Dear Z.,
When I was in seventh grade in rural New Mexico, the bus ride home from school took nearly two hours. I liked to sit in the back with the older kids because I liked the music they listened to and their conversation, although sometimes I didn’t fully understand.
I had a crush on a girl who sat in the back of the bus. She was a junior in high school. I’ll call her Kim. Kim liked orange Jeep Wranglers with diamond plate on the sides, and asked thought-provoking questions of the motocross boys who wore earrings in both ears and called everything they didn’t like, ‘gay’.
One afternoon, on the bumpy back roads near Stanley, Kim asked the crew in the back of bus #64, “if you were the opposite gender for one day, what would you do?”
The conversation that ensued has stayed with me for more than 25 years. Not because it was profound, rather the opposite. Nearly all of the boys who answered the question alluded to masturbation, sex or pleasure; Kim herself said she would hit on her female friends and see what that felt like (I had no idea what it meant to “hit on” someone, so used my imagination).
What fascinates me now about that conversation is the window it offered into how curious a bunch of surfacely-homophobic boys were about feeling pleasure in a female body (not to mention the implications about their curiosity about other boys. In that context, in the late 1990s, no one I knew was out as gay or trans).
The boys in the back of the bus—myself included—were being conditioned and trained to be deeply hetero-normative. And yet here was a moment of raw curiosity and desire revealed amongst and despite the daily mental carnage that toxic patriarchy wrought.
One gem I took from that conversation was that men and boys were not who they appeared to be; the masks we bore were thin, and not always consensually worn. As obvious as that truth seems to be now, it offered me a sense, as an awkward pre-teen, that other boys were just as complex and nuanced as I knew myself to be, even if in moments they weren’t able or willing to show it.
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Another story, from the locker room at Dimond High, Anchorage, AK, circa 2002:
An older boy, half dressed and angry, was talking shit about a girl I knew. I don’t recall specifically what he said, just the feeling of alarm and disgust that I felt in my body when a handful of other boys laughed with him. My heart pounded with fear and resolve. It was one of those moments where I knew I would hate myself if I didn’t say something. So I did.
That part of the locker room went silent. The older boy got right up in my face and sneered, “are you defending her?”
To this day, I wish that I had stood my ground, in my boxers and getting ready for P.E. class, and looked him right in the eyes and replied calmly with something like, “does she need defending?”
But I didn’t. At 16, I so feared being even further alienated from all of those boy humans that I took the shame he was giving me and, backing away, I said, ‘No.’
That moment was a turning point for me. I stopped laughing at the locker room jokes. For a long time after that, most of my friends were female. Somewhere deep down, I did want to protect them. Somewhere deeper down, I wanted to protect my own mother—your Oma K.—from the abusive men in her life. Men who had hurt me also.
Throughout my younger life, some boys began to perceive me as a threat. Not because I was strong or intimidating, I realized, rather because I tried to show respect to girls, and in some cases had earned their trust.
A study abroad housemate once insinuated that I was a predator because the only person I spoke to at a party he threw outside my bedroom door at midnight was a girl I knew from class. I remember telling her how annoyed I was that the party was happening, because, once again, I was too cowardly to speak to my housemate directly.
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As I recount these stories, I want to be clear that while I continue to choose with my life and body to break as many generational cycles of harm as I can, the same elements of misogyny and patriarchy that I have loathed in other males live in me also, and that I, too, have behaved in ways that have caused harm to women and girls.
I feel really sad about that.
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In my experience of myself and others, there’s a natural tendency for the masculine to want to ‘fix’ things. Often enough, we want to fix something so that someone else feels better, which often just means we just want to feel better.
Here’s an important little piece: more often than not, Z., when it comes to relationship with humans, there’s nothing to fix, especially in the moments where something feels broken. Just sit with them, and yourself, and feel the thing and breathe.
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Since #MeToo exploded in late 2017, I’ve noticed men’s work in the West has become trendy, even commodified. Everyone seems to have their thing, teaching men to be men in all sorts of newfangled ways: the guru-recovery crowd has dispersed power amongst many instead of few; courses on integrating and accepting the inner feminine compete for attention with experts on cold immersion science and breathwork techniques.
Hell, I’m one of those folks, peddling presence and curiosity in hopes of experiencing a more balanced society within my lifetime.
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This being male thing is a powerful force in the world. It is a privilege, but more than that, it is a responsibility. Some shirk the responsibility, and others shirk the gender entirely. It makes sense to me. Some things seem too broken and hopeless to continue for some folks that changing direction becomes the best option.
While it’s probably safe to say that many men feel freer of our conditioning in 2023 than anytime since at least the dawn of western civilization (who knows what that means for your generation, as things are speeding up at some kind of exponential pace—maybe gender will be irrelevant a few decades from now, and I’ll still not understand the conversations happening at the back of the school bus), there’s still so much work to do.
I’m here for all of it, as long as the unfolding results from so-called ‘men’s work’ show up as us considering the feminine in ever-deeper ways, trusting and accepting her experience, paying her more money, freeing her body from the talons of law, asking for and honoring her consent, and learning that sharing power actually and tangibly increases that which lies within us.
As for you, all I have is curiosity and wonder. Who are you? Who will you become? What will you value? Will gender—yours or others—play an important role in your life? If so, how? And what kinds of relationships will you build with other boys, with men, with girls and women and all those between and without?
For my part, I’m keeping my awareness on all the little comments that float around in my mind—things said to me as a kid—and let nearly all float away with the tide. And, I’ll always be there if or when you have questions, or just need someone to not fix something. (Unless you need something fixed, in which case I can do that, too.)
All my bones, little one.
as you’re starting to call me: Day.
Sean, thank you for your vulnerability. We are in the same niche - writing to our sons. I hope he reads these letters too. As much as I would like for my to come across these someday, I realize I’m writing more for myself just as much as I am for him.
Givers. That is the word. Try to fix it, protect it. Blame ourselves if doesn't turn out the way we want. Givers.