Phillip Ruddock said
we will be amending the Family Law Act to refer to the need of both parents to have a meaningful involvement in their childrens' lives and the children have a right to spend time on a regular basis with both of them
How good is that? Sometimes the government gets it right. For too long many men in Australia have had cause only to grieve at the loss of their children. In certain instances children are left with abusive and neglectful mothers and the fathers can only watch, helpless, as their childrens lives are destroyed.
How would you feel if your son or daughter, who you loved more than life itself, was living with their mother who was drug addicted or psychotic and the law prevented you from providing your child with even temporary respite from the nightmare of their existence? This is the reality for some fathers. In some of these case the mothers falsely accuse the father of sexual abuse to protect their own position. Sadly the courts usually choose to believe the mother over the father. Not to put too fine a point on it but men are suiciding because they feel so helpless and discriminated against.
Now men who desparately want to care for their children have the support of the government.
Well that is the reaction of many Australian men to the mere suggestion that they attend group therapy. The men of America, it appears, have a remarkably similar regard for Group Therapy. Not only that, it just doesn't work for many men.
Dr. Anthony Joyce, a psychologist in the University of Alberta Department of Psychiatry has been looking at the role of gender in the efficacy of short term group therapy to treat complicated grief, where a person is unable to come to terms with the loss of a significant other and, in addition, are experiencing problems in work or social functioning. He finds that, generally speaking, men hate short term group therapy and they do not benefit from the supportive environment that it provides.
It seems obvious to The Green Man that men handle grief in a significantly different way to women and the assumption that they will benefit from sharing their experiences with other persons going through a similar process will be of benefit is just that, an assumption. For many men, the appropriate course of action is to "continue as normal" whilst they take time to assimilate what has happened to them. Placing a man who has been taught that he must be "the strong one" in a situation where people are sharing their grief may make him feel that he has to absorb their grief as well as his own.
The study shows that a "one size fits all" approach to helping people cope with grief is simply not appropriate. Many men have needs that are simply not catered for when adopting a female centric approach.
Those of the readership of The Green Man who are deeply religious, which a number are, can draw some comfort from the fact that this is less likely to be a problem for you than for most. Holly Prigerson and Michelle J. Pearce of Yale University have been researching the physical and psychological impacts of grief on wellbeing and have found that elderly people whose religious beliefs help them cope with the loss of a loved one seem to stay healthier than those who don't look to spiritual forces for support. They say
Despite the expectation that health would decline given the documented health risks associated with bereavement, bereaved individuals who relied more heavily on religion to cope with their loss did not experience a significant increase in health problems
For any of the readership who are not too ashamed to own up to being accountants that translates to $180 million savings in supportive health care services.
It is interesting to speculate why this might be so.
- belief in afterlife, i.e. the person is not really dead
- deterministic attitude, i.e. it was God's will
- better support network amongst the congregation than non-church goers
- access to pastoral care
all spring to mind as being contributing factors.
Finally, the Birtish Medical Journal reports that relatives of cancer patients who have been euthenased experience less grief than those of patients who have died naturally. The article suggests
Possible explanations for less grief symptoms among the family and friends of patients who died by euthanasia include the opportunity to say goodbye, being more prepared for the way and day of the imminent death, and being able to talk openly about death
It seems to The Green Man that a couple of these explanations can also be applied to natural deaths, if we have the care and enthusiasm to do so.
Read more on Dr. Anthony's work on Group Therapy here.
Read more on the role of religion here.
Read more of the BMJ findings here.
Why do men go into politics? The answer for the majority is power. They cannot earn as much as in the private sector; they have to make personal sacrifices; they work horrendous hours; they spend long periods away from home; they subject themselves to incredibly stressful lives; all for power. It is not for most men, most men do not have the drive and are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to attain power but for those who do it is intoxicating. It harks back to our primal beginings and one of the things that inevitably accompanies power is women.
That is not to say that these men necessarily have sex with all the women that they acquire, although it is not hard to believe that it is a fringe benefit that many avail themselves of. The power component of having these women comes from possessing their commitment, possessing their loyalty, as much as is possible these days, possessing them.
I am sure that there are a number of feminists in the readership who are repulsed by the whole concept but it is as old as the human race and it appeals to men at a primal level.
The Green Man was watched "Love Actually" on the weekend which was a passable enough DVD to fill in a cold, wet Saturday evening with the family. Interestingly, in spite of the fact that the film was aimed clearly at the female demographic, it provided an excellent demonstration of this very phenonemon. (Which is what got The Green Man thinking about it.) The Hugh Grant character is the, just appointed, Prime Minister of England. He receives a visit from the President of America. He is taking a very non-confrontionalist approach to the contact. When considering relatively abstract issues such as defence policy and trade relations he was bowing to the American's will.
Later, he enters a room to find the US President inappropriately close to one of his aides and whispering in her ear. The US President has violated the PMs power by approaching one of his women. The PMs response is one that is as old as history. She gets dumped and is only reinstated when she redeclares her allegiance. Further, at a press conference, the PM lays into the American President. He could not tolerate such a concrete violation of his power.
This is just fiction of course but it is so credible because it so accurately depicts, in a modern context, our ancestor's primal experience. It rings true because the Prime Minister displays a set of behaviours that are characteristic of the powerful males of many species, including our own.
The Green Man as icon is, of course, green. The Green Man as blog author has a skin colour that reflects his ancestoral links to northern Scotland, that is, white. One of lifes little injustices is that colourful clothes do not go well with such a pallid complexion. Sadly they just look inappropriate and pathetic. On a dark skin however they look great. Any wonder that Africans like such colourful attire, it looks so good on them. This propesity for colour is now being utilised by South Africa to address it's raising AIDS crisis, they releasing new colourful condoms.
This is the brain child of South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. She says
We realised that we needed to change the way we market government condoms to maximise their impact. Condoms should not only be a necessity but should be seen as sexy and part of fun.
This is much better than her last approach which was to advocate a diet of beetroot, spinach, garlic and olive oil.
The Age reports that the single greatest risk factor associated with death, disease and disability for younger Victorian women is voilence at the hands of men. A pretty shameful claim to fame.
Male violence is a contributing factor to suicide, depression, anxiety, alcohol, tobacco and drug use, sexually transmitted disease, cervical cancer, physical injuries and eating disorders in women.
10% of deaths of women in the 15-44 age group were attributable to domestic violence. Of course not all violence is of the physical kind, psychological abuse can be equally devastating. It is no point trying to justify behaviour that is threatening or abusive to your partner. There are no circumstances where it is justifiable, none! If you are an abusive man then you are denying everyone in your family, including yourself, a quality life. The good news is that you can fix your problem and improve the quality of your life and the lives of your family but you probably can't do it by yourself.
Here are some contact details
In Australia contact Mens Referral Service on 9428 2899 or 1800 065 973 noon to 9pm Monday to Friday.
In the UK contact Respect on 020 8563 8523
In the US contact The Nonviolence Alliance on 1.860.347.8220
In Canada contact Men For Change
If you are not from one of these countries I suggest you hunt the net, which is where I found these links, I am sure you can find something if you try hard enough. Here is Web Ring" on ending violence, it might be a good place to start.
In Australia it is the Queen's Birthday holiday today. Happy Birthday your royal something or other. Not that it actually is her birthday but who cares it is a holiday and that is what is important. Anyway thinking of Her Majesty naturally leads to thoughts of sperm. (I know, I know it is deeply Fruedian but humour me it is an interesting topic)
Sperm counts have been declining for some time now in Western Countries. We know this because IVF technology has been around for some time. New Scientist reported in January that British fertility had declined 29% in the last 12 years. This trend is also seen in testicle size. In testicles, big is better. Bigger testicles may limit your career as a champion horse rider but boy can they produce sperm.
Nature suggests that this is a result of increasing polutants in our environment. In particular some pesticides mimic the female hormone oestrogen. It is a hormone to strike fear into the testicles of every red blooded man. There has been talk of these pollutants causing a decrease in testicle size in new born babies.
A baby born with two good testicles is well off for fertility in later lifeSays Niels Skakkebaek of University of Copenhagen, Denmark but presumably only if you are a male. Not only that, the research shows that in mature males sperm come out "under cooked" when developing in a environment containing these oestrogen mimicing chemicals. These sperm, whilst appearing to swim OK, are unable to penetrate the egg to fertilise it.
Men are such delicate creatures, particularly in the genital department. There are so many things that can bugger up those little swimmers.
Testicular Exposure to Overheating - If you are planning on being fertile forget the sauna and the spa, and a kilt is not such a bad idea either, particularly if worn traditionally, sans underwear
Substance Abuse - Drink alcohol to your hearts content but steer clear of cocaine and marijuana they interfer with chemical receptors in in the sperm making them unable to penetrate the egg
Smoking - In part because it impairs the motility of the sperm, that is how well they swim, and in part because it makes you completely unattractive to your modern non-smoking woman.
Malnutrition - Diets deficient in vitamin C, selenium, zinc, and folate can cause fertility problems. Oysters are The Green Man's method of choice for ensuring at least a couple of these are in ample supply.
Obesity - There is some evidence that this affects fertility but, like smoking, it also interfers with your chances of having someone to be fertile with.
Bicycling - Pack that bicycle away, particularly the mountain bike. Like horse riding it is a common cause of infertility that has arisen from damage to the testicles and surrounding structures.
One could also suspect that pollutants have had some part to play in the 300% increase in testicular cancer that has occured over the last 50 years. 
So how do you detect testicular cancer? The same way as breast cancer, of course, you feel for it and if you think it is hard convincing women about the importance of breast examination then think about the problem of encouraging men to seek a checkup.
We are facing a future where increasing numbers of men are infertile, currently the rate stands at about one in twenty, raising the question of whether monogamy is a viable approach to the perpetuation of the human species into the future. Fortunately, despite what some of us like to think, humans have shown no particular propensity for monogamy in the past with an estimated one in ten children not being sired by the man who believes he is the father so we are probably OK.
Much has been made, in a negative sense, of the fact that men, in general, have a superior ability to control their emotions. Certainly many men take this ability to the extreme and end up living in an emotional wasteland which is neither healthy or fulfilling as a method of living your life. However, simply because many men choose to abuse this ability by over using it does not make the ability a liability per se.
Much humor has been had at the expense of the "new-age man" who effuses and indulges his emotions. This humor arises out of our discomfort because this man is not behaving in a way that we are used to and new research by George Bonanno of Columbia University's Teachers College points to the fact that it is equally disfunctional. Men, and women for that matter, who are able and do control the expression of their emotions, delaying the expression to an appropriate time, are more well balanced than those at either end of the scale.
The message is that it is often desirable to contain your feelings provided that, at some more appropriate time, you are empowered to let fly and emote to your hearts content.
