Sam Keen – Fire in the Belly – On Being a Man

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INVITATION TO A JOURNEY

The year I was seventeen I received many messages from my classmates, my family, and my culture about what was required to be a real man:

Join the fraternity.
Get a letter in football, baseball, or basketball.
Screw a lot of girls.
Be tough; fight if anybody insults you or your girl.
Don’t show your feelings.
Drink lots of beer (predrug era).
Be nice—don’t fight or drink.
Dress right—like everybody else: penny loafers, etc.
Get a good job, work hard and make a lot of money.
Get your own car.
Be well liked, popular.

My grandmother gave me a Bible with a note that said: “Read this every day, Big Boy—it will make you a real man.”

I felt I was probably destined to fail at being a man. I didn’t drink, smoke, or swear. I was the only one in P. S. duPont High School in Wilmington, Delaware, who wore cowboy boots. I did not shave, had only a sparse crop of pubic hair, and was embarrassed in the locker room. I never got a letter in a major sport. To this day I avoid anyone who was in my high school class, especially old football heroes. I hated fraternities. The only thing that saved me from being a complete geek was that I had a car and a girlfriend, although the car was only a Model A Ford and the girlfriend was not a cheerleader.

Today I look at an old picture of that seventeen-year-old boy. He is dressed for the senior prom in a rented white dinner jacket—lanky, loose-jointed, too-large hands on hips, the pose clearly adopted from Gary Cooper. Next to him stands his girlfriend, Janet, already looking mature, dressed in the traditional white gown with the traditional purple orchid, filled with the traditional dreams of settling down. They are both virgins. I see hints in his ungainly adolescent body of the man he will become. In the forward-leaning head, slightly sunken chest, and forward-curved shoulders is the form of a question mark. In the awkwardness of his pose I see him trying to be suave for the occasion and play the man while he still feels himself to be a boy. I know he will feel boyish, not a man among men, well into his mature years.

But it is his face that moves me most. Open. Shining. Filled with a strange power of innocence and strong dreams. His mask of sophistication hides the painful sensitivity he fears is a mark of his inadequacy as a man. I do not see, but remember well, the loneliness, the uncertainty, the feeling of being both proud and embarrassed by the secret life the boy was living.

His clandestine life included many activities not on any list of requirements for being a real man: keeping a diary; exploring nearby woods and longing for the wilderness; sleeping under the stars; taking long walks alone; waiting and watching to see what would happen when a cowbird laid its eggs in a vireo’s nest; masturbating and imagining the woman of his dreams; wondering about the limits of his mind; exploring his dark moods; writing poetry; reading books and playing with ideas; loving his parents; agonizing about war, poverty, injustice, torture; wanting to do something to make the world better.

Today I honor the boy, knowing that he knew far more about manhood than he thought he knew. For instance, the week after the prom, he set out on his walkabout, a trip across the U.S., working on a wheat harvest, ranches, carnivals, etc. Hidden in his young heart was a craving to discover his own definition of manhood. Father to the man who is writing this book, he did not know it but he had already set out on a pilgrimage, a quest to find the Grail.

Deep down, the tectonic plates that have supported the modern world are shifting. Revolutions are daily occurrences; the centers of power are moving. Ancient enemies are making common cause. Paradigms and worldviews are changing overnight. Yesterday’s certainties are today’s superstitions. Today is all chaos and creativity. As the sign down at the local Chevron station says: “If you aren’t harried, worried, and a little bit nuts you don’t understand what’s going on around here.” Nobody can predict the shape of tomorrow’s world.

The earthquake that is shaking men and women, their roles and interrelationships, is part and parcel of this shifting of the world culture’s tectonic plates. The changes in our gender roles are only one aspect of the upheaval that accompanies the death of one epoch and the birth of another. And we will be in the birth process for several generations.

