Archives for May 8, 2016

A little over a year ago, at the age of 28, I was asked to speak at an event called “One Last Talk.” I would spend 15 minutes delivering (to 200 people) the message I would leave if I knew I only had 30 days to live.
A month before the event, the organizer arranged a speaker’s retreat where all the speakers met to present and refine our talks.
At the retreat I sat and watched everyone else give their talks. Then it was my turn.
As I stood up to begin my talk, tightness crept into my shoulders and chest. I had nothing to say, so I froze. 11 sets of eyes stared at me.
It felt like it went on forever.
Then I heard something that created a small crack in the seal that held the bottomless chasm of feelings I had been tucking away for over two decades. “It looks like you just want to cry, when was the last time you cried?”
I broke down and sobbed like a little boy. All the pressure drained out of me.
Thankfully, the event organizer had the foresight to organize a speaker’s retreat prior to the live event so I only collapsed into a raw, emotional heap of tears in front of 10 other speakers, not in front of 200 audience members.
I left the speaker’s retreat an emotional train wreck. The event itself was approaching in less than three weeks and I didn’t have the slightest semblance of a meaningful talk.
When I was first asked to speak at this event I thought to myself, “Awesome! A room full of 100 people and all I have to do is tell a story for 15 minutes, this is not going to be a problem.”
I’d been in the real estate investment and private finance business for over six years at that point and had given countless talks, many to rooms much larger than 200 people. I thought this talk was going to be no different, if anything it would be easier because I wasn’t selling anything.
I arrived at the speaker’s retreat telling myself all fired up. I had done a lot of personal growth in the past and thought I was excited to tell my story.
As I listened to the other speakers share their stories I began tossing more and more ideas around in my mind about what I was going to speak about.
I would hear a speaker share a story about how they went through some emotional pain, were able to face and accept it and come out the other side in a more joyful place and would think to myself, “Wow that was really vulnerable, I can really empathize with this person’s journey and I want to get to know them and help them. I like this person. What story can I tell about my life to sound that vulnerable?”
I wanted to sound like the other speakers. I wanted a story where I faced great pain head on, slogged my way through it and came out the other side with a much happier and more joyful life.
I wanted anyone else’s story but my own.
As I stood at the front of the room fighting as hard as I could against the urge to panic and make a mad dash out of the room I gradually became aware of why I wanted to tell anyone else’s story but my own.
I wasn’t feeling. I didn’t want to feel.
I didn’t want to feel because I didn’t want to face the pain. I couldn’t begin to imagine that happiness could exist on the other side of the massive crater of pain I was holding back.
That’s when the pain overwhelmed me.
The pain of pretending to be the perfect boyfriend, to love my business, to be joyful and full of happiness, to love myself and my life — when inside I was holding onto deep feelings of shame, anger, and sadness.
My emotional perception of my reality was much different than the one I projected to the outside world. I thought I was a horrible boyfriend because I had cheated on every girlfriend I ever had — including my current girlfriend.
I was working almost every day of the week on a business I hated because I had made it all about making money. I got addicted to quick fixes in an attempt to control the massive amount of pain I was feeling. I thought if I did more deals, made more money, had more sex, and partied harder that the pain would stop.
But these “solutions” never eased the deep underlying shame. They only made it worse. Standing in front of that room I realized I’d been lying to myself for as long as I could remember.
The sadness, shame, and pain were at first quietly suggesting, and then violently screaming at me to wake up and listen to myself.
In that room I finally realized I could tell the truth on myself. I did not have to push the pain back and hold it inside. I could choose to reveal the shame, pain, and sadness – first to myself, then to those closest to me, and finally to the rest of the world.
At first I was terrified to do this. I thought, “There is no happy ending to this, all I feel is shame, pain, sadness and despair. If I truthfully reveal these feelings I’m going to be alone. Who is going to want to be friends with me or love me?”
I thought I needed to be able to wrap my story in a bow in order to reveal myself to the world.
It sucked. I was in turmoil. I was ready to do anything to stop the pain. Finally, I reached out to a trusted friend and mentor for help. I revealed a tiny bit of the pain and shame of who I thought I really was.
It was terrifying to open up, but when I did an incredible thing happened.
I actually felt something. Yes, it was painful and I cried like a baby, but beneath the tears I was deeply relieved to feel.
Something shifted inside of me as I stood in front of the room that day, crying like a baby. I began giving myself permission to feel.
I began to accept my feelings and listen to what they are telling me. Through this I began to have compassion for myself, accept more of myself and allow more of myself into the world.
This is now a process I work on every day.. It’s a journey without an ending. While things in my life are by no means perfect today, by giving myself the permission to feel and telling the truth on myself, I have a greater sense of peace and purpose than I have ever felt before.
On the day of the event I felt the strong urge to vomit due to an anxious knot in my gut.
I was about to tell the truth on myself in front of 200 people and it scared the shit out of me more than any talk I had ever given.
I was feeling and my mind did not want me to feel, it wanted me to run as far away from that stage as I possibly could, curl up into a little ball and hide.
I decided not to trust my mind and trusted my feelings instead.
Rather than pushing the fear away – as I had in the past – I wanted to meet it head on, get to know it and accept it as a part of me.
I was terrified to share my truth with the audience and potentially not be loved. It was not the audience I was scared of. It was the thought of feeling intense pain, shame, sadness, and despair again.
My fear wanted me to make giving the talk all about me.
It wanted me to paint me in the most perfect light possible, better yet it wanted me to not give the talk at all. When I leaned into this fear, stood on that stage and shared my truth I realized sharing my truth is not about me at all.
It’s about the impact my story and my truth can have on others.
The outpouring of support and compassion from the audience stunned me. Several people reached out to me directly to share their stories of pain, shame, and despair and ask me for suggestions on what I thought they should do.
After speaking my truth and sharing my story I realized I was not alone.
As human beings we all feel pain and my pain – while uniquely viewed through the lens of my own story – feels no different than anyone else’s pain. When we open ourselves up to sharing our pain with others we find that we all experience intense feelings of pain, shame, and loneliness through the lens of our own individual stories.
I believe that every one of us is uniquely equipped to share our truth with the world, no matter how scary it may seem.
In the same light each one of us is uniquely equipped to feel compassion for the pain our fellow humans are suffering.
When we share our truth, we allow others and ourselves the opportunity to feel the intense emotions we’ve been hiding. Then these feelings begin to lose their individual significance in our minds.
Sharing our truth provides an opportunity to ourselves – and more importantly to others – to feel the pain holding us back, heal it, let it go and allow more truth to shine through and impact the world.
You do not need to be perfect to share your truth with the world. The world wants and needs you exactly as you are. Your imperfection is what the world wants, what the world needs to see. Share you exactly as you are.
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As the Managing Partner of Bluewater Investments, Chris Biasutti has been helping investors find quality alternative investments for the past six years. Chris is passionate about sharing a focus on “Wealth, Wisdom and Well-being” by educating investors how to identify, analyze and select alternative investment opportunities to fit not just their overall portfolio and investment objectives, but their lifestyle. 
Chris is in love with the ocean and travelling. He spent 2012 living on a remote island in the Philippines where he was certified as Divemaster. He can frequently be found diving under or sailing on top of the water off the coast of B.C. and in remote destinations around the world.