Those of you who subscribe to Psychological Science can check out the July issue for more information, the rest of you will just have to trust The Green Man (an inherently risky thing to do).
Masters School in New York has taken an interesting approach to tackling the differing learning styles that boys and girls have during puberty. Whilst the school runs co-educational classes in the early and later years, for the ages 11 to 16 students are segregated into single sex classes.
Traditional feminist theory suggests that girls fare better in a single sex classroom environment and the corrollary is, in fact, also true, so do boys. A real problem for boys at this age is that firstly girls mature earlier and secondly they have superior interpersonal skills. This means that your average boy is behind the eight ball when it comes to humanities type subjects.
Removal of girls from the classroom situation grants boys the time and space to develop skills in the elucidation of ideas without being swamped by the girls. It also enables them to learn in an manner that suits boys, which is typically less structured and has a higher physical component.
Too long have we neglected the needs of boys in schools because their needs are not as organisationally convenient as those of girls. It is good to see at least some schools taking the initiative in addressing this problem.
Alec Millar writes in "Journey to the Stone Country"
I knew the Australian outback only from one small black-and-white photograph that I had seen by the light of an oil lamp in the kitchen of the Exmoor farm labourer with whom I lived. . . . One of the photographs in the book was of a group of stockmen lounging in the shade of a low veranda, gazing out at the landscape before them.
What was it in this photograph that so intrigued Alex Millar that he came half way round the world to try and capture it for himself. Later he writes
In the 50 years since I saw my first photgraph of the Australian outback, those stockmen have not moved. Unlike me, they dwell in a place beyond time, beyond the reach of homeland. .. No sound or sign has broken the rapt contemplation of those stockmen. . . . the image of those stockmen in that photograph represents for me the deepest longings of the human heart; those silent figures are still the prophets of my imagination.
The Green Man knows what Alex saw in these men, it is the same thing every man is looking for, a group of men with whom he is at one. What Alex saw in the photo, and later discovered for himself, were a group of men that belonged to their environment and to each other. These men had a rare gift and Alex perceived it in that black and white photograph half a world away. Later, he was privileged to experience it first hand in the time he spent with them.
All men have a deep need to belong, to connect with other men in a meaningful way. It is a need that many attempt to fulfill, and fail, through belonging to church, sporting clubs or to rotary and other such organisations. They fail because these organisations are not structured to facilitate deep male companionship. They do not give men an opportunity to, in an unhurried and unforced way, get to know one another, to share their hopes, joys, fears and insecurities without the taint of agression or competition.
Life is about being the most fulfilled that you can be and you can't do that without the support and deep friendship of other men. If you live in Mebourne and are interested in participating in such a group, contact The Green Man.
If you are engaged to be married then you are probably pretty excited about the whole thing, not the least of which being the anticipation of wedded bliss with, your soon to be, other half.
I imagine you think that you are a perfect match but the reality is that you are not. Even if you have been living together the situation will change once you are married. There are a whole lot of expectations that people have of their spouse that they may not have of them when they are simply living together.
I also imagine that you have a, not unreasonable, goal of being happy in your married life. Well the unsurprising news from a Ohio State University is that the more accurate your knowledge of partners strengths and weaknesses is prior to the marriage the happier you will be in your marriage.
Sure, it may make you happy in the short-run to think your spouse is better than he or she actually is, but if the reality doesn’t match the image, eventually your satisfaction is going to decline.
So says James McNulty, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus.
You may think that this is all very obvious, particularly if you have been married for some time, but the study did turn up some interesting anomolies. Those people with excellent relationship skills but low expections for their marriage end up fulfilling their expectations. The idea that their excellent relationship skills might somehow counteract their low expectations did not prove to be valid. James suggests that, because they had a low expectation, they did not put the effort into utilising their relationship skills.
In conclusion James finds that those who have poor relationship skills and low expectations end up with a crap marriage but at least they were not disappointed. It was what they expected anyway.
A group of men sit in an afternoon seminar, a part of a larger conference on the family. Women have been asked not to attend this meeting. The atmosphere in the room is different to the other seminars of the day - slightly more sombre, a little charged. A middle-aged woman who is lost puts her head in the door, immediately senses the atmosphere, mumbles an apology and disapperears.It's my job to lead this seminar, I sit quietly, getting comforable with the room, settling down into my body. I have started thousands of seminars and talks, and know not to disperse my own energy trying too hard to be "friendly".
When the time comes, I begin to speak and the group slowly warms up. Unlike the vitality and the slight sense of indignation you will find at a Women's Movement meeting, in a men's group there is great reserve, even fear. This is lightened at little by banter and warmth from some of the older, more self-reliant men. As a forty year old man, I stand midway - no longer brash or superficially confident, not too much in love with the sound of my own voice. I have experienced enough loss and shame. I've learned respect for pain and endurance - which only makes me respectful for those who have gone further....
We talk first about what is not working - rifts with fathers, painful experiences in marriage, parenthood, health. The invitation is for men to tell part of their experience and simply listen to each other. As they speak, quietly and simply, eyes fill up and men begin to cry....
There is a pressure inside men which has been building up for a very long time. It's nothing complicated - Just "How is it going?" Yet this kind of conversation does not happen at the pub or the sporting club, or the Rotary or Church meeting. So the opportunity for a very natural and necessary part of men's soul development is missing from our lives. Imagine how tense women would become if they could never talk to other women. Understanding this, perhaps men's tension and numbness makes more sense. We've held back from each other for so long.
Steve Biddulph - Manhood
Men pride themselves as go-getters, having initiative and being capable of achievement. Set yourself a goal to find such a group of men and join it. Choose to live a richer and more fulfilled life.
If you are in the northern suburbs of Melbourne I will be starting a new group in a month or so. If you are an adult male of any age you are welcome to join, to share and to grow. Email me, or leave a comment, and I will make sure you know when and where it will be starting. (you will need to edit the email address before you send it.)
The Green Man has a perfect body, well perfect for me anyway because it is keeping me out of the grave. It works well enough and I see no particular reason to try and exact massive, potentially damaging, changes to it.
Sadly not everyone has this opinion of his or her body. It has been estimated that at any point in time 65% of teenage girls are dieting, all of them skating close to the edge of the slippery slope that is anorexia nervosa. They all want to be skinny like the models in the women’s magazines. They may start out dieting because they feel that they are not attractive to boys but a quick flick to a porn site, I wont include a link but I am sure you can find one if you try, will show you what types of females males are interested in, basically any type as long as they are young and healthy and, of course, very skinny females do not look healthy. That’s the irony, they destroy the very thing they profess to be trying to achieve.
Like many aspects of adolescence the situation is different for boys. Boys don’t want to take weight off, they want to put it on, in the form of muscle. They are equally vulnerable but to a different thing. For teenage boys it is drug abuse in the form of anabolic steroids that is the big danger. The ABC reports that a study showed 11% of US boys were using performance enhancing or muscle developing drugs. Just like the girls, Scientific American reports that these boys are modelling themselves on unrealistic images of masculine bodies shown in magazines.
In both cases the bodily abuse is often a pointer to deeper and more profound psychological problems, in many cases arising from earlier abuse or neglect as a child.
In the spirit of promoting a healthier approach to body image today is International No Diet Day. A day to abandon that ridiculous diet that you are on that is never going to be successful in the long term because
1. It is not balanced and therefore unsustainable. Your body will simply compensate for any false gains when you finish it anyway
2. It will not change you basic body shape unless you do great damage to yourself (aka anorexia nervosa)
Adopt a healthier lifestyle and choose to be happy with however you look, that is The Green Mans advice for today.
I was looking at my son the other day, when he had no shirt on. He has a scar about 10cm (4inches) long on his shoulder. He dislocated it playing football and the scar is the result of the operation to reattach ligaments, that sort of thing.
A scar is a physical record of earlier pain that has made us the complex and, hopefully, balanced individual that we are today. Pain is integral to life and we all experience it. It is an interesting phenonemon that, largely through medical advances, we have come to see pain as completely negative. This was not always the case. Primitive cultures often viewed pain as not only unavoidable but also a path to a more complete person. It was integral to so many initiation ceremonies across the world that it is likely that it vested something in a young man that they would have had difficulting gaining without it, generalised perhaps as "maturity".
Of course pain does not only arise from physical discomfort. Emotional pain has, perhaps, an even more profound impact on our sense of completeness as a human being. Think back to your first romantic disaster. Would you want to go back to how you were then, I certainly would not. I am much more comfortable with who I am now.
There are two things to take from this:
1. The pain that you have experienced in your life is part of who you are. Discarding it is neither possible or desirable. It gives you balance, enables you to empathise and provides a contrast that enables your joyous moments to shine in their true brilliance.
2. Pain is something that you cannot protect your children against and if you could you would deny them their humanity. As they become capable of understanding, teaching them of the inevitability of pain in their lives is an important part of your role as a parent.
Like everything else your response to the pain you experience is your choice. You can choose to be scared of it and repress your memories of prior painful incidents or you can choose to accept it and embrace it as an inevitable and essential part of life and who you are. I choose the latter.
With thanks to Richard Hall at Bene Diction Blogs On who got me thinking about the topic. Oh, and, unlike Richard, on the matter of beer, I discovered half a dozen bottles of 10-year old home brewed stout the other day, which were surprisingly drinkable.
time-poor parents, lack of ritual and tradition, spiritual anorexia, mixed media messages (be sexy - but be good), and higher expectations in terms of material possessions, academic performance and career choices, and the adolescents of 2004 are arguably the most vulnerable generation Australia has ever seen.
These are the words of Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, an adolescent psychologist at the Albert Road Centre for Health, from an interesting and thought provoking article in The Age a couple of days ago. If you have an adolescent or younger child then it will prove to be a good investment of 5 minutes to read it.
Pru Goward, the Australian federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, presented a paper last night reflecting on the "men's movement" and, from what I can gather from the edited extract in The Age is dumping on it as a group of men who are potentially
"driven by anger and sadness for what has been lost, rather than hunger for a better future".
To paraphrase, that the men's movement is about returning to "the good old days" where women were subservient and men ruled the world. I think she has missed the point completely, although there are undoubtedly men's groups around that fall into that category.
The reality was that "the good old days" were not that great for men either. On the surface they had power but as Henry Thureaux succinctly put it over one hundred years ago
Most men live lives of quiet desparation
The men's movement has nothing to do with women, or with returning to "the good old days". In Australia and, from what I can gather, Canada, USA and England, the men's movement is about helping men free themselves from the destructive expectations that society puts on them.
