How Male Culture Is a Culture of Violence
I believe that every human being is born a creative – whether in the making of visual images, the willful manipulation of sound as music, expressing movement of the body through space in dance, enhanced communication through the poetic use of words… The Latin words ingenium and ingeniare denote cleverness to contrive or devise. Hence even the engineer who invents and assembles structures is first and foremost born an artist.
Sadly, the creative, artistic modes of thinking and feeling are murdered or maimed beyond recognition in many people. This often takes hold as early as the age of four, and tragically far gone by adolescence. There’s an age-old sickness in our society that I seek to address, and it expresses itself as male culture.Male culture in our society (for the moment I’ll address Western male society in particular) is a rape culture, a culture of dominance, a child abusive culture -- not a culture of nurturance. Violence is hard-wired into male culture.
As a result every man is a walking time bomb. Some men explode with destructive impact on those around them—spouses, children, associates, strangers, other men. Women have far too long borne the brunt of male violence and oppression. Other men quietly implode into addiction, depression and psychogenic-induced physical illnesses, or some combination of all of the above.
It persists because it’s socially sanctioned. It’s passed on from generation-to-generation, father-to-son as a kind of social blood curse. It’s ingrained in the playground and sports field rites of passage by which boys are terrorized into becoming so-called "men". Few if any survive it whole.
I believe it need not be this way.
My intention is to contribute to healing and social transformation through an art that expresses the truth -- whether through brutal honesty or through the celebration of beauty. I’ll have much more to say regarding these matters in the coming weeks and days how this might be done. I’ll say it as graphically, repeatedly and from as many angles as I can devise, here on this blog and through other social media. But it needs to be said starting now. Won't you join me in the conversation? Won't you help me in the social transformation?
