On Men and Women… But Mainly Men

A perspective on the Women’s March 4 Justice, with a healthy dose of Jungian archetypes

Image by Stewart Munro on Unsplash

I try not to get too caught up in issues tainted by partisan Australian politics (the US is another story), which is why I have tried to avoid the current events in Canberra and how they relate to the March 4 Justice movement. But that is a downright rubbish excuse for avoiding the underlying issue of men on women violence, because it is self-evidently not political. 

While I now self-identify as a conspiracy theorist — mainly because of how uncomfortable it makes people — before that my pronouns would have been he/him/emo. Back then, when I was first finding my feet as a writer, one of the main topics that occupied my mind was the way that men treat women, which I analysed through the lens of music.

And if you think some of the stuff I write now is uncomfortable to read, you should see some of the cringe confessions I put together to try and give myself some cred on Medium. This one in particular — which is literally the confessions of an emo.

It makes the case that the music industry has been used to manipulate the male archetype through emotion — with no better example than the Emo genre itself, which morphed from humble hardcore roots into something best described as the commodification of emotional abuse. It required deep dives back into the Emo Smart Playlists in my beloved iTunes library, and the identification of the various negative archetypes that emerged time after time. 

And that’s what I ultimately concluded: that there has been a systematic attack on the male archetype — a type of sustained emotional trauma — that resulted in its fracture into various shadow aspects. We are seeing the impacts of these fractured shadows right now in many ways, and it will require some deep and uncomfortable shadow work by afflicted men, to face up to this emotional trauma, before anything gets better.

There are no excuses here. At the end of the day, free will is absolute, and every man has the power to break out of that societal trap and properly embody their divine masculine side.

In short, to use a phrase, men need to man up. We need to stop playing the victim card, stop finding excuses to think the world is stacked against us, stop believing we are entitled to anything from the opposite gender, stop playing out this hopelessly predictable archetype of the emotionally stunted, emasculated man.

While I don’t want to make this a pissing contest, i’ve been single for almost 10 years, and I can assure anyone that is hasn’t been by choice. I’m not perfect: I moped around for a while, I felt like the world was against me; I played and resonated with some of those shadow Emo music archetypes. But I also sorted through my issues, got over myself, and (I would like to think) have come out the other side. 

Far from leaving that baggage behind, I draw on those experiences to attempt to make positive change in the world. Specifically, I have found it leaves me well placed to call out young men, or more precisely teenage boys, who think they can explain away their abusive behaviour: basically, in the language that is required for them to listen, to grow the f—k up and take responsibility for themselves. Until then, expect to be treated exactly how you deserve to be treated.

I get plenty of practice at this because, right now, I see teenage boys up-close and unfiltered on a consistently exhausting basis. A select few clearly embody more feminine characteristics, and will end up on the ‘queer’ (apologies if I’m not down with the woke terminology) spectrum, where hopefully they will soon exist without judgement. They are, to the surprise of no-one, the easiest and most stress-free kids to deal with. 

But the majority of teenage boys are ‘boys’ in every sense of the word. They like to boast and brag, they like to compete, they like to impose themselves, they like to be smart asses, and they are obsessed with girls. I don’t believe these are traits that we enforce on them as society — even if we do warp them out of shape — but more simply reflections of boys being who they are.

As much as I fully agree that men need to be more in touch with their emotions, I also don’t think we need to go as far neutering them and taking away any traces of the characteristics that might — under the wrong circumstances — transmute into violence. Manipulating, hitting, abusing, raping women isn’t ‘macho’ after all, it is just pathetic and weak.

This is why I don’t think the solution is as easy as many people make it out to be. Leaving aside the more universal social tendency to shirk at using our own free will to be better people, men are also acting like dicks because there are profound underlying issues about what it is to be a man in today’s society. These masculine tendencies need to be channeled, not erased.

Call me old fashioned, but society is in dire need of real men right now: not in the simplistic way we have historically defined them, but also not in the watered down way we are currently normalising.

There are many ways to be a real man at this moment in time. One is to do what many others are also saying: call out toxic attitudes towards women. Not in passive-aggressive, tentative, or comfortable ways; in blunt, forceful and uncompromising ways, if that is what it takes.

But there are also other issues that require our attention. Because as much as a problem as violence against women is, it still sits alongside of other pressing social issues: issues that will not be resolved in the absence of strong masculine figures asserting themselves against the powers that seek to control us. It is these issues that have been made to be most controversial: issues that men are currently being conditioned to leave alone, to simply comply with. 

Firstly and most obviously: to push back against Government tyranny, and call out those in position of power when they are abusing that power. Gaslighting does not discriminate by gender: we are all capable of falling victim to the malicious lies of those who do not have our best interests at heart. It requires intellectual and moral courage to see this and break away from it.

Doing this inevitably requires giving voice to unpopular opinions without backing down at the first sign of blowback — while at the same time being man enough to own up to be being wrong. Most people are well aware of the issues I have chosen, but everyone can find their own unique voice of dissent.

If anyone needs a starting point, I would like to suggest this: research, understand and advocate for truly uncomfortable issues relating to children. None are easy: whether they are vaccine injuries on one hand, or child trafficking and pedophilia on the other. These are issues that are still mainly left up to women, despite being mainly perpetrated my men.

These issues all require reckonings with our shadows, both as individuals and those of our society. But that’s fine, because we all have these shadows, whether they are whole or fractured or somewhere in between. And if we don’t deal with these shadows, they will continue to express themselves in the ways we have become accustomed to: most notably as violence against women.

I don’t think any of us men should be complacent enough to believe that we are immune to these acts, regardless of how spotless and pristine our history with women — or girls — might be. After all, most violent men were good boys at the start, as those subject to that violence can attest to.