“How sad that men should base an entire civilization on the principle of paternity, upon the legal ownership and presumed responsibility for children, and then never really get to know their sons and daughters very well.”
— Phyllis Chesler, About Men.
My daughter got married in very hip Brooklyn earlier this year, and shortly before the wedding, she called me up to tell me two things: first, there was a dress code, and she hoped I would be agreeable to wearing a sports jacket and leaving my blue jeans behind. Secondly, she told me I would not be escorting her down the aisle. You know, she sort of joked, the end of the patriarchy.
I know Emma well. It was no joke. When I told my male friends about this, they gasped in shock and then sympathy but I told Emma – and believe – she was never mine to give away. She handled it quite well.
This end of the patriarchy thing was not news to me. I was not only part of the decline of the patriarchy, I had been witnessing it and reading about it for years. Frank Pittman was an author and psychiatrist, he specialized in treating men, in many ways he saw masculinity as an illness unto itself. He studied men his entire career and he wrote the best book I know of about men, it was called Man Enough: Fathers, Sons And The Search For Masculinity. Dr. Pittman died in 2012.
I have been re-reading it this week. I have been writing about men a bit.
The family history of fatherhood is now an unmistakable pattern as the world has changed over the past century, wrote Pittman. “We are in the declining years of patriarch, a system of male dominance and privilege in which the world and domain over it was passed from God to Adam to father to son. As patriarchy wanes, so of course does the patrimony.”
For several hundred years now, each generation of fathers has passed on less and less to his sons; not just less power but less wisdom, and less love. We have finally reached the point, concluded Pittman, where most fathers are either absent or largely irrelevant in the loves of their sons. “The baby has been thrown out with the bath water, and the pater has been dismissed with the patriarchy.”
How prescient he was.
Everyone seems to be floundering around, not quite knowing what to do with men, who cling to the tentacles of the power and are busy setting fire to the world, as they have always done. More and more people understand they need to be stopped, but it may take more time than we have.
No one really knows what father or masculinity means any longer, or what to do about men. No one seems to like men very much, everyone has their own horror story about them. Women everywhere are in the ascent, it is becoming clear that they are the only hope for the world. In my lifetime, it has become quite clear that the only thing women can’t do that men can do is be a father.
And for that, that is too often the saddest part of their story.
The history of the creation of the patriarchy is quite familiar. It is described in the Old Testament. In Rome, the father had power of life and death over the members of his household, including his children. Throughout history, young men have been called upon to prove their masculinity by their willingness to go to war and die, young women have been called upon to prove their femininity by their willingness to die for their man. Women have been made to appear small, dumb and helpless so men could feel big and strong and brave and clever.
This idea is shattering, all over our world.
In colonial America, wrote Pittman, the father was the primary parent and caretaker. “Books of child-rearing advice were addressed to him; the law had preferred him to mother in the matter of child custody….Women were considered too irrational and unsteady to take the lead here.”
The Industrial Revolution doomed the patriarch, it took men away from their families and separated their work from their home. They became strangers to their own children. This, wrote Pittman, doomed the patriarchy to eventual oblivion, and doomed the patriarchs to lifetimes of obligation, loneliness and isolation.
As Phyllis Chesler wrote, how said that so many men never get to know their children well. I am coming to see that I am one of these men in some ways, I was always away, traveling for work, out reporting stories, running to various mountains, moving to my farm, learning to herd sheep, rushing off to interview people, crazy and distracted by work and other things.
I love my daughter, of course, and she loves me, but it is very difficult for men in our world to truly get to know their children, our economy, culture and political system make it difficult, sometimes impossible. When men had to leave home and work, masculinity began to be defined in terms of money. Father The Provider, bringing things home to the family rather than living and working at home with the family.
Men became strangers in their own lives, remote players in the great drama of family life. My father never had breakfast at home, not once in his entire married life. He was rarely home at night, we were strangers to him and him to us. While our mother knew every intimate detail of our life, he knew little of us, he was always struggling to catch up and never could. I was hungry for him, I came to understand my life had to go forward without him, and it did.
After the Industrial Revolution, mothers and children discovered, for the first time in human history, that they could manage quite well without a man around. Fathers became clueless and bumbling, objects of joke and ridicule, confused about what it meant to be a father.
Pittman was not the first to see Father The Provider as a sad figure, “leaving a life without dignity or rest, and certainly without the glory and reverence his paterfamilias grandfather had known.” As the father’s role became primarily economic, the rich and economically successful father became a potential tyrant, but the father who wasn’t rich and famous was an inescapable failure, a disappointment, a buffoon. Fathers were not judged by how loving and caring they were, but how much money they made.
I struggle with this today and still, I am always telling my daughter and wife that I wish I had been able to amass more money to leave them when I die, it haunts me that I can’t. Both of them bristle at this, they say they can take care of themselves, they are not interested in the money I earn. It is important for me to believe them.
It is not fashionable in our time to worry much about men, or have much sympathy for them. They are doing too much harm.
All you have to do is watch TV and see them bellowing and posturing in rage, and you understand what Pittman and so many others have been trying to tell us. These are sad and hollow men, cut off from the nurturing and healing power of children and family, often isolated from their families. I read last week that scores of congressmen sleep in their offices at night, shower in the congressional gym, fly home on weekends to try to get to know their families.
No wonder. Imagine how different our political culture would be if the children lived with them, were nearby as they did their work.
The power men on Wall Street are no better off, commuting long distances, working brutal and stressful hours, their children a footnote in their lives. It is not an accident that these men make economic and literal war, and seem to be bent on conquering and destroying the world, or at least indifferent to its suffering.
Good riddance to the patriarchy, but goodbye also to the point and meaning of life, which is not to make money but to make connections, to know and love and support our wives, to know and love and support our children. No wonder these people are so angry.
Pittman wrote in Man Enough, which I have now read a half dozen times, that life for most boys and for many grown men is a frustrating search for the lost father who has not yet offered protection, provision, nurturing, modeling, or, especially, anointment. Men learn from their fathers how to be a man, or they don’t learn it at all.
Freud and Jung and Pittman all reached the same conclusion. All those tough guys who fill up the jails, who scream and rage on cable news and presidential debates, who fill up divorce courts and brutalize women and children, all the corporate and trophy hunters and war-mongers, all the philanderers, contenders, strivers and controllers who fill the appointment calendars of shrinks, every one of them, says Pittman, are suffering from Father Hunger.
Their fathers were absent from their lives. In the absence of fathers, perhaps what the world needs is not more distant mothers or more subservient wives but a new and better class of male mentors, one of the very few things we men can actually do for one another in their time of trouble and confusion.
Robert Bly, the one-time patron saint of the short-lived men’s movement, called it the “male mother.” Men need male mothers.
I mentor young men whenever I can, although in my lifetime it is now seen as dangerous for older men to be anywhere near younger men. Another setback for men.
I have always suffered from Father Hunger, my father taught me nothing about being a man. I work almost every day of life to understand what it really means to be a man, and I am 68 years old and I will tell you with a sometimes heavy heart that I have no idea.