For most of what feminists rightly call Western his-story men were considered the norm for humanity, the standard by which sanity and virtue were judged, and women were considered mysterious, suspect, and slightly deviant. Freud articulated the standard opinion when he asked with supposed seriousness, “What does a woman want?” Until recently, women were characterized as the gender with the problem. But nearly a generation ago, women began to lead the revolution in gender. Feminist philosophers, theologians, poets, and social activists have gone a long way toward articulating a systematic critique of modern society, redefining female identity, and securing equal rights. They have made it abundantly clear that the answer to Freud’s question is, and has always been, obvious to men of goodwill. First and foremost, women want what they have been denied—justice, equality, respect, and power.

Today the question that is the yeast in the social dough is: What do men want? The traditional notions of manhood are under attack and men are being called upon to defend themselves, to change, to become something other than what they have been. The matter was summarized in a recent Newsweek article on “Guns and Dolls”1:

“Perhaps the time has come for a new agenda. Women, after all, are not a big problem. Our society does not suffer from burdensome amounts of empathy and altruism, or a plague of nurturance. The problem is men—or more accurately, maleness…. Men are killing themselves doing all the things that our society wants them to do. At every age they’re dying in accidents, they’re being shot, they drive cars badly, they ride the tops of elevators, they’re two-fisted drinkers. And violence against women is incredibly pervasive. Maybe it’s men’s raging hormones, [or] … because they’re trying to be a man.”

Ask most any man, “How does it feel to be a man these days? Do you feel manhood is honored, respected, celebrated?” Those who pause long enough to consider their gut feelings will likely tell you they feel blamed, demeaned, and attacked. But their reactions may be pretty vague. Many men feel as if they are involved in a night battle in a jungle against an unseen foe. Voices from the surrounding darkness shout hostile challenges: “Men are too aggressive. Too soft. Too insensitive. Too macho. Too power-mad. Too much like little boys. Too wimpy. Too violent. Too obsessed with sex. Too detached to care. Too busy. Too rational. Too lost to lead. Too dead to feel.” Exactly what we are supposed to become is not clear.

Men have only recently begun to explore new visions and definitions of manhood. At no time in recent history have there been so many restless, questioning men. Granted, this yeasty brotherhood is still a minority, but it is a powerful ferment. As yet, there is little literature that speaks to these questing men. The most spiritually adventurous men of our time have moved out on the frontier beyond the reporters, the popularizers, the psychologists, the so-called “experts” about men. Go into a good bookstore and ask if they have a section on women’s studies and you will be shown a rich variety of books on social theory, linguistics, biographies of forgotten heroines, women’s poetry, studies of the goddess, histories of feminism, etc. Ask if they have a men’s studies section and you will be shown a small one with titles relating to (1) gay experience; (2) diatribes about men’s inadequacies and failures (Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, What to Do When He Won’t Change, The Peter Pan Syndrome,2 etc., ad nauseam); or (3) something called “men’s liberation,” which sounds suspiciously like warmed-over feminism with a reverse twist. Not much here to stir the head, the heart, or the gonads.

This book is an attempt to fill this lack. It is not One-Minute Masculinity or simple answers for simple men. It is for a new kind of man who is being forged in the crucible of the chaos of our time. It is for men who are willing to undertake a spiritual journey beginning with the disillusioning awareness that what we have agreed to call “normal” is a facade covering a great deal of alienation. But it goes beyond the valley of the shadow to celebrate a new vision of manhood—a vision of man with fire in his belly and passion in his heart. The path it follows is the ancient way of the hero’s journey that involves departure from everyday normality; descent into the strange land of dis-ease, demons, dreadful powers, treasures, and maidens guarded by dragons; and, finally, a return home to the heart of the ordinary.

I structured the book along the lines of something Paul Tillich, perhaps the greatest philosopher-theologian of our time, was fond of saying. “Every serious thinker,” he said, “must ask and answer three fundamental questions: (1) What is wrong with us? With men? Women? Society? What is the nature of our alienation? Our dis-ease? (2) What would we be like if we were whole? Healed? Actualized? If our potentiality was fulfilled? (3) How do we move from our condition of brokenness to wholeness? What are the means of healing?”
–This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.