The enlightened young men that Pru Goward refers to in her article are, sadly, still the minority. Australian men are still ultimately expected to be the breadwinners in the household. They are still taught that it is a sign of weakness to cry, or show any emotions except "happy" and "angry". They still believe that it is a sign of weakness to visit a doctor or take the medication that is prescribed if you do. Their health is still largely ignored by medical research and any funding of such is limited at best. None of this has anything to do with women, except in enlisting their support as mothers and wives to assist in important social change.
The men's movement is not interested in turning back the clock, nor is it interested subjugating women. It is solely concerned with the psychological and physiological well-being of men. Pru Goward may like to turn her attention to discriminations that exist against men in our society because they do exist, particularly in the area of health.
The British Medical Journal reports that Dr Michael Leitzmann of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland has been examining the association between ejaculation frequency (including sexual intercourse, nocturnal emission, and masturbation) and the risk of prostate cancer. He found that most categories of ejaculation frequency were unrelated to risk of prostate cancer. However, high frequency was related to decreased risk of total prostate cancer.
The Green Man demonstrates a rare example of restraint. There is so much good satirical material here, it is a shame it is such an important subject.
It will do this country no good if we spend the next decade hand-wringing and clinging to misplaced, but well-guided ideological purity; if we produce a generation of young men who are disengaged, who are disillusioned and who feel ill prepared for the future,
thus spake Brendon Nelson, the Minister for Education in the Australian federal parliament. He was referring to an initiative of the government to increase the number of male teachers in our schools, particularly at the primary level. Finally, it seems that the lack of decent role models for our young boys is being recognised.
Think about it. When a boy is working out how to "be a man" who can he model himself on. He may rarely see his father who is at work most of the time, and the other men he sees are sporting heros and television characters. Whilst our sporting heros are real people their presentation in the media is essentially two dimensional as of course are television characters.
The anti descrimination act is being modified to allow schools to selectively recruit male teachers. Sadly the opposition have indicated that they will not support the amendment. They say
The evidence shows the real barriers to men becoming teachers and staying in our primary schools are pay, career structure and status compared with other professions
they may be correct and more should probably be done but it is disappointing that they are choosing to block the small step forward that is being taken.
Completely missing the point, women's groups have criticised the move saying there is so much pro-male bias in society that more is not needed. This is not about benefiting men it is about raising our boys to be caring and well balanced men. If feminism does not see this as a noble objective then it has completely lost the plot.
Read more in The Age.
Does this look like the face of a caring, compassionate man? It is! He is the leader of the Australian Labor Party in the Australian Federal parliament and he appears to have recognised the crisis facing Australian males. In a recent press club speech he said
Our boys are suffering from a crisis of masculinity. . . We need to give our boys a new centre to their lives, one grounded in community support and mentoring
Although the welfare of men is typically a taboo subject in politics, this is perhaps not as surprising as it may at first seem. Mr Latham has been forced to confront and conquer the demons with respect to his own masculinity. Some years ago he was diagnosed with testicular cancer and had to have one testicle removed as part of the treatment.
Compare this with John Howard who, as far as can be determined from media reports, is as caught up in the negative and destructive masculine culture as most Australian males. His apparent addition to power has caused him, like most parliamentarians, to abandon any real effort in being a father to his children. He is now so addicted to the power that any chance of him gracefully handing over to his successors has evaporated long ago.
There are of course many issues to consider when choosing which party to vote for in the forth coming election but the mature and balanced self image that Mr Latham clearly possesses must speak in his favour. Compare this with the immature behaviour of the senior Liberal minister Tony Abbott who felt it was appropriate to use parliamentary privelege to accuse Mr Latham of being less of a man because he now only possessed one testicle.
Charles Crawford is an evolutionary psychologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada and he has an interest in teenage girls. No not that sort of interest! He is interested in the catty remarks they make about one another, particularly in respect to physical appearance.
Studies by Charles and by Maryanne Fisher of York University in Toronto indicate that whilst competition amongst men tends to focus more on aggression or displays of wealth or physical fitness, women's competition tends to focus on physical beauty. Yes, hard as it is to imagine in todays enlightened feminist utopia, there are still cat fights amongst teenage girls and it is physcial appearance that is the weapon of choice.
What is more it appears that they are at their worst when the girls are in a fertile period of their monthly cycle. Asked to rate the physical beauty of other girls, girls consistently rated them lower when they were fertile compared with when they were not.
You can read more in Nature here.
It spite of feminists claims to the contrary it has been know for some time that woman are less able to cope with stress and trauma than men are. Stress-related mental illnesses occurs at least twice as often in women as it does in men. Becca Shansky, a graduate student in neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine has found that, unsurprisingly, this is probably due to estrogen, the hormone responsible femaleness.
Adverse reaction to stress was measured by increasing memory impairment. She found that females susceptibility to stress matched the cyclical nature of estrogen levels within the body. As estrogen levels peaked so did the female's impairment when placed in mildly stressful situations. Males on the other hand showed no such impairment.
Extremely stressful situations induced memory impairment in both sexes.
Here are some British sperm happily seeking an egg. They are smiling as they wriggle their way across the petrie dish in the IVF lab, but almost all are doomed to failure. With a bit of luck one will succeed, fertilizing an egg and going on the form a human being.
Give it about 18 years and the person that arose from that serrendipidous moment when one little wriggler climbed the sperm equivalent of Mt Everest will start wondering about the half of their genetic inheritance they know nothing about, the male sperm donor who is their biological father. New laws in England mean that they can now legally find out who that man was.
"I firmly believe donor-conceived people have a right to information about their genetic origins that is currently denied them, including the identity of their donor. There is a growing body of opinion, which I agree with, that donor-conceived people should not be treated so differently from adopted people. Today's new regulations will align their positions,"
British Health Minister, Melanie Johnson told the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) Conference in London. She said, in drafting the legislation, that the rights of the donor conceived child were considered to be paramount.
There are other rights at stake here of course, those of the donor and of the couple that were the fortunate recipients of the sperm but The Green Man wholehearted supports the right of a child to find and make contact with its biological father.
He/she may be in for a bit of a let down if they do discover and meet their father. Particularly in the early days of IVF, sperm donorship was approached with a degree of flippancy that is not present today, donors were often medical students coopted in by their lecturers who were conducting the research. Not all of these men will be happy to see the results of some light hearted student escapade arrive on their doorstep. It is to be hoped that an IVF child and it's environmental parents are well counselled and supported during this process.
Still The Green Man believes it is important to know and understand your biological father. The Green Man wishes them luck in their search and hopes that they are acknowledged and greeted warmly by their father should they find him.
Image courtesy of Dave Henniker
Actually it is really just begining but it is the conclusion of Manhood week. I hope those of you who stuck with it for the week feel that you have had an opportunity to review how you are living your lives from a slightly different perspective from the one you normally take. Some of you will have found some things during the week that challenge the safe facade that you have built for yourself. Take heart in the fact that it has been challenging for me as well. I have been in tears writing at least one of the pieces.
It takes a great deal of courage to question some of the fundamental tenets by which we define ourselves as men but, like all things that require great courage, the rewards are great too.
Please do not live your life in such a manner that, at its inevitable conclusion, you think to yourself, "Is that all there is?" Money does not matter, pride does not matter, the respect of macho louts does not matter, the only thing that matters is that you became the best man you could possibly become and that you connected with men and women in your life; that you loved them openly and unconditionally and received and acknowleged their love graciously.
Good luck on your journey and remember that when you arrive at a fork in the path it is always a good idea to take the path less travelled.
Obviously The Green Man will continue to post on men's issues but it will drop back to into the eclectic mix of topics that this the usual style of The Green Man.
We are at the final stage of the intellectual journey towards a more fulfilling and rewarding life as a man. Your real journey, should you embrace the task, will probably take you a number of years. You don't rid yourself of a lifetime of negative conditioning overnight.
The final stage in the journey is to gather some of the real friends you have developed on the way and go wild, in the truest sense of the word. Head off into the wilderness, on foot and carrying those things you need to survive, if you are capable. Go fishing and hunting, even if it is with a camera. Enjoy the companionship and bonding that arises amongst a group of men when they are out in the wilderness together, relying on one another, supporting one another.
As Walt Whitman so elegantly put it.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
It is time for you to find a suitable mountain top or precipice give air to your barbaric yawp. It is a scream of sheer exhilaration and triumph. Standing on a summit surveying the wilderness laid out before your feet you are a master of the universe, revel in your maleness.
On second thoughts, bugger waiting till the end of your journey, find every opportunity to be wild. Men are not built to sit at desks and worry; men are built to be immersed in wilderness.
The image is of the Routeburn Track in the South Island of New Zealand. One of the greatest wilderness walks in the world in The Green Man's not so humble opinion.
Addendum: (in response to Jonathans comment)
Those of you not acustomed to the traditions of bushwalking may be unaware of the fact that remaining clothed seems of far less importance to bushwalkers than most, swimming costumes for example are unheard of.
You could speculate that it arrises because you are
1. with people that you know and trust and
2. enjoying the privacy of being the only people for many miles.
Skinny dipping with your group in a mountain lake or on a deserted beach is one of the undeniable pleasures of going wild.
It is a fact of life that most of us need to earn money on which to live. That being said there are ways of earning your money that you know, in your heart are worthless, appologies to any stockbrokers amongst the readership, but your profession springs to mind.
You spend at least half your waking life at work. If, in your heart, you know that you are not doing what men have traditionally done, which is contribute to the wellbeing and support of the community in which they live, then it is time to find a job where you do.
There is a reason that people volunteer their time to community service have better psychological and physical wellbeing. It is because they feel good about themselves. You have an opportunity to do good and earn money at the same time, it is simply a matter of finding the correct job.
It is hard to overstate the importance of this. It is fundamental to your wellbeing that you are contributing to the wellbeing of your society and I am afraid trading in shares just doen't cut the mustard. Stop kidding yourself and look seriously at how you are spending your life. If you are not spending it in a meaningful and fulfilling way then the time to change is now.
You have the potential to be a great man but each day that you spend in a job that you know does not contribute to the greater wellbeing of your community diminishes it.
Here is another small vingette for you to consider, it is real not fictional.
I was attending the awards presentations at the local junior football club, I was there because I consented to my son playing for them. The "best and fairest" is the premium award in Australian Rules Football and the winner for the under-17s was announced. The recipient went up to the podium, accepted the award, and said, without a smile, "Yeah, err thanks. Oh and thanks to the coach" and makes his way back to his seat.
This is the most prestigous award that this boy could receive and, by 16, the club had taught him so effectively that he feels it is inappropriate and a sign of weakness to look happy or excited at receiving it. What are these men teaching our boys?
I had grave doubts about the wisdom of allowing my son to associate with such a disfunctional group. I spoke to him about it and, although I let him stay, I was never really comfortable with it from then on. It is something that one must be vigilant about when raising a son.
