On Men and Boys
This is the way the fucking world ends! Look at this fucking shit we're in, man! Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Apocalypse Now
I smoked toad venom once.
Twice if we’re counting the second time.
When it comes to tripping, exiled prophet of psychedelia Timothy Leary always promoted the importance of ‘set and setting’, i.e. you need to be in a good emotional space (mind-set) and in a safe space (setting).
Who could argue against that?
Me.
I could.
Not that I disagree with him, but the greatest teachings don’t always come gift wrapped.
And so, when I took that tryptamine amphibian hit, straight from the glands of the Colorado River toad…
I had a fucking terrible time.
Because about half an hour before the bomb was dropped, a simple, shitty text from a male friend of mine shattered me into a thousand agonising splinters. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it, but it was too late to stabilise my broken heart, the ceremony was scheduled, the pipe was loaded, and that’s the ‘set’ I was in - fragile, delicate and extremely sensitive - when I banged up a dreadful headful of crystallised toad venom.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the main takeaway from this apocalyptic Boschian experience was the message – you are fragile, delicate and extremely sensitive.
But wait - there was more.
These qualities are neither masculine nor feminine, said Mr Toad. They are human.
These are the qualities men have denied.
And these are the qualities that will make men whole again.
The phrase ‘life changing’ is a cliché.
I like clichés.
They’re founded in truth.
The toad changed my life, rebranding my patriarchal model of masculinity – tough, strong, invulnerable, impervious to pain - in about 15 minutes of swirling fractal shrapnel madness.
And therein lies the paradox – pain is perhaps the greatest teacher of all. What happens when you make the very thing that helps us evolve, a sign of weakness?
This.
This shit we’re in right now.
Tate. Trump. Musk.
Hollow men. Synthetic men, hateful, power mad men, full of bluster and bile.
Of course, it strikes me that I may be the worst person in the world to comment on masculinity.
Because for the past 30 years I’ve run men’s groups. This means that I’ve been in the privileged position of being surrounded by men whose primary desire is to evolve, to be accountable, to become conscious, to be the best dads, partners and friends they can possibly be. They come week in, week out, year after year, decade after decade – this is no drop-in circle. This is serious commitment.
These are lifers.
We rarely talk about masculinity. We don’t moan about women, or what we have lost.
I’d say the bulk of these men are driven by a desire to do a better job than their fathers did. And while most ultimately succeed, to do so means facing the pain of accepting they’ve inherited far more of their fathers than they’d like.
I know I did.
I learn a lot by being asked questions. I often hear myself say something that I didn’t know I knew.
I was on a podcast recently and the host asked me if there was a pivotal moment in a man’s life when he became a man.
I heard myself say - when he stops denying his father within himself.
Didn’t realise I knew that one, and… didn’t like it much either.
I’m going to digress here a bit, but bear with me - I have a point.
You may or may not have heard of the former British sports commentator David Icke. Nowadays he’s probably best described as a conspiracy theorist, although he prefers the title, ‘Son of the Godhead’.
Why not?
Icke believes an interdimensional race of reptilian shapeshifters has hijacked the Earth, and that many public figures are part of this alien race, engineering a global fascist New World Order by keeping humanity in a perpetual state of fear.
Icke believes the only way to defeat the reptile influence is for people to wake up to the truth and fill their hearts with love.
Damn.
It kind of adds up.
But, don’t worry, I haven’t flipped on you, although you’d be forgiven for thinking – wait a minute… the guy started off talking about smoking toad venom, and now he’s introducing the idea that the world is run by reptiles…
I don’t believe in Icke’s theory, although I do like his treatment plan.
And I believe that Tate, Trump, Musk etc have extremely over-developed basal ganglia, colloquially known as the ‘lizard brain’, the most primitive part of the brain responsible for basic survival instincts and behaviours.
In layman’s terms this means they’ll tear your fucking heart out to get ahead.
They’re cold blooded, ruthless, heartless, carnivorous predators.
The Donald may be an ignorant man, a stupid man, a thoughtless, insensitive, bully of a man. But his primitive instincts are intact, as are the rest of his evil posse. They know how to exploit the void created by…
My generation.
The New Man.
I never wanted to be like my dad. My dad is much more like the Donald, rigid, bullying, authoritarian, domineering, misogynistic.
Naturally, I tried to be the opposite.
My first wife summed it up very well – your problem Jerry is you have a dad who hates women and a mum who hates men.
And so, in response to that hot mess, all I could do was be neutral. I think that’s what New Man really was - No Man.
Out of defiance of my dad, I became No Man. Out of loyalty to my mum, I became No Man.
What this meant was that I became covert, unthreatening, passive, controlling, manipulative… fake. Invisible. And with a giant shadow waiting to burst out. Which it inevitably did, destroying my first marriage and ensuring my daughters grew up separated from their father.
As an analyst of mine once said about my unformed masculinity – I think what we have here is a spinal issue.
Men like me - and we are legion - rejected our dads both outwardly and inwardly. We became nice. And in doing so - we became hollow.
The reptile men recognised the frustration in younger males, how the absence of positive role models had created a vacuum they could exploit (as another prominent sports figure, former footballer and England manager Sir Gareth Southgate pointed out in the BBC's Dimbleby Lecture this week) and how easy it was to seduce them with old school ideas of masculinity - that feminism had robbed them of their birthright, how men were the natural rulers, that it was time to return to the old ways.
Young men signed up in their droves.
Perhaps scarier still, women too.
Because guess what?
Women didn’t want No Man either.
Plus, misogyny is cultural, not gender specific, and women absorb a lot of the same messages that men do, and so for some, dominant, controlling men can seem attractive.
No Man was weak, insipid, bland, slippery, agreeable. Apologetic.
