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What’s Great About Guys?
My men’s group has been meeting regularly
since 1979. We began meeting when we all lived in
Marin County, California and felt the need for a
supportive environment to discuss the changes going
on in our lives. We’re seven guys who now
range in age from 61 to 71. During the last 30
years, two guys have dropped out and two guys have
been added. The last “newcomer” joined
the group 19 years ago. We now meet for a 5 day
gathering four times a year. It’s something
that we all look forward to and never miss. We met
recently in Seattle were T lives now and during our
time together I realized something important about
men that I had missed.
First, it struck me that our current cultural
view of men is often very negative. Second, I had a
flash of recognition of how truly wonderful guys
really are. As a culture we seem to have accepted
that (to some degree at least) women, gays, and
racial and ethnic minorities are human and deserve
care and respect. However, many believe it is still
OK to put down men. There’s a book (one of
many) I saw recently called All Men Are Jerks,
Until Proven Otherwise by Daylle Deanna Schwartz.
The book was published by major publisher and Ms.
Schwartz has appeared on Good Morning America and
Oprah. No one could get away with writing a book
titled All Women Are Jerks or All Blacks Are Jerks
or All Jews Are Jerks, but we still seem to feel
that male bashing is funny.
What would the world be like if we honored the
men in our lives rather than ridiculing them? Let
me tell you a few things that I like about the guys
in my men's group (I could write a book on each
one…but, I’ll be brief).
Terry waited until he found the right woman,
married, had two kids, and raised them to be kind,
loving, and involved in the world. He’s still
madly in love with his wife, and it shows. Jim
retired after a successful career, has become a
late-in-life grandfather, mentors young men, is an
incredible artist, and works daily to be a better
father. Del raised a son and a daughter, re-married
and helped raise his new wife’s daughter. A
superb father to all, Kenji takes his health
seriously and keeps fit in body and spirit.
He’s never had kids of his own, but has been a
terrific father to a number of young men who have
come into his life.
Derrick makes great wine from grapes he nurtures
like his children. When he married he stepped into
a family with four kids. He soon became a man of
value in their lives and every day teaches them
what it means to be loved and supported. Tim built
a school (the program, the teachers, parents, kids,
buildings, the stone-work, the driveway—the
whole shebang). He also stepped into the father
role when he married. He’s a loving, creative
spirit, who continues to heal old wounds and
deepens his relationship with his wife, family
friends, and the school community.
What do these guys have in common? They care.
They’re not afraid to feel. They are strong in
ways that really count. They are always learning
and growing emotionally. They are creative. They
have real courage. They can be counted upon. They
aren’t afraid to fail. They never give up.
They love and are loved. They act like men at a
time when it isn’t always easy to do so.
Given the climate of the times, guys often hide
their goodness because it is sometimes seen as
“bad.” Guys restrain our natural desire
to be polite and hold the door for a woman for fear
we will be labeled chauvinists. We hold back our
tears for fear of being labeled “soft.”
We take Viagra to make our erections hard for fear
that being soft will label us as
“impotent.”
One of the wonderful things about being in a
men’s group for 30 years is that we let
ourselves be seen—in all our human-male-flawed
glory. It’s rare these days that men let their
goodness show, even to themselves. It’s even
more difficult to take the risk to let it out to
women.
One woman who found a novel way to learn about
men is Norah Vincent. Norah wanted to know what
life was really like for men. Many women have long
been convinced that men have always had it better,
in every way. To find out for herself if this was
actually true, and to see where the common
perception fell short, Norah did it: for eighteen
months she became a guy. She lived in the world of
her alter ego, Ned, with an ever-present five
o’clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rimmed
glasses, and her own size 11 ½ shoes—a
perfect disguise that allowed her to observe and
participate in the world of men as an insider.
Reading her account in her book, Self-Made Man:
One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back
Again, I thought, “this is a woman who
literally walked a mile in my shoes and
‘got’ what it’s like being a
man.” Dealing with the "opposite sex" brought
some deeply disturbing insights.
“I thought,” she said, that
“dating was going to be the fun part, the
easiest part.” She talked like a kid in a
candy-store, finally getting her chance to be a guy
and ask out any woman she wanted (the fact that she
described herself as a lesbian feminist made the
prospect even more enticing). What she found was
very different than expected. “I was in for a
mountain of rejections, and the self-hatred that
came with being the sad pick-up artist, the wooing
barnacle that every woman is forever flicking off
her sleeve.”
She discovered that it wasn’t so easy being
a man in a world where women had a kind of power
that was often invisible, but could cut deeply into
a man’s soul. “As I would soon learn,
that’s how it went for most guys. It was just
the way of things in the wild when you were male.
You were the eager athlete, the brightly colored
bird doing the dance, and she was the German judge
begrudging you the nod.” She came to
understand how difficult it is for men to be
themselves and how easily they can be wounded by
women who don’t realize their power to
hurt.
I wish more people could get an inside look at
the inner workings of men today. I think
they’d find that, contrary to popular belief,
men are quite wonderful.
If you’re a woman, in what ways do you find
men to be worthwhile? If you’re a guy, in what
ways are you most proud of being a man? What’s
great about guys?
©2010 Jed
Diamond
See Books,
Issues
+ Suicide
* * *
Wealth can't buy health, but health can buy
wealth. - Henry David Thoreau
Jed Diamond
is the internationally best-selling author of nine
books including Male
Menopause,
The
Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing. The 4 Key Causes
of Depression and
Aggression. and
Mr.
Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the Irritable
Male Syndrome. His
upcoming book, Tapping Power: A Man’s Guide to
Eliminating Pain, Stress, Anger, Depression and
Other Ills Using the Revolutionary Tools of Energy
Psychology will be available next year. For over 38
years he has been a leader in the field of men's
health. He is a member of the International
Scientific Board of the World Congress on
Men’s Health and has been on the Board of
Advisors of the Men’s Health Network since its
founding in 1992. His work has been featured in
major newspapers throughout the United States
including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall
Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA
Today. He has been featured on more than 1,000
radio and T.V. programs including The View with
Barbara Walters, Good Morning America, Inside
Edition, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, To Tell the Truth,
Extra, Leeza, Geraldo, and Joan Rivers. He also did
a nationally televised special on Male Menopause
for PBS. He looks forward to your feedback.
E-Mail.
You can visit his website at www.menalive.com
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