Let us cast our mind back to one of the scenarios that I outlined in the post on Monday. Your son is dead, he commited suicide and you had no idea there was even a problem. You are crippled with grief, guilt, self-doubt and fear that your whole life is a failure. You have a group of men that you regard as "friends". You have known them for years and at the pub great tales are told about previous conquests, young passing females are compared in a ribald fashion accompanied by much laughter, the sport that is in season is discussed with much intensity. It would be a completely fabricated story if I suggested that, in your time of emotional need, you approached these men for support. They wouldn't give it, of course, they have no idea how to, but you would know better than to even approach them. It would be a gross breach of the "male code of silence" on matters emotional and you would never do it.
It is about this time that you realise that, even though you have stacks of male friends, you are completely emotionally alone in the world. There is not a sinlge man in the world who you know that you can turn to for support in your time of greatest need. Sounds far fetched? Then you are probably a woman reading this because men know that, for most men, it is the reality. Even those men who are not in this perilous boat recognise that it is the reality for most men.
If you are a man, here is a test. Picture yourself in a state of utter grief being held and comforted by another man as you cried your heart out. Do you have a male friend who would be comfortable playing that role for you? For the most part the answer is emphatically "No". Not that it matters at one level because most men would never be capable of expressing their emotions to that extent anyway. Most men live in a world of emotional black and white, happy and angry are the only two emotions they allow themselves.
So you consider yourself a go getter, an acheiver? Well acheive this. Search out and establish friendships with some real men who are further down the path to becoming complete men than you are. Men who understand that it is not a sign of weakness to grieve, to be excited, to be scared, to be uncertain, to be apprehensive; men who do not have to compete with you or belittle you to prop up their own fragile egos. They are out there and you can find them if you look.
Here are 7 steps to male friendship (courtesy of Steve Biddulph)
1. Weed out any kind of competition from your friendships beyond the playful kind.
2. Stop trying to prove you are a man. Just be one.
3. Be affectionate. Give straight compliments from time to time and mean them.
4. Listen to your friends problems without trying to minimise them. Help your friends find their own solution instead of providing advice.
5. Join a men's group where men talk about their real lives and discuss the important things as well as the trivial.
6. Don't be afraid of grief, despite what you have been taught, it is a natural emotion for men too and not a sign of weakness to experience it.
7. Have fun with other men. Be noisy, wild and safe. Be proud of being a vibrant human male.
In primitive and agrarian societies men did work that a boy could understand. From a relatively early age boys accompany men and assist them with tasks concerned with the wellbeing of the tribe/extended family. During these periods boys get an opportunity to learn through observation and imitation what it is to be a man, how to behave, how to interact with other men. If your son sees you only for a brief period each night when you are tired from a stressful day where is your son learning how to be a man. The simple answer is the television and from older boys who learnt it themselves from other boys in an extended game of "chinese whispers"
Let your child choose what they usually watch on TV and take some time to cast a critical eye over the father images that are portrayed on these shows. Is the kind of father that is portrayed the kind of father you want your son to become or your daughter's husband to be.
The simple fact is that you are probably not spending enough time being a father to your children and why? So that they can have a bigger TV set through which to absorb all the wrong types of images of what it means the be a mature man and a father.
You have a role to play in the upbringing of both your sons and your daughters and it is not that of surrogate mother when your wife is not around. For all your children, you are, or should be, a protector both from the real world and the virtual world. As much as they complain about not being allowed to watch some things, or go some places, if they understand it is being done because you care for their wellbeing it will reaffirm in their minds your love and commitment to them.
Protecting your son means more than protecting him from physical harm. At three/four/five your son is probably talkative, happy, excited, loving, caring. He is destined to get most of that knocked out of him unless you do something about it. Sadly, female teachers can be the worst offenders, they bring their own agendas into the classroom. You need to be alert to this and take affirmative action to protect your son. He has the right to be himself.
Being a father also means participating in your childrens lives at a meaningful level and that is not taking them to team sports and watching from the sides. It is finding things to do together where they can talk to you and learn from you.
When someone says "Tell me about yourself" perhaps, instead of saying "I am an accountant" you can say "I am a father" and mean it.
There is a women's magazine in Australia called "New Idea". It contains the usual mix of light weight trashy stories that are so popular about celebrities, human interest stories, Princess Diana, that sort of stuff. It also contains a regular feature called "Mere Male" where readers write in and retell vignettes of silly things their husbands have done. It is harmless enough in itself but it plays on the image of the husband as harmless bumbling fool in the relationship. Look at many of the adverts for household cleaning products or baby care needs and you will see further examples.
It is a role that men find easy and comfortable to conform to. It takes responsibility away from them in the household and in their relationship with their wife. It is however a sign of a deeply flawed, but not beyond repair, relationship. Many of these men are managers of groups of individuals in the workplace; strategic thinkers; go getters. Yet at home they conform to a role that allows them to disengage with their wife on almost all levels.
It is time to look at your relationship with your wife and ask yourself "Am I guilty of taking the soft option and letting her 'rule the roost'?". If you are then you are cheating both yourself and your wife.
There is also a dark side to this marital structure. Ironically, it is too often accompanied by violence. The scene is all to common of the compliant submissive man who periodically "explodes" because he
1. can no longer handle that his values, beliefs and needs are being ignored
2. does not know how to talk to his wife about how he feels and what he needs from the relationship (I am not talking about sex here.)
3. is so emotionally withdrawn that his wife, out of desparation, provokes him to get at least some type of response.
So what happens. As well as the obvious damage to his wife, the man is even more disempowered. He now has feelings of guilt to add to the firestorm of emotions that he is unable to understand or resolve, mainly because he does not have a wife or any true male friends in which he can confide to help him sort them out.
The Solution
1. You are an equal partner in the relationship who is entitled to have your beliefs, values, needs and wishes respected. (Your wife is equally entitled to this.) Of course you cannot expect these things to be respected if you do not tell your wife what they are, she is not a mind reader. It may sound stupid but even in a marriage of 10 or 20 years this is still important particularly if you have not been doing it along the way. You are entitled to say "That is how I feel. I am not asking you to understand it, just accept that that is the why I feel."
2. Your wife has a set of beliefs, values, needs and wishes which are not the same as yours and you are entitled and obligated to find out what they are and respect them, even if you think they are stupid.
3. Your wife is not always correct she can also be obstinate, misguided, perverse and irrational just like you can. You don't have to accept everything she says. On some matters you can disagree entirely and still have a happy and fulfilling relationship.
4. If you are angry about something then your wife is entitled to know. How do you think that adopting the "cone of silence", and giving yourself a stomach ulcer by quietly fuming over it, is going to fix the problem.
A marriage is a relationship between equals. If yours is not then it is time to fix it. If you have been together a long time then it will be a difficult task that will need to be undertaken with tenacity and in the knowledge that you both will need to change, which is never easy.
Here is a picture of Anna for you to look at. It is not workplace safe she is naked. If you are a heterosexual male then you will probably find her sexually attractive. The reason that you do is because she is young, healthy and has the hallmarks of being fertile. As a male animal you are built to find that attractive in a female it is nothing to be either ashamed of or particularly proud about it is just the way you are.
If you haven't clicked on the link yet you should. You will see from the photo that she was clearly unconcerned about having her photo taken and why should she be. It shouldn't bother you either unless you are uncomfortable with the fact that you may find her sexually attractive.
Here is the rub, as heterosexual males we find the female body appealling and a pleasure to look at and it is time to grow up and acknowledge to yourself that that is part of being a man. It is nothing to be ashamed about. You are a sexual being and you are sexual in a uniquely masculine way that your wife will never truely understand simply because she is not a man.
A key component of male sexual exploitation of women is failing to see them as a human being with thoughts and feelings and emotions. Part of your sexual exploitation of yourself is to deny yourself your sexual thoughts and feelings and emotions. This does not mean you are going to dump the wife and kids and run off on some wild orgy of sexual indulgence. It means that you acknowledge as well as being an intellectual person and a caring person you are also a sexual person. It is not a grubby little secret it is part of who you are, be proud of it.
As babies turn into young children they begin to make sense of the world around them. For children growing in the usual heterosexual household they begin to understand that their mother is the primary care giver, she is afterall breastfeeding them and the most common attendant to their needs. A fathers relationship with his young child is usually somewhat more distant.
In our culture, as the child grows, the father is too often relegated to the role of dispenser of discipline, he becomes a distant, aloof, god-like figure to be feared when wrong doing has occured.
So what happens when a boy becomes a man? At least at an intellectual level he clearly no longer sees his father as a god-like figure but the distance remains. Here is a quote from Manhood by Steve Biddulph. For many of you it will resonate.
A man anwsers the phone, it is his son on the other end.
"Hi Dad, it's me."
"Oh, uh huh! Hi Son! I'll go get your mother"
"No, don't get Mum. It's you I want to talk to."
A pause
"Why? Do you need money?"
"No, I don't need money"
And the younger man starts on his, somewhat rehearsed, but still vulnerable, speech...
"I've just been remembering a lot about you, Dad, and the things you did for me. Working all those years to put me through college, supporting us. My life is going well now and it's because of what you did to get me started. I thought about it and realised I'd never said "Thanks"
Silence from the father... the son continues
"I want want to tell you ... Thanks ..... And that I love you"
"You been drinking?????"
It is poignant because it closely reflects the state of relations between so many adult men and their fathers. The father may be incapable of expressing any outward acknowledgement of the deep impact that such an interaction has had on him. He may at the time dismiss it as "foolishness" but in his heart he now knows what, at the times when he is most vulnerable and scared, he hoped but did not know before. So many men go to their grave falsely believing that they were inadequate as fathers simply because their adult son has not disabused them of their feelings of inadequacy.
The problem that you will have as a man seeking atonement with your father is that they have been subjected to the same disfunctional masculine upbringing that you have. In fact that is where you probably learnt a lot of it from. Some of you will be fortunate in that your approach to your father will be something that he has been wanting for many years and the flood gates will be open. For most of you, your experience will be like mine, you will be greated with an awkward silence or embarrasment but rest assured your relationship with your father will have changed. Whether he knows or admits it, or not, he will now be a more complete man than he was before, that is a gift that only you, as his son, can give him.
For your sake, you will have taken a major step along the path to becoming a more emotionally complete man.
There are many men who have lost contact with, or never known, their father. For you the journey of atonement is fraught. You may have been raised to believe that he is a terrible person, and sadly it may be true, but your view of your father is the one that your mother has given you. As a man it is time to track him down and form your own opinion.
Whoever he is it is important for you to know him because he gave you life and you would not be who you are without him. There will have been times in your life when you would have been curious about who he was. The answers given may have been satisfactory at the time but they do not cut the mustard now you are an adult man. You may be angry with him but you don't know his side of the story, it is time to find out what it is.
