Slipstream

I was driving through northern California last week, listening to a podcast about Buddhist meditation. It was a great way to dwindle away the long, dry miles of the Sacramento Valley, especially since the speaker didn’t talk like your typical Zen-centered facilitator. A cowboy poet would have been more like it, or cowboy koan-ist, as it were, except that he sounded more Brooklyn than Dallas, with a sprinkling perhaps of the great Midwest.

I particularly appreciated his discussion about his own experiences with meditation—how it had helped to bring about a sense of happiness and balance and equanimity and connectedness to the world around him. Meditation, he believes also made him more intuitive, which he thinks is a real cool thing for guys. “I was never intuitive being a guy,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense to me. Why would anyone want to have feelings like that?”

When he said this, he spoke with the same easy drawl he’d been using all along, a way of talking that somehow emphasized his roots as a real man, despite his having slipped into a more spiritual and enlightened persuasion.

What concerns me about casual remarks such as this is the implication behind them, that normal men are not intuitive beings, which means, by extension, to be male and intuitive is to be abnormal.

I’m sure he meant nothing by these comments, and I do appreciate his openness and frankness, yet I’m nonetheless reminded of the countless remarks of this sort that offhandedly typecast men and try to define what it means to be one of the guys, that is, someone who’s not intuitive or sensitive or self-aware or thoughtful or caring. Those who grow up not fitting into these stereotypes, who are bombarded with messages that define what it means to be male, reminded over and over that they experience the world in a way that leaves them out of the inner sanctum, are often left with a perception of themselves that make them feel inadequate, odd, and anything but normal. At least that had been the case for me.

When I was a freshman in high school, our PE class met two days a week to learn about men’s health and their sexual peculiarities. At one point, our gym teacher showed us a film—a fifties style docudrama—that tried to explain how boys are emotionally different from girls. Boys, it seems, are naturally unfeeling and much more direct when expressing themselves. Girls, on the other hand, are given to emotionality and would rather dance around a topic than risk hurting someone’s feelings.

The film illustrated the point by dramatizing the way teenage boys and girls deal with friends who have a problem with body odor. The concerned girls dropped carefully targeted hints to their female friend that tried to suggest ways to attend to her BO. The boys, on the other hand, simply threw their smelly male cohort into the shower, clothes and all, without thought to his feelings or reactions or natural inclinations. They were just being guys, after all, and what could be more normal than that?

After watching the film, I knew—although I would never admit it—that I could never do that to someone without taking into account his feelings, no more than I could be thrown into the shower without feeling deeply embarrassed and hurt myself. Once again, I was faced with another indicator that something was decidedly wrong with me. Never, no matter how I tried, could I ever be one of the guys.

From the time we plop out of the womb, we’re inundated with messages—both overt and not so—that tell us how to live and think and feel and see the world. Gross generalizations that define what it means to be a woman or man, to be sinful or pure, to be productive or lazy, to be stupid or smart, to be rich or poor. Yet this one-size-fits-all mentality is based on anything but reality and achieves little more than to confuse, hurt, and often destroy those who cannot meet the constant barrage of expectations.

And perhaps the greatest tragedy in all this is how we come to believe these gross generalizations and consequently judge ourselves with the harshest of condemnations for not living up to them. We indeed become our own worse enemies, no longer believing in ourselves or our ability to reach any sense of fulfillment or self-satisfaction because we’ve become convinced that achieving them is permanently outside our capabilities.

I suspect if we’re ever to pull ourselves out of this mire, we must start by each of us looking at our own complicity in generating these expectations and perpetuating the generalized myths. Not an easy task when we’ve come to identify ourselves by such sweeping ideas. Yet if we don’t strive to examine the things we say and the impact they might have on those around us, we may be inadvertently contributing to the hurt and frustration of others as we impose our simplistic justifications and expectations upon them.

Even casual remarks, such as those spoken by the speaker on the podcast, have the potential for contributing to the low sense of self-worth that seems to have reached epic proportions in our culture. How else do you explain our rampant consumerization and consumption of resources and addiction to entertainment? We must constantly go outside ourselves for validation because we’re afraid or incapable of finding it within.

And all this from a podcast on Buddhist meditation.

Perhaps if I were a more normal type of guy, I wouldn’t have noticed or cared about the speaker’s comments. Perhaps I would have simply shrugged them off and listened to the rest of the discussion without reaction. Perhaps I would have instead turned on sports radio and listened to a huffing and puffing announcer and his harrowing attacks against superstar athletes and the teams for which they played. Perhaps then I would have known what it felt like to be one of the guys.

 

Tags: Buddhism, gender roles, meditation