Creating The Webbd Wheel: Sacred Male Energy
In which healthy men sustain and support one another ...
I am not a man. I have a beloved brother. I have a biological father and had an adoptive father. I raised two sons and was married twice to men. I have cherished male friends. But I can never enter into the internal experience of being male.
I have been assaulted and raped. My boundaries have been violated by men. I’ve had a male stalker. And I cannot enter into the internal experience of being male.
I do know something about being a woman, but I don’t know everything about other women.
I preface with this because we seem to have lost our clarity and crisp boundaries around who we are and who we are not. This is tragic, not because of politics or ideology, but because I firmly believe in the sacred balance of male and female in every aspect of life. It’s more than belief. I revere it. I honor it. I don’t use the word “sacred” lightly.
In post #51 of The Hanged Man, we spend time with the male initiates during a period when the men and women are separated. Again, this has nothing to do with the current political and social hysteria around exclusion and inclusion. I don’t say we aren’t faced with social injustices such as racism and many other “isms”; but this is a work of fiction, a work of imagination set in another world.
In terms of male and female power, I believe it’s essential for women to have safe and private spaces to be with other women, and likewise essential for men to have safe and private spaces to be with other men. This private time with our own biological sex allows us to maintain our health and identity and benefit from the wisdom and leadership of our elders and the innocence and enthusiasm of youth. Women learn what it is to be a woman at every stage of life. Men learn what it is to be a man at every stage of life. Both women and men return to their mixed-sex communities strengthened, healthier, more secure, and more self-loving.
That last is the most important piece. If we cannot honor and respect our own sexuality, our bodies and physical experience as men and women, and all our physiologically and biologically-based behaviors, priorities, and needs, we will be unable to honor and respect the opposite sex. If we hate ourselves and are self-destructive, we disrupt the balance and allow things like rape culture, misogyny, and toxic masculinity to take root, which is destructive for everybody. The sacred balance breaks down. Men and women cannot benefit from one another’s viewpoint, experience, abilities, and strengths. We work against our bodies rather than with them. Our procreative ability is threatened; we’re no longer able to raise healthy, happy offspring. I could not teach my sons to be healthy men. I could only try to teach them what a healthy man looks like to me, which is not the same thing at all. Boys need healthy men and girls need healthy women. Boys need healthy women and girls need healthy men.
Hate, intolerance, bigotry, and self-hatred do not create healthy men and women.
My heart aches for all of us who have been amputated from our rightful pleasure and joy in our bodies. In this post, Radulf experiences awed gratitude for his body, his living body, with its shape and power and abilities. It’s a deeply sensual experience, by which I mean he feels deeply with the aid of his senses. He marvels at the shape of his own hand, and the scars of living it bears. He feels akin to the natural world in his powerful maleness. He comes home to himself in ways few of us ever achieve. This wholeness, this sense of belonging, is vanishing as the overculture oppresses, represses, and increasingly distorts our rightful sensuality, sexuality, and physicality and the planet becomes saturated with our poisons and overpopulated by our species.
Yet I can imagine a different, healthier culture in which we respect and glory in our lives and the lives of others. All others. I can imagine a world in which hatred and violence are an aberration rather than the norm. Perhaps if we can imagine such a world, we can create one.
(This essay was published with post #51 of The Hanged Man.)