For you it is a journey into the unknown. You have no way of knowing how you will be received, or even if you can find him. It is a quest for which you will need to be well prepared because it is a perilous one and may end in rejection. Great quests are not abandoned, however, simply because they are perilous, when the risks are great then so is the potential for gain. If you can get to know and understand your father you will be more complete and satisfied as a man.
Sadly, if your father is deceased, it will never be possible for you to seek atonement with him. You owe it to him and to yourself, however, to understand him more fully than you do now. This is important because who he was is partly who you are. By understanding your father and accepting him for who he was you move closer to understanding yourself and who you are.
It is time to seek out people who knew him not as a father or husband but as a person, people he went to school with, his friends and work colleagues. Seek them out and say to them "Tell me about Bill, what was he like."
It comes a poor second to getting to know him yourself but it is valuable never the less and the best option available to you.
This weeks journey is based on the magnificent work of Steve Biddulph in his book Manhood, An Action Plan For Changing Mens Lives . Over this week we will be exploring an plan for self actualisation, that is being the fullest and most complete man that you can be. Here is the roadmap for the journey and the weeks curriculum:
1. Establish a proper, meaningful, loving relationship with your father.
2. Cast aside the dysfuntional myths and understand and accept your sexuality.
3. Establish a relationship with your partner that is honest and where your needs are respected and fulfilled.
4. Stop being a bread-winner and start being a father to your children
5. Establish some real male friends
6. Find meaning in your job or dump it and find one that has some
7. Go wild, in the wilderness the male spirit soars.
Steve Biddulph, in his book "Manhood" writes
Most men do not have a life. Instead we have just learned to pretend. Most of what men do is an outer show, kept up for protection.
Here are two scenarios for you to consider:
Scenario One:
After 45 years with the one company a man retires and within 3 months he is dead from suicide. If you had asked this man a question like "Tell me about yourself" the first thing he would have said is "I am a clerk with ???", most men respond the same way, they define themselves by their work. (Ask yourself how you would answer that question.) When work ended his life ended. Over the years his reason for being had turned into being a meal ticket for the family.
This man was undoubtedly a vibrant imaginative child, as most children are. After 45 years of attending a job which, for the greater part of this time he hated but pretended to like, he had turned into a shell of a man struggling to find a meaning for existance. He grabbed onto the only thing available, his work. Ultimately everybody failed this man, society, his family, his male friends. They all conspired to keep him from really living and by time the time came when society gave him permission to live there was nothing much left. This story is a tragedy but the bigger tragedy is that his story is commonplace. His reality is the the reality for the bulk of men of his age in our society. It is why this group has one of the highest suicide rates.
Scenario Two
Andrew is 18 doing his University entrance exams. His father has said he is capable of getting into Medicine at Melbourne University and that he doesn't want a looser for a son. The pressure of the exams is great and, even though he has studied hard, his nerves get the better of him. His results come back and his marks are far above average but he just fails to make it into Medicine. He drives to the families hobby farm where he has enjoyed some of the most care free and happy periods of his life. He takes a rifle that is stored there and climbs to the top of a hill on the property, it is a place where as a child he used to imagine he could see forever. He places the barrel in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
The sad irony is that he never wanted to be a doctor anyway. That was what his family's dream was for him and what his father told him he should want to be. He actually wanted to be a teacher in a small country school, possibly owning a little farm on which his kids could enjoy growing up. He shared this dream with his father, once, who ridiculed him saying "Those who can - do, those who can't - teach". He resigned himself being a doctor. His failure to get in was the final straw. He thought "I am not allowed to do what I want and I can't even get into what I am supposed to do, my life is a failure." His story is a tragedy but the bigger tragedy is that thousands of boys are trying to attain stupid and pointless qoals set by fathers and suiciding when they fail. The rate of suicide of teenage boys and young men is highest of any group in our society.
At Andrew's funeral his father was stoic as he delivered the eulogy. Not a tear dampened his cheek. Even though inside he was a maelstrom of emotions of grief, self doubt, guilt and failure there was noone he could turn to. In the family he was expected to be the strong one and his mates, uncertain how to deal with the situation, avoided him at first and when they did eventually see him the topic was reduced to the banal, something like "Bad luck about Andrew".
Over this week we will be looking at the failure Anglo societies (Australia, USA, Canada, NZ and UK), to address the needs of boys and men. What you can do as a man to make your life more fulfilling, so that the end of your working life is not the end of your life. What you must do as a father to empower your son so he grows into well rounded, confident and complete man who has a full, rewarding and happy life. What greater gift could you give your son?
It is manhood week next week at The Green Man. If you are a man then be prepared to have some assumptions about who you are and what your life really means challenged.
Every now and then we all need to take a step back and challenge the assumptions by which we lead our lives. For the male readers of The Green Man this will hopefully provide such an opportunity.
If you are a woman then you are welcome to drop by and perhaps gain a glimpse behind that big macho fasade behind which most men live their lives, even if they don't realise it themselves.
Here is a photo of Nicole Kidman. If you are thinking the high life in Hollywood is taking its toll then you are probably correct but this photo does not reflect the actual state of Nicole. It is a photoshop creation submitted to a competition at Worth1000.com. Click here to view the original image from which this image of Nicole Kidman was created.
Worth1000 is a photoshop site that regularly runs competitions and the current one is to "un-airbrush" celebrities. There are some creative efforts, some taking the competition literally and simply reapplying the natural blemishes that are likely on a face and others embracing the challenge more enthusiastically and advancing the ageing process to predict how stars will look as age. Click here to view them.
Two that took The Green Mans attention were of Michael Jackson and Michelle Pfeiffer. The Michael Jackson one simply because it was completely superfluous, he has succeeded in making himself into a caricature of his former self in real life nothing more needs be done really. You can look him up for yourself on their site if you really need to see.
The one of Michelle Pfeiffer I include here because it struck me how beautiful she looked. One of the myths that many women seem to cling to, and is reflected in many cosmetic adds on television, is the men find the types of facial wrinkles present in this photo unattractive. At 30 Michelle Pfeiffer was a beautiful woman and she will still be beautiful at 50 so long as she resists the temptation to try and look like she is still 30.
Here is a little insight into the male mind for those female readers of The Green Man. Men can tell the difference between a 30 year old woman and a 50 year old woman with a face lift. A man who has never really matured into a well adjusted adult male will try to cling to his youth by dumping his wife for a younger model no matter how many face lifts she has had. A mature well balanced man appreciates that the characteristics of a womans natural beauty change with age but that does not mean that her beauty diminishes.
There is nothing more off putting than a 50 year old woman with a permanently surprised expression on her face telling you how her friends say that she looks 10 years younger. The challenge in life is not to stay young, noone can do that, but to look beautiful at whatever age you are and that has more to do with being comfortable with how you look and being healthy and confident.
The suicide of a teenager is always a tragic event and sadly it is mainly boys who suicide. Ironically, most of the support effort in schools tends to go to girls. This is, in part, because they are more receptive to the forms of assistance available. Boys, I am afraid, often fall into the "too hard" basket.
New research by Ohio State University highlights the fundamental and significant difference between the way teenage boys and girls organise their respective social frameworks and how this organisation is reflected in their risk of suicide. These differences mean that there must be dual approaches to suicide intervention to address the needs of both the boys and the girls.
Teenage girls typically have close friends in whom they confide almost everything, including thoughts of suicide. Girls with few or no close friends are less likely to confide their thoughts in others and, as such, are less likely to receive the suicide intervention assistance that they need. Similary problems with these relationships greatly affect girls mental health.
For girls, those who felt isolated and friendless were at as great a risk for considering suicide as girls who knew someone who had committed suicide.
(The risk of a person suiciding increases by a factor of 30 if a close friend or relative suicide. It seems that someone close to you suiciding somehow makes it much more acceptible for you.)
The situation is quite different for boys who do not establish these types of relationships during their teenage years, many men never develop them. The social structure for boys in school is a more loosely structured "gang" type organisation. For boys the suicide risk is reduced where large dense networks of friendships are maintained. Boys typically do not discuss their suicidal thoughts with anyone but in these large dense organisations it is more likely that someone will realise that suicide is being contemplated and facilitate intervention.
For both sexes a major factor in reducing suicide and suicidal thoughts is the joint participation of parents and adolescents in activties. Your teenage child may bitch about it being uncool to do things with you but it is remarkably good for their mental health.
Attending church regularly was also found to be a reductor in suicidal thoughts, possibly because of the extended support structures that are typically provided by the church community.
Fathers you can help protect your adolescent boys from suicide by
- Doing things with them and participating in their lives
- Enroling them in a number of clubs and societies
- Taking them to church (if that is right for you)
Are you a feminist? Yes? Then you are probably one of The Green Man's older readers. Young people are just not interested in feminism, it is an characteristic of the baby boomers.
What's more.
Women were more than twice as likely as men to think of themselves as feminists.
-Men and women born between 1935 and 1955 were the most likely to self-identify as feminists.
-Racial differences played no significant role in self-identification as feminists.
-Marital status, parental status, employment status and income were not significant factors in self-identification as feminists.
These are the findings of a study by Jason Schnittker, assistant professor of sociology at University of Pennsylvania
Britain is set to introduce a new law on domestic violence with sweeping new powers to allow the courts to impose a "stay-away" order on partners of individuals claiming to be the victims of domestic violence even when the alleged perpetrator is found innocent.
The solicitor-general, Harriet Harman, said
We often talk in government about the importance of diverting offenders - particularly young offenders - out of the criminal justice system earlier.In this case, we want more offenders diverted into the criminal justice system at an early stage... Because then we can ensure that their behaviour is addressed and they receive the appropriate punishment for their crime
Of course she completely misses the point that these people she is diverting into the criminal justice system are not offenders, they were found innocent. Like Australia and the US, the presumption of innocence underpins the UK criminal justice system. (We have seen it cast aside with gay abandon by the US with the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay but they don't count, they are not people after all, they are illegal combatants)
Ms Harmon is also quoted as saying
This will offer real protection to victims
This is complete fiction as anyone working in this field will know. In Australia, and UK is probably the same, roughly 97% of all protection orders are breached.
Given this, it may deliver a lot more people to prison but it won't protect the actual victims. Sadly, the bill will also be used by unscrupulous women to prevent caring fathers gaining access to their children.
Still we all know that polititians live in faerie land and their statements are more about being good "sound bites" than anything else don't we?
Read more on the new Domestic Violence Laws in The Guardian.
There is a time in every person's life when things seem too much to bear. Generally speaking women have good networks to support them through these periods, men do not.
