Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates, we cannot address male pain. We cannot demand for men the right to be whole, to be givers and sustainers of life.

In Donald Dutton’s study of abusive men, The Batterer, he observes that there are few male models for grieving, and he emphasizes that “men in particular seem incapable of grieving and mourning on an individual basis. Trapped by a world that tells them boys should not express feelings, teenage males have nowhere to go where grief is accepted.”

“I believe that the only way we can get where we have to go is by never refusing to face the truth of our feelings as they rise up in us—even when we wish it were not the truth. So we have to admit to the truth that we sometimes wish our own fathers, sons, brothers, lovers were not there. But, this truth exists alongside another truth: the truth

am responsible for accepting or choosing the values by which I live.

Men of integrity are not ashamed to serve. They are caretakers, guardians, keepers of the flame. They know joy.

So many of us have felt that we could win male love by showing we were willing to bear the pain, that we were willing to live our lives affirming that the maleness deemed truly manly because it withholds, withdraws, refuses is the maleness we desire.

“In our culture, boys and men are not, nor have they ever been, raised to be intimate.”

Again, Real uses the word “traditional” rather than “patriarchal.” Yet traditions are rarely hard to change. What has been all but impossible to change is widespread cultural patriarchal propaganda. Yet we begin to protect the emotional well-being of boys and of all males when we call this propaganda by its true name, when we acknowledge that

Death was the way out of the fear evoked by the proclamation “Wait until your father comes home.” The threat of punishment was so intense, his power over us so real. Lying in my girlhood bed waiting to hear the hard anger in his voice, the invasive sound of his commands, I used to think, “If only he would die, we could live.”