Mark Greene believes a monolithic view of male privilege will impede progress toward gender equality.

In an article titled Now that I have checked my male privilege , Jim Vaughn is engaging a watershed dialogue regarding gender equality. In order to buy into this dialogue from Vaughn’s perspective (and mine) you have to buy into two central ideas:

1. Male privilege is real and does a lot of damage in the world.
2. The concept of Male privilege is sometimes used in ways that can be rigid and polemical; used to silence or marginalize men in spaces promoting social justice and change.

Vaughn’s article begins with a simple confirmation of male privilege:

As a graduate student, I have been checking my male privilege for several years. As a man I am more likely to run governments and corporations due to my gender, and I have the privilege of not seeing much of that privilege.

Male privilege is a universal thing, at least as it manifests at the meta level. If you can’t see this playing out, you’re either socially blinded or willfully ignorant. Across America and the world, we see the brutal and wide spread oppression of women, primarily by men. When I write about gender I first acknowledge that the collective oppression of women is worse then that faced by men. This is my baseline. Then I proceed to talk about issues of oppression faced by men. The result is comments asking “why do you have to start by saying that?”
People can be highly reactive about gender. The oppression olympics it is sometimes called, the temptation to compare body counts and levels of threat and abuse. Recently I tweeted about gender violence.  An activist replied “We have to be explicit. ‘Gender’ violence is male violence.” The implication being that violence by women against men is so rare as to be irrelevant.