If you are a man it can be very difficult to find someone to confide in. Secret men's rules mean that men cannot talk to one another about their fears, insecurities and problems. Midlife crisis, depression, isolation, fear, coping with divorce, these are all things that many men find difficult to discuss with their mates. To do so would be a sign of weakness. The result is suicide and substance abuse.
Do you need to talk to someone who cares and understands? Click Continue reading for some numbers
| Australia | Mensline Australia | 1300 78 99 78 |
| New Zealand | Mensline NZ | 09 522 2500 0800 MENSLINE (636 754) from outside Auckland |
| USA/Canada | Mens Centers | Various |
| USA | Mens Hotline | 512-472-3237 |
| Ireland | Black Dog | Aware helpline Locall 1890 303 302 (24 Hours) from Southern Ireland Samaritans helpline 1850 60 90 90 (ROI) 08457 90 90 90 (NI and UK) |
| UK | Men in Crisis Helpline | 0181-893-5563 |
The Centre For The Advancement of Health reports that, in low income minority groups, it is the men who are picking up the message on healthy behaviors.
In these groups it is the men who are exercising, giving up smoking and reducing their alcohol intake. This is an interesting counter point to the middle/upperclass white population where it is the women who are leading the change to a healthier lifestyle.
In those who had not yet moved to improve their lifestyle, the men were far more confident of their ability to do so. It is hypothesised that this is because
“men may be generally more confident about making personal behavior changes than females are,”
Donna Kite and Dr. Graham Tyson, School of Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst have done some interesting work when it comes to the sensitive issue of child sexual abuse. Surveying police they found that the gender of the perpetrator of the sexual abuse was particularly important in determining how seriously the offence was perceived.
Unsurprisingly it was the males who fared poorly, after all the stereotype of a child sexual abuser is that of a male. The research found that cases of alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by females tended to be underestimated or dismissed as unimportant by police. This is consistent with findings in other countries.
Clearly there needs to be some serious work done. I would have thought that the objective was to protect children regardless of the gender of the perpetrator.
Read more here. (but you will have to search for it)
Child sexual abuse is not the only place we see this bias though. Generally, female offenders are more likely to be cautioned rather than charged than are male offenders for the same offence. It seems that we are far more lenient with a woman's criminal behaviour than a man's. In the juvenile justice system actions against male juveniles is 500% that of female juveniles and yet evidence suggests roughly similar nature and level of criminal behaviour in both groups.
Here is an interesting study by Australia Institute of Criminology.
Lost in the mists of prehistoric times a small family group of our predecessors are huddled in a cave living a precarious life. In this scenario the adult male of the group is a vital resource in the groups survival. There are periods when the female is pregnant or nursing very young children and cannot hunt for meat which is a vital component of their diet. During this time it is the male that carries the bulk of the responsibility for finding food.
So what happens when the male is killed. The group is in real trouble unless it can acquire another male. This is a period of great risk for the children of the first male. We know from primate behaviour, including our own, that these children are risk of being killed by the new male. A young girl, however, has an option that her brothers do not have.
If she enters puberty early she increases her chances of survival by being attractive either to the new male or by finding a mate of her own outside the family unit.
Evolutionary theory says that if something provides a greater chance of an individual surviving to reproduce, passing their genes to the next generation, then it will gradually become prevalent in the population. So it is with this characteristic in young females.
Research has shown that female children who live in a household where their father is absent enter pubity earlier than normal, have their first sexual encounter earlier, have children earlier, have more sexual partners and have a short duration of marriage. We don't why yet but it is hypothesised that pheromones may play a part. The pheromones of the new male triggering the early development.
The presence of the biological father in a young girls life is far more important than was once thought. For a girl to develop normally a loving and attendant biological father must be part of the family unit. To corrupt a phrase that was popular early in the feminist movement
"A girl needs a father like a fish needs a river"
Are you a senior executive? Well what are you reading this for? Your time is far too valuable to be wasting time on the subversive ramblings of The Green Man. Off you go, back to slashing and burning.
Right, now they're gone we can get down to business. Ever wondered what makes a senior executive happy. Personally, I'd have thought the $4million plus per annum that most receive would go some of the way but no. What really makes them happy is being top tin can on the rubbish pile (so to speak).
University of Warwick Economists Professor Andrew Oswald and psychology researcher Professor Gordon Brown (both fairly high up the rubbish pile themselves by the look of the titles) surveyed 16,266 individuals from 886 separate workplaces and have come to the conclusion that, to most executives, the money is not as important as power.
Stands to reason really, these people have long past the point where they have more money than they need for the rest of their life, even living a luxurious lifestyle. They must look to other things for increased happiness. They could choose quality of life, reduce their work hours, reintroduce themselves to the wife, take their kids on a fishing trip, that sort of thing. Instead they choose power, equating increased power with increased happiness. Poor sad men, they're life is passing them by and they don't even know it. Never mind, so long as they keep really busy they will be able to ignore the fact that they have wasted their life on things that don't really matter.
I was in the shopping centre yesterday and wandered into a shop specialising in Dungeons and Dragons style war games. They sell little plastic soldiers, monsters etc. and the domains in which they do battle. It is school holidays at the moment so, even though it was a Monday, it was full of boys in the eight to fifteen age group. It is a smallish shop but it has enough room for some battle grounds on tables at the front and a work area for its clients towards the rear.
I have been into this shop before and each time I do it lifts my heart. Each time I see boys engrossed in constructive and creative activity. There is so little of this quality activity available for boys. In this shop boys can let their imaginations range across imaginary landscapes and control epic battles fought by iconic armies of knights, elves or any number of other creatures. Younger boys have simplistic battle strategies that grow more complex, sophisticated and abstract as their brain develops and matures.
At the back of the store, in the work area, preparation is underway for future battles. Minute figurines are being meticulously painted. Here boys are not only developing their future armies they are also developing their fine motor skills, learning about art and sharing their hopes and dreams with other boys.
In this shop conflict is played out on the minature battlefield and loses, whilst disheartening, are accepted gracefully. Boys are learning to compete in a constructive and supportive environment with no adults placing unrealistic demands upon them or abusing them from the sidelines. Compare this with the local football field.
The young adult males who work there are not trained in counselling or youth work but they share the passion with their customers. They relate to these boys and interact with them at a level that most youth workers can only dream about.
This store is about making money and it clearly does that but in doing so it delivers a rare and valuable service to boys in our community. If you are a father of a young boy check out if there is a store like this in your area. Your son may embrace this fantasy world and he has much he can gain from it if he does.
"I just assumed life sucks and that's that." So thought Bill Thielkerand he just kept going through the motions of living. He was quite surprised when his doctor diagnosed depression. Time reports that, although two thirds of those diagnosed with depression are women.
in many ways depressed men are worse off than depressed women. They are less likely to recognize their condition through the cloud of seemingly beside-the-point feelings like anger, apathy and low self-esteem. And even when they know what they've got, they're less likely to acknowledge it to others or seek treatment. They are also more likely to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol and four times as likely to kill themselves.
In a response to this terrible situation the National Institute of Mental Health is releasing a campaign through television, radio and the internet called "Real Men, Real Depression" designed to counter the widely held view amongst men that mood disorders, like depression, are a sign of weakness.
All men in western societies have been socialised to believe that they must be able handle their own problems. The sad fact is that they cannot and suicide and substance abuse statistics provide conclusive evidence of this. Where feminism failed both men and women is that it failed to recognise that in the things that really matter, health, wellbeing, happiness, fulfillment, men are far worse off than women. Making women equal to men is doing them a huge disservice.
Very early on in life all boys in western society come to know the boy code. If they are to avoid humiliation and rejection they must embrace it for themselves and enforce it in others. It is the genesis of the attitudes in men that inhibit self-care and help-seeking behaviours. If you are a man or adolescent male in a western society you know what this code is but I will detail it here anyway.
To be accepted as a boy you must:
- focus on physical accomplishments and external success
- be tough, aggressive and competitive with others
- not express emotions and deny any emotional vulnerability
- be performance oriented with your sexuality
- reject homosexuality
- deny pain, tough things out and avoid seeking help.
So here is the choice we give our boys,
1. they can adopt the code and subject themselves to lives that are characterised by loneliness, violence, physical and emotional health problems. They can spend their lives ignoring their own emotional and physical needs until late in life, if they live that long, they come to realise that their life has been a meaningless waste.
2. they can reject the code and be subjected to continual reminders that they are inadequate as men. Men who choose this path choose a path of isolation from other men in mainstream society. They are viewed with suspicion and distrust.
At least this is what it used to be. We have seen a glimmer of the light of hope in the new men's movement. Some caring men are coming out of the closet to talk and share their emotions.
We must confront the code and demonstrate to boys that rejecting the code does not doom one to ridicule and isolation. The time has come for western men to lead healthy fulfilling meaningful lives but they can only acheive it if we actively work to undermine the boy code.
In promiscuous baboon societies females mate with numerous males. You would think that this would obscure the blood lines but recent research indicates that baboons fathers know which of the offspring of a female are theirs. Fathers will rush to protect their own children when they become involved in an altercation.
Here is a baboon father sheltering its child as another young baboon approaches.
We know which baboon children are fathered by which male through blood testing of the group. How the baboon fathers know is still a question to be answered, one could hypothesise it may be smell.
Evolutionary theory would suggest that fathers who can correctly identify their offspring and support/protect them would have an advantage. Accordingly it is understandable that this has developed as a trait. Prehistoric humans males had a similar problem. How do you know whether a child was yours? Being a species that relies mainly on visual clues it is natural that this sense was used for this purpose. Research by Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany shows that, even today, fathers favour children that look like them over children who do not.
More about baboon families here. More about the link between facial similarity and affection here.
How do boys learn what it means to be a man? Before the Industrial revolution, in agrarian and hunterer gather societies they could do it by modelling themselves on the men they came in contact with. Their father was the most important role model but not the only one. Uncles, those adult males who were some relation but not part of the boys initial upbringing often play an important part.
It is a sad irony that, for all the sophistication of our society, our boys are developmentally poorer than many third world boys. Many have virtually no contact with adult males in any constructive form. Fathers are either separated and live apart or working so many hours per week that they rarely interact with their sons in a meaningful fashion. Teachers in school are almost exclusively female. The only role models boys have are older boys who are not yet mature themselves or TV/Film actors whose characters portray disfunctional and unrealistic models of behaviour.
This is a recipe for building adult boys not well balanced men. Go to the footy on a Saturday, you can find ample examples. A group of men in Byron Bay, Australia, amongst others, has recognised the problem and are fulfulling their obligation to society in a way that so many of us are not. The organisation "Uncle" is a loose group of men who are volunteering some of their time to spent with boys who would otherwise not have any adult males in their lives. This is a good news story for the boys involved. Australia needs more caring men of their calibre, as do many other urbanised societies.
In what is probably a first. Several high profile men's movement activitsts in New Zealand are pushing for the establishment of a Men's Ministry to compliment the Women's Ministry. The major issues that they wish addressed are the same ones plaguing men in Australia, US, UK etc, namely
- Boy's under-performing at school;
- Father absence and lack of rights in the family court;
- High male suicide rate;
- Crime - 90% of prison inmates are male;
- Men's Health
Sadly State Services Minister Trevor Mallard does not see a need. Apparently none of the above issues are significantly important enough for him to bother about. Women may have had problems breaking into a mans world but getting men to take their own wellbeing seriously eclipses that.
Prue Goward, the national sex discrimination commissioner writes
British sociologist Dr Catherine Hakim proposes that women fall into three groups: home-centred, work-centred, and adaptive women whose hopes and aspirations are in the areas of both work and family. Of course, there is going to be the same three categories of men, although nobody has bothered to ask them.Failing to acknowledge that men at least aspire to an adaptive type of life means men are firmly stuck, by choice or not, in the working world.
And that disadvantages all of us - fathers, children and mothers.
The light is starting to dawn. Feminism was not completely successful because it ignored exactly half the problem. Men are just as constrained as women in the choices open to them, in fact, post feminism probably more so. We must grant men the same compassion and the same freedoms that women have in part attained or the quality of our society, for both men and women, will be poorer for it.
Whilst teenage girls and boys offend at roughly the same rates, the domain of serious offence is predominately that of the boys. What's more, one of the best indicators of whether a boy will offend at 15 is whether he was a victim at 12. If, at 12 or so, a boy has things he holds precious stolen then it is giving him the mandate, later, to reciprocate.
Interestingly, this seems to be a normal male response but not a normal female one. Male offenders and male non-offenders were quite similar in behaviour patterns and attitudes suggesting that it was a product of the circumstances in which they found themselves. Female offenders on the other hand tended to be quite different from other girls in their age group, typically being drug users, gang members, truants, and from a lower class background.
Gang membership generally was a good predictor of offending with the gang providing moral support and encouragement in such activities.
The implications of this excellent research by Economic & Social Research Council in the UK are that programmes targeting offenders and victim support programs need to be rethought within the context that they are targeting the same people. You can read more here.
If you are then one of the biggest loosers in the situation is you. You have the power and ability, with help, to revolutionise your life. You may not be able to imagine what it is to live in a warm loving relationship where fear is absent but it is like moving from black and white to colour.
There is a hand held out to help you, be brave enough to reach out and grab it.
In Australia contactMens Referral Service on 9428 2899 or 1800 065 973 noon to 9pm Monday to Friday.
In the UK contact Respect on 020 8563 8523
In the US contact The Nonviolence Alliance on 1.860.347.8220
Your life can be rewarding and magnificent but the first step is up to you!
If you are a woman in a violent relationship then falling pregnant "to fix things up" may not be such a great idea. Pregnancy, it appears, often triggers or increases the level of violence that a woman experiences in a violent relationship.
Here is an interesting article from "The Midwifery Digest" on the topic.
Researchers at Ohio State University have identified a "powder-keg" relationship that is most at risk of violence, a insecure male and a dismissive female.
They found violence was most likely to occur when a man showed an insecure attachment style -- he felt unsure about his partner’s love, and was extremely jealous and fearful of rejection, says Patrick McKenry, co-author of the study and professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University’s College of Human Ecology. Violence was even more likely if the man’s partner had an attachment style that was insecure and also dismissive -- she was less sensitive than average to his concerns about the relationship.
If we can move beyond the shock/horror aspect of couple violence we can diffuse these sort of "powder keg" relationships by teaching both partners more effective interpersonal skills and facilitating the improvement of self-confidence and self-image.
Here is some research that supports what we pretty much knew intuitively anyway.
Over 20 years Dr Miriam K. Ehrensaft of Columbia University has been following the lives of children of violent relationships. Her results highlight two important facts
1. Problem behaviour amongst children and adolescents is a good indicator of the presence of violence in the home.
2. Use of violence by a parent is often modelled and used as a form of conflict resolution by these children when they are grown and in relationships of their own.
The most significant finding is that recognising and treating problem behaviour in children from abusive families can result in a significant reduction in the use of violent conflict resolution techniques when they are adults.
New Dimensions (ABC TV) had an item on joint custody of children post divorce. As part of the segment they chose to include an interview with a woman fighting, correctly, to deny access to her ex-husband who was abusing his daughter but ignored completely the plight of men who are faced with a reciprocal situation.
Child abuse consists of far more then sexual abuse and the program was contributing to the perpetuation of the myth that men are always the abusing parent. Research by Australian Institute of Family studies shows that child abuse through neglect or physical abuse are more likely to be perpetrated by mothers. Similar research in the UK and USA comes to the same conclusion.
Imagine the mental anguish and frustration that these fathers have to deal with whilst trying to gain custody to protect their children in a court system that makes it difficult for a father to gain sole custody of his children.
Society for Women's Health Research has released a paper bemoaning the lack of spending on coronary heart disease research on women. Once again we see the dominance of the womens movement in health.
Here are some interesting statistics.
In 1900 women lived, on average, 1 year longer than men; now they live 8 years longer.
For every $12,000 spent on womens health research there is less than $1,000 spent on men's health. This is reflected in articles on gender specific health on Medline database, in a ten year period 1,372 for women, 47 for men and, of this, 50% of men's health research is on AIDs in homosexual men, not generic men's health.
Let me make this clear, I have no problem with the spending on women's health per se, but let's not try and pretend that women are the forgotten sex in medical research. The idea is so entrenched, while driving home, I heard a female professor from an Australian university comment on the radio that "If men needed hormone replacement therapy there'd be a clinic on every corner" (I nearly pranged the car) It is estimated that up to 50% of men over 50 would benefit from hormone replacement therapy but we don't know for sure because no one is researching it are they. Also HRT for women is subsidised by the government under the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, not so for men.
And one more thing that seems to have slipped by this researcher. The male death rate from heart disease is 160% that of females (190 cf 119 per 100,000). If gender specific research is undertaken I am thinking it is men that are most in need.
| YEAR | Number of Articles | |
|---|---|---|
| Women | Men | |
| 1982-1983 | 32 | 0 |
| 1984-1985 | 31 | 2 |
| 1986-1987 | 67 | 11 |
| 1988-1989 | 156 | 8 |
| 1990-1991 | 333 | 12 |
| 1992-1993 | 753 | 13 |
| YEAR | Average # of articles | Ratio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| published per year | |||
| Women | Men | Women/Men | |
| 1982-1985 | 15.8 | 0.50 | 31.5 |
| 1986-1989 | 55.8 | 4.75 | 11.7 |
| 1990-1993 | 271.5 | 6.25 | 43.4 |
| 1982-1993 | 114.3 | 3.83 | 29.8 |
Consulting one of Melbourne's leading social commentary publications, the Herald Sun, I discover to my amazement that beards are in and not those amateur gottee efforts, Darren of the LivingRoom springs to mind, but a real mans beard. The kind that Billy Connelly eloquently referred to as "looking like you'd eaten a bear and left it's arse hanging out of your mouth" (he certainly has a way with the words does Billy)
"It's about time too" I say. It took a long while for fashion to catch up with me, around 25 years if my memory serves me correctly.
Fortunately, at this stage, it seems the fashion is restricted to men.
Well it was a big night last night. We (me, long suffering wife and in-laws) all went to see Les Girls which was being hosted by a theatre restaraunt somewhat prophetically named "The Looney Bin". Les Girls is a group of female impersonators with a couple of men as men thrown in for good measure. I can hear you all thinking "My, that's a bit sophisticated for the Green Man isn't it?" and I have to agree. It was a level of, well let's call it sophistication for want of a more appropriate term, that I rarely experience.
My assessment you ask! Well it was pathetic and magnificent in equal quantities.
Pathetic if you were expecting any semblance of artistic merit in the show. The performers, and I use the term loosely, seemed to believe that their ability to pass as credible females relieved them of any obligation to choreograph acts or, at a simpler level, lip-sync with the song they were attempting to mime. They demonstrated the ability to, similtaneously, look completely like a female and behave in a completely masculine way.
Magnificent in that it was a group of men doing something that they quite clearly enjoyed. It was a view into an Australian male subculture so rarely glimpsed from the suburban cultural desert. You may not be comfortable with the occupants of this fringe group but they are in their element. If you can look past your discomfort and their external appearance you will find men being men.
Existing in a lymbo world which parodies both the table top dancing venues and the Melbourne Theatre Company they provide us with a kind of carnival mirror view of our culture, a distorted reality but a reality never the less.
This is a must night out if you are looking for the crass and the obscene or to participate in a fringe subculture for a brief moment. Not being offended by crassness or obscenity and being interested in what it means to be a man in todays Australia, in all its forms, I quite enjoyed myself. Mrs Green Man, on the other hand, got hung up on the fact that the performance was complete crap and had a much less enjoyable time.
The Australian reports the outcome of a trial where a man has been forced to pay child support payments for a child that he obligingly agreed to father on behalf of his ex-wife and her lesbian girl friend.
He seemed to feel that he was not the father because the woman agreed he would not be the father. That their amateur IVF clinic approach had some sort of standing in the law.
Men, both morally and legally it is simple; if you father a child you are the father of that child. This is not nuclear physics, if you are unprepared to be a proper father and accept the responsibilities of being a father, both financially and emotionally, then don't deliberately get a woman pregnant.
Wake up people! This is an extremely emotion charged area where unwritten rules change by the day. I need only to point to the recent tragic suicide/murder of a lesbian woman and her child when the father saught and was granted access.
The issue of sexual harrassment in the workplace is complicated by the fact that men and women view the issue of what constitutes sexual harrassment differently. The Journal of Applied Psychology reports on meta-analysis of research into gender differences sexual harrassment perceptions.
The analysis found that in areas of "gross" sexual harrassment there was no significant difference in perception between genders; however in areas that were more subtle, such as where the perpetrator has no authority over the victim and the alleged harrassment was not of a personal nature, men and women exhibited significant differences in what they considered harrassing. Put simply, some behaviours that men considered "harmless social interaction", women considered "harrassing".
Clearly there is a role for education in the workplace for men in the nature of what women consider harrassing and this has been embarked on with vigour over the last few years. Something that has not taken place, to my knowledge, is education programs for women, to help them understand and correctly interpret male behaviour. Many situations of conflict may be defused if the woman understood that the man was not intending to harrass but was simply interacting in a way that was acceptable a male perspective.
As men, all of us get angry from time to time. It is a natural human emotion and we are deluding ourselves if we try and pretend that we don't experience it.
