Today, I went to the congregation, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation services. There’s a gentleman there by the name of Emrys Dant Statton, I think. I’m not exactly sure of his last name. He talked today about the new form of masculine love, or something like that. I didn’t exactly follow exactly what he was saying. The things he was examining seemed fairly personal and not necessarily universal. I was reminded of a lot of what I know to be true about, say, masculinity. One of the things that Emrys was saying was the cultural stereotypes of masculinity. He was talking about how those may be obsolete or aren’t as valuable as they were once thought to be.

I was considering that because he mentioned certain things, like being a leader of a country or something like this. I think he was talking about traditional alpha male rules. That was interesting, because masculinity isn’t about the external trappings of masculinity as much as it’s about being a self-leader. That’s really the key to it. The masculine self, the masculine identity, is the part that has a direction. It is the part that has somewhere to go and something to do. That’s the masculine identity. The part that just knows what direction it wants to go and just wants people to come with it. You know, “Let’s find some people to do these different tasks along the way as we head in this general direction over here.”, and that’s the kind of leadership that I think most people consider the traditionally masculine types of leadership.

Often then the results are, you know, something empire, social structure, build a building, build a football club, whatever it is. That’s what puts people at the heart of it. But now, if, say for instance, you’re talking about sports, well okay you have the owner, who I guess you could say built his franchise, built his thing, whoever, if it’s an individual, then you probably have a general manager, and that person leads multiple people including the different managers, and the coaches. You have a head coach, an offensive coach, a defensive coach, a batting coach, and I don’t know what all the different things are, but that’s just baseball. Football has the same thing, offensive, defensive, special team coaches, and maybe even a specific coach for the kicker, you know, passing coaches. There’s probably one coach for the linemen and one coach for the backs, I don’t know but I’m guessing that there are people who are kind of designated to work with these different groups, so that everyone can work at the same time.

Each of these individuals has to build their own following right. They have to be really successful at it. I know someone who is a visual artist and also now has a company editing photography. So this is a natural progression in a way, but he probably feels like he can lead more effectively, whether that means lead his family through providing better for them through this different business, or maybe just lead more — more activity, more business, and therefore more income, by having a related field.

So these are the things, because this is an important piece, because the feminine wants to be led. The masculine wants to lead and protect, and the feminine wants to nurture and receive. These traits are more about our biology than our psychology. These things are probably not going to change, and what it means, and nothing is hard and fast. Obviously there are masculine and feminine traits in males and females. However, most men fit into the identity of masculinity. It’s not a goal, you know.

I suppose there’s a big difference between whether it’s a goal or just a description. I think that the ideals aren’t really ideals at all. They’re really observations of traits. I think it’s alright that the traits are labeled masculine or feminine. They could be labeled something else if that makes them easier to work with I suppose. Call them whatever you’d like, you can call them the receptive traits and the dominant traits, you know. They don’t have to be masculine. Masculine doesn’t have to dominate. I’m just thinking of how you can divide it up so that people can work with the ideas and utilize them. Clearly the gender roles in like primates are defined, and the genetic influences are probably more pronounced than the social influences.

In other words, I don’t think that the silver, I think they’re called silver backed gorilla, I don’t think that they live the way they live, with one male having a small harem of females primarily, in small familial clans like that. I don’t think that that happened because of social pressures. I think that the social pressures happen because of the genetic information, the genetic predisposition towards certain kinds of behaviors, and those who are successful are successful at reproduction, and that means those traits are the traits that we have. They are the most successful to reproduce. Often traits don’t really count. There are certain traits that don’t affect the mating desirability of an individual, and therefore, we have a mix of these traits around.

Men:

Men, the masculine, want to lead and protect the feminine. Everything self-fulfills. A lot of folks today are saying that the masculine wants to be accepted, essentially approved of, wants to meet with approval. That makes sense. Particularly that makes sense if that means mating approval. If that means approval from the female of the species, because that directly affects the reproduction opportunities.

What we have here is a situation where the reproduction opportunities are in need of monitoring, because of the way that we tent to behave and react around certain things. A man who faces what he considers to be rejection from a woman could withdraw or become more aggressive. They might just consider it to be a temporary situation. Some men will continue on, despite what appear to be obvious signs of rejection. Sometimes, their persistence will win out in the end. There are many different strategies that humans have for dealing with all these things.

Women:

Let’s talk about the women and what the women want. My personal experience and that of many of the men that I’ve encountered are that women just want to be accepted and acknowledged as human beings, with the same flaws and insecurities that everyone else has, and that they want to be led. You know, in the  1980s there was a song out, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and in a way that’s true. At a certain age for most girls, most early women,  just want to be able to be completely free. In complete freefall, having fun with nothing hard around. Only happy, fun things going on, and happy fun thoughts. They want to escape all of the fear, shame, guilt, and all of the other feelings that go on. So yeah, they do reach out for something like this. It seems to be a part of their awakening as women, to have this kind of a need going on, it’s probably always been that way. It’s probably a traditional kind of a reaction or phenomenon, because it probably is disguised by their emotional development, their hormonal states.

People:

I think that it’s easy to imagine that people want to be acknowledged, accepted, and cared about. They often need input, advice, and guidance from others. I think that this is true for most people, even those that act like they already have everything figured out. They take other’s opinions into account because no one just wants yes men. That way they don’t have any interesting challenges, no new puzzles to solve in their own mind. If everyone already thinks that whatever they’ve decided is the greatest thing, then they don’t have the option of exploring the various thoughts around topics as well. That’s why it’s good to have a variety of opinions about things, because all the different ideas can bounce off of each other and new conclusions and new and more creative solutions can happen that way.