The widespread physical abuse of men by women, typically domestic partners, is anything but irrelevant. In the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey—2010 Summary Report, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention includes the following data:

Women’s rights activists rely on clear dramatic conceptual frames; frames like male privilege to drive change. These kinds of frames are effective tools for creating public awareness. But the frames we construct in opposing injustice are just that; constructed. As such, no matter how universally accepted a frame like male privilege may be, it must remain subject to deconstruction as well.
But frames like male privilege can become, for lack of a better word… privileged. In some spaces, male privilege has become the single over arching litmus test for whether or not a man is viewed as enlightened. Men are expected to admit that they, by definition, have a huge advantage in every single imaginable context.
But men don’t. In many contexts men continue to hold privilege. But in a growing number of contexts they do not.
Although men collectively maintain an advantage over women at the meta level, individually they are subject to widely varying levels of privilege in new and emerging contexts. Many of these contexts have been intentionally created in opposition to patriarchy. And they are operating as intended. Men have less privilege in these contexts, sometimes none.
For example, put a man in a gender studies classroom. Or a family court proceeding. Or employ a man as a nurse in a field that continues to be dominated by women. (One study showed that over 89 percent of the male nursing participants reported hearing anti-male remarks from faculty in the classroom.) Or put a man on the wrong side of the law, sitting across from a woman represented by a  discrimination & sexual harassment law firm.

I cite these examples not to say that the world is unfair to men. I cite them as examples of contexts in which male privilege is clearly eroding. What this indicates is that although male privilege may have been monolithic fifty years ago, it simply no longer is. It is splintering. Fragmenting. And justifiably so. There remains more work to be done.
Vaughn notes:

As Michel Foucault states, power in (post)modernity is constantly resisted and is not possessed by individuals…Men’s macro power has been rightfully resisted through bureaucratization from a strong feminist lobby, government programs for women and girls, and the like. Men’s power does not automatically translate into a privileged experience, there is some turbulence between the two.

Applying frames like monolithic male privilege is understandable when fighting clear cut instances of the oppression of women but it can become counter productive in the liminal spaces where change is evolving. As more wide ranging expressions of gender emerge, our monolithic view of male privilege must become more nuanced, because any monolithic or static frame that seeks to encompass something as miraculously complex as emerging gender roles cannot help but be under-developed. Applied over and over as a monolithic “fact”, binary views of male privilege will do the most damage in spaces where men are actively engaged in self reflection and social change.
Said another way, in the evolving world of gender and justice, declaring someone else’s privilege can be the new privilege. We all need to go carefully here. Or we risk calcifying an ever increasing set of counterproductive binary frames. This is the liberal infighting your mother told you about. It got Nixon  and Reagan elected. It is a bad thing.
Let me be clear. It’s not the erosion of unearned privilege that is problematic, but the pursuit of equality by putting men down that is problematic. It still maintains the system of oppression that is at the heart of our culture’s problems. It just flips the groups.

Privilege will eventually become gender neutral. Privilege has always existed somewhere on an intersectional continuum, changing contextually hour by hour depending on who we are with and where we are located, intellectually, socially, professionally, sexually, spiritually and so on. The participants are just wider ranging now.
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Men are moving into parenting, care giving, and other spaces once viewed as feminine. Men are increasingly expressing sexuality or gender in non-traditional ways. Men are becoming more empathetic and emotionally literate. Rebelling against gender norms is no simple task, and it can result in a lifetime of abusive pushback from patriarchal men and women. For the most gender radical of men, the risk of being assaulted or murdered still exists. The battle is by no means over. But real substantive and irreversible change is happening.
I realize that privilege is historical. That on one level, men have a debt to pay, an obligation to work towards gender equality. Men who seek to disengage from patriarchal male privilege have still benefitted from a lifetime of living in that patriarchal system. (And likely paid a painful cost as well.)

I do not suggest we remove the term male privilege from common use or even modify the frequency of its use, but men and women must go carefully. Emma C Williams states it eloquently in her article titled On Privilege and Being Human:

When the counsel to “check your privilege” is used as a bludgeon rather than a gentle reminder that we each have our own perspective on the world, it drives potential allies away from the people who need them the most. It also belies the very concept that empathy is even possible – and without empathy, we lose our humanity and each other.

No matter how significant male privilege is currently, it is no longer monolithic. Women are rightfully taking a share of power. Men are intentionally walking away from traditional manhood. Change is happening.
Perhaps going forward the solution is to hold universally accepted frames like male privilege more lightly, elevating a range of alternative frames to equal importance. By seeing others via a multitude of frames, we invite opportunities to contextually realign our thinking; to notice the gender performances that are emerging and to design the path forward to a place where masculinity is about equality, not the assumption of privilege; either by men or by women.
I understand there are many places where male privilege remains a brutal force for the oppression of women and girls. In such contexts, the relative niceties of holding concepts lightly are justifiably irrelevant. But in the spaces where working for gender change has created safety and the opportunity for dialogue across all kinds of barriers; gender, race, sexuality and otherwise, we must encourage more dialogue, more participation, more variability and more acceptance, not less.
Because there is no other way forward.
This article originally appeared on the Good Men Project.
Read More By Mark Green:
Why Traditional Manhood is Killing Us
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