The mark of a man is not in whether he gets angry or not but in how he chooses to behave when he gets angry. The important concept here is the concept of choice. You cannot control your life so completely that you can prevent yourself from getting angry. You can however choose how to respond to that anger.
Cast your mind back to when you were angry and what you chose to do. It is a rare man who can look back and not feel embarrassment at some of his behaviour when angry. Spend some time thinking on how it reflected on you as a person. If you were violent, either physically or psychologically, do you think that made others think what a mature man you were? Probably it made them initially scared and ultimately made you look like a little boy throwing a tantrum.
There are ways of handling anger that are mature and responsible. Find someone who you trust and talk to them about how angry you feel. Get it off your chest and move on. Too many men waste the greater part of their adult lives being angry. You can choose not to take that path.
Now is the time to prepare yourself. Think to yourself "The next time I am feeling angry I will choose the mature path"
A new report is available from the Society for Women's Health Research on sex differences in cardiovascular disease. Interesting, I don't recall a Society For Men's Health Research.
Quite naturally, given who they are, the report focuses on cardio-vascular disease in women which is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Oh that men had such research devoted to the male specific aspects of the disease.
So that you can get it into perspective here are mortality rates for Australia and US.
Men |
Women |
|
210 |
139 |
|
406 |
268 |
In summary cardiovascular mortality is 151% greater in men than women. I don't think it is too much to ask for some research dollars and attention here.
Last February, a 17 year old stole the keys to a car belonging to his mothers friend and took the car for a spin. Unfortunately for him, he encountered a booze bus. Panicing he did a U-turn and spead off. Quite naturally a police car took up the pursuit.
Being unlicenced, extremely inexperienced and in a panic he ran across the road, whilst looking over his shoulder for the police car, and into an oncoming vehicle, killing the driver.
Today he was sentenced in the County Court to 3 years in a youth training centre. You may think that it is hard to find anything positive in this story but there is.
The parents of the young woman who was killed in this unfortunate accident were in court to hear the verdict. Outside the court the father was asked for comments on the sentence, he said his family had forgiven the boy and prayed that he would get a light sentence. "He's only a young fellow" the father said.
Here is a man showing maturity and genuine compassion for a fellow human being. If only we had more men of this calibre in our society.
One problem facing many men in Australia today is anger management.
In a society that trains its boys to display/acknowledge few emotions we create men who live in emotional black and white. They only recognise two emotions "happy" and "angry". The way to handle fear, disappointment, saddness, grief, stress etc is to get angry. Not only is this disfunctional but it is also very bad for your wellbeing.
John Hopkins Medical Institutions has found that men who are quick to anger when confronted with stress were five times more likely to have an early heart attack even when there is no family history of it.
So here is a good medical reason to seek assistance. Here is a better reason, you are wasting your life being angry. You are isolating yourself from your family and friends. It is time to "look after number 1" and address this problem for your own sake. Here is a place to start (if you are in Australia) ring Mensline Australia on 1300 78 99 78 and talk to someone who cares about how you feel and can help you.
It appears that men participating in the housework has a positive effect on children, making them better adjusted and more socially aware. This is, in part, because of the social equity of the participation but also because it gives children more opportunity to interact with their father, something that is sorely missing in industrialised societies.
And if that wasn't reason enough, it also makes men more sexually attractive to their partners.
That's it, I sacking the housekeeper.
Nicole Gilbert of Mt Holyoak college found that men received fewer gifts and less attention on Fathers Day than women received on Mothers Day but were happier with what they got.
Why is Dad happier? Gilbert suggests three possible reasons:
Many fathers say that simply having time with their families is valuable and a change from the routine.
Fathers have fewer expectations. Unlike Mother's Day, which tends to be highly scripted around the woman's value as parent and nurturer, Father's Day is more loosely structured.
Research indicates that men are not defined by their role as fathers, while women are defined by their role as mothers. Therefore, recognizing their contributions as parents is not as crucial to their self-identity as it is for women.
We have a serious problem in our society. How does a boy know when he has become a man. It may seem a rather unimportant issue on the surface but it underlies a number of problems that we have in our society today that rise from young men engaging reckless, dangerous or illegal activities to "prove themselves".
In primitive cultures initiation rites were a distinct turning point in a boys life during which he took the transition from boyhood to manhood. We have some lesser versions of this in our society, for example turning 18, but young men are looking for more definitive proof that they are now men. Unless we give them something then they will continue to create "tests" for themselves.
If you are a father of a adolescent boy, it might be time to consider some symbolic gesture to mark his transition into manhood. When my son turned 16 I told him that, since he was born, I had been planning a grand adventure for the two of us when he grew up. Later that year we headed off trecking in the Himalayas together. I was telling him that he was now grown up and we could do adventurous things together.
Well if you are an Australian man, the chances are you may comit suicide. At a time in life when you would think, after having worked all your life, you could sit back and enjoy yourself, men are suiciding at a rate of around 28 per 100,000. (compare this with the murder rate of 1.8).
In this age group suicide amongst women is almost non-existant.
The question for society is "Why is it that so many men, when they retire, value their lives so little that they comit suicide?"
If you are a man, the question is "How are you preparing for retirement?" You hear ads on the radio all the time talking about making sure you are prepared financially for your retirement (you can't start too early apparently). I am asking you to consider how you are preparing emotionally for your retirement, you definitely can't start this too early.
Here is a question I would like you to consider carefully. "Apart from your paid employment, what meaning does your life have?" If the answer is "Not much" then now is the time to fix that. It is time to discover your great passion. It may be grand or it may be daggy, it doesn't matter. The only thing is that it matters to you. You need to start structuring your life so that towards it's end you can say to yourself "shit, that life was good!" You have the power to do it. Muster up the courage and start today!
Duke University Medical Centre find that inactivity rapidly increases visceral fat levels (that's fat in your guts folks) and that it is easily reversed with exercise.
Whilst women tend to accumulate fat most easily around their hips, men accumulate fat most easily around their waist. This is bad. Research has shown that a build up of fat around the waste directly contributes to heart disease and several other nasties that I can't be bothered looking up at the moment.
Traditional wisdom is that when you diet you loose body fat evenly across your body not where you need it most, in the waist. This new research indicates that the most damaging fat can be targeted for removal through exercise and the more exercise the better. Moderate exercise is good, vigorous exercise is better. (Just don't give yourself a heart attack if you haven't done any for a while).
So guys, forget the diet. Eat responsibly and exercise heavily. (If only I could motivate myself to do it!)
Ohio State University finds that men estimate the income of the family as, on average 5% higher than their wives. They also estimate that the debts are less than their wives believe they are.
“There’s quite a gap between husbands’ and wives’ reports of their financial status,” Zagorsky said. “These differences may have significant impacts on everything from a couple’s relationship to national reports of economic statistics.”
While couples have very different views about their income, they agree even less about their total net wealth. Among older couples surveyed, half differed in their wealth estimates by more than $14,700, and 10 percent differed by more than $113,000. Among younger couples, who have had less time to save, half differed in their wealth estimates by more than $7,000, and 10 percent differed by more than $31,000.
This is potentially a major area of conflict within a relationship. Interestingly the survey reports those couples that had very similar estimates of their income, expenditure and total wealth were less likely to divorce.
Perhaps it's time you and your spouse sat down together and worked out exactly what you earn and spend.
The Australian Burea of Statistics report a steady growth in suicide rates in adolescent and young adult males. Between 1988 and 1997 the rate of adolescent suicide rose from 27.9 per 100,000 to 30.6. Even more dramatically the rate for young men (25-34) rose from 28.3 to 37.5. By way of comparison the annual murder rate is 1.8.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we are preparing our young men to deal with the world, i.e. we are not doing it. Part of the problem is that there is so little opportunity in our culture for mature men to provide support and training for young men in "How to be a man." Women do not have a comparable problem.
When a young man is having problems coping where can he turn.
Not to his mates: they are probably as inexperienced as he is and besides our "mate culture" does permit this sort of topic.
Not to his father: he probably hardly knows him and he is desparate to prove he is a success not admit that he is not coping.
Not to his wife/girlfriend: they expect him to be the strong one.
If you like to think of yourself as a mature adult male then prove it by engaging with adolescent and young adult males. Build trust, share your own fears and insecurities. This will give them permission to do the same. Then work with them, teach them, support them.
If you suspect they are contemplating suicide, ask them straight out. No euphamisms just "are you considering killing yourself?" This is a really scarry thing to do because there is a good chance they may say "Yes". This is a question that men rarely lie about when they answer.
If they answer "yes" work with them to find alternatives to suicide and above all else be an effective support for them. It may be difficult and demanding and he may end up committing suicide anyway but this is a young mans life we are talking about it's worth the effort and the risk.
Women: There is no point in reading any further on in this entry. It has nothing to do with you.
Steve Biddulph writes in his book Manhood "Most men don't have a life." They just pretend, doing things that they think you are supposed to do.
At middle age many men get a suspicion that life might be passing them by, that their life is meaningless and, to a large extent, worthless. The tragic fact is that in most cases they are right. When these men were boys they were vibrant, creative, enthusiastic. What happened? What turned these men into shadows of their real potential, living life vacariously through their wives and children?
In a series of posts over the next few weeks I will be exploring what it means to be a man in todays western culture (particularly Australia, but the same applies to NZ, UK, US etc).
Drawing unashamedly on current thinking in the mens movement (Steve Biddulph and others) and on my experiences as a counseller of men in crisis I will be looking at who we are and how we can rediscover those aspects of our maleness that we have been taught to ignore/suppress.
I am starting a journey into the dark forest and I am asking you to join me on this adventure. Like any adventure, things will often not be comfortable, there will be demons and challenges to face, but we will be doing it together. A band of men venturing into a lost world where there are jewels to discover. When we get back we will have been changed by the experience. We will have grown, our horizons broader. We will know each other better. We will have learned to talk to one another about things that really matter to us. We will be more complete as men!
Welcome aboard.
Discovery channel last night screened a documentary on the emerging practice of "harvesting" sperm from recently deceased males for the purpose of allowing their partner, or in one case his mother via a surrogate and egg donor, to produce his offspring. In all cases the deaths were unexpected and the men had not previously requested this procedure.
Is this the ultimate violation of a man's rights.
Clearly there have been women who have deliberately fallen pregnant against their partners wishes, which is a serious violation in itself. These cases take this violation to a new level. Not only is a child produced without consent of the father but it is done in circumstances where the child is guaranteed not to know or benefit from it's biological father in it's life.
The underlying selfishness of the actions on behalf of these women is staggering in it's magnitude and demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the important role a father should play in the development of his children.
Let us just hope that the use of reproductive science in this macarbe manner does not gain mainstream credibility.