Reptile Man is defined, recognisable, powerful, has fast cars, beautiful trophy wives and unimaginable wealth.
And to young, lost, frightened people, and older people raised with outdated attitudes, Option B can seem much more attractive.
Plus, and this is something mind-blowing that my wife pointed out to me this week from an Instagram post she saw by feminist author Rose Hackman – Reptile Man and No Man are in league with each other.
No Man needs Reptile Man because it makes him look nice. One of the good guys. As long as Reptile Man exists, No Man can always appear like the lesser evil. He has the moral high-ground. No Man’s passivity, silence allows Reptile Man to thrive. He benefits from the chaos Reptile Man causes, positioning himself as the ‘good guy’ without ever having to take real risks or stand for something.
Reptile Man is terrifying, but No Man is far more insidious because he hides behind Reptile Man's monstrosity, remaining untouched, unchallenged. Together, they form a vicious ecosystem where nothing changes - where evil thrives because of quiet complicity, not overt violence.
We’re fucked.
Unless…
We find some middle ground. Mature, self-aware men who model integrity, emotionally intelligent, sexually evolved and boundaried, confident enough to share their frailties, their vulnerabilities, their weaknesses.
Men willing to admit when they are wrong.
Adults.
To me this is one of the most fundamental goals of therapy. To become adult. It’s not something that just happens. It’s a mature, evolved way of being that takes time, effort and the mentorship of healthy elders.
Biological age in no way guarantees adulthood.
And the lack of inspirational, evolved, strong elders to guide young people to a place of maturity goes a long way to explaining why so many belligerent children in man suits are running and ruining the world.
Petulant toddlers make terrible politicians and even worse world leaders.
As fathers, Emory Tate, Errol Musk and Fred Trump all embodied extreme, patriarchal masculinity, modelling strength as equating to power, kindness equating to weakness. They were cold, distant, unloving and often cruel figures, but unlike the men I work with, their reptilian sons are shaped by their own patriarchs - shadow fathers they’re either trying to embody or outdo. Scratch the surface, you’ll find the ghosts of the men who came before them.
Even the so-called men’s movement isn’t immune to these masculinist ideologies. Secretive initiation rituals, blogs, forums, websites, social media accounts, and online communities make up what is collectively known as the ‘manosphere’, which refers to a collection of online communities, including men's rights activists (MRAs), incels (involuntary celibates), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUAs), and fathers' rights groups. These groups are united by their promotion of masculinity, anti-feminism, and, in many cases, misogyny.
The problem then of course spreads to girls and young women who end up on the receiving end of this dogshit. In my practice I’ve lost count of how many clients I have with daughters who self-harm, attempt suicide, or who are sectioned in psychiatric hospitals.
This week Netflix aired the masterful series Adolescence. Within days it had become a global sensation because of the themes it explored that touched a deep nerve in our society – absent fathers, teenage boys influenced to violence and abuse by online manosphere ideology, the dangers of social media, male rage, social expectations of masculinity and the state of our education system.
No Man didn’t work for me.
It didn’t work for my first wife or my children. It hasn’t worked for our society, and by denying the sins of our fathers we unwittingly opened the door for the reptiles to invade the world.
Sir Gareth Southgate is right to call for better role models, we need prominent figures to speak out, but as the world’s worst marketer I’m painfully aware of my own invisibility, and I’ll be honest with you, even though I’m told I have one of the bigger and certainly long running men’s group practices in the UK…
That amounts to about 35 men.
There is absolutely zero demand for what I do. At most I get 1 or 2 enquiries per year.
And this is where I fear Sir Gareth’s inspiring speech will make little difference. As Jack Thorne, writer of Adolescence said on the BBC’s Newsnight program:
“We've been having that conversation since I was a kid. This has got to be a point where we do something a bit more radical than that. It's not about role models.
Role models obviously can have a huge impact on people. But truthfully, we've got to change the culture that they're consuming and how our technology is facilitating this culture.
It was a really interesting speech, but I was hoping he was going to propose more radical things than he did."
It’s time for No Man to step up, not man up. You don’t need to smoke toad venom, and you don’t need to revert to outdated stereotypes of masculinity. And it’s a much subtler process than axe throwing or sweat lodges. Jack Thorne is right. Just because a good man like Southgate speaks out doesn’t mean the role models will magically appear – I gave up asking men who their positive role models were years ago because I’d just be met with blank stares.
Role models need to be grown.
And non-masculinist talking circles are the petri dish in which we can change culture. This too may sound like an overwhelming thing to achieve, but I can tell you it really isn’t. Even when I used to run groups for male perpetrators of domestic violence, it wasn’t hard to get them to change their violent behaviours. Because we created a space where the societal rules were different – give a man a non-judgemental environment where he can cry, be vulnerable, be sad, broken, show his frailties, he will quickly evolve.
And if he then goes home and models that to his children, you have the possibility of a real, lasting cultural shift.
Join a group, create a group, online, offline, who fucking cares, join a group - it really isn’t rocket science…
Just join a group - learn how to talk and share your emotions rather than isolate or sulk. It’s not complex.
It’s really not complex.
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot
Resources:
bell hooks (African-American author, feminist, and social activist)
The Centre for Gender Psychology (Nick Duffell)
Men’s Work UK (Theo Youngstein)
Father Lessons (Mark McBennett)
Make Me a Man – The Director’s Cut (Men’s work film by Mai Hua & Jerry Hyde)
The Feminist On Cell Block Y (Californian prisoner who studies and organizes around feminism and toxic masculinity with his fellow young incarcerated men)
amazing amazing. i hope legions of men - no men intergrate this. let’s share this.
I enjoy reading your writing. You are amazing, and I love that you’re helping all our amazing men out there heal!