This essay tries to make transparent where I come from and what I bring with me into my work on masculinity. In doing so I give honour to the many feminist researchers and writers who reject the project of "objectivity" in favour of celebrating our locatedness, our embedment in relations, and our uniquely personal experiences as gifts from and to the world.

Standpoints and biases

I'll start with one of my most important general values. I've learned very painfully through my own growth journey and through many awful relational situations to have compassion for our frailties as humans. We just fuck up, despite our best intentions and best efforts. Doesn't matter who we are, or how much personal work we've done, or how famous we are. I've realised that nearly all the time nearly all people are doing the best they can with what is available to them at the time - and for a number of reasons (largely to do with fear and trauma) often what is available to people shrinks in the moment to the point where there are only violent childhood templates.

This doesn't deny our responsibility for our actions now, but it brings lots of kindness. It also helps to draw attention to the ubiquity of trauma for us all - again invoking compassion.

This reminds me of one of my favourite guiding principles, this one from activist Sarah Corbett the creator of Craftivism:

We want our world to be beautiful, kind, and just;
So our activism must also be beautiful, kind, and just.

Kindness to ourselves is such an incredibly essential stance. At a kink workshop I attended, veteran sex educator and kinkster Dossie Easton said over her 50 years in the field she's developed "Dossie's Rules":

1. Be kind to yourself.
2. Be kind to yourself.
3. Be kind to yourself.

This is especially true around masculinity, a formation which is permeated with violence in every direction.

Which brings me to masculinity. My viewpoint or analytical lens is that I see masculinity as a social artefact constructed within social process. I don't see it as anything inherently linked to biology or physiology. This is clear from the enormous variety and creativity evident across thousands of human cultures and across history in how the natural phenomenon of sexual dimorphism can be taken up in social life. I'm not implying that masculinity is artificial or simply imagined. On the contrary, its genesis as a social artefact means that it is immensely powerful in social life. But my view that it arises in social process is a starting point to inquire into the nature of that process, its ingredients and drivers and other conditions which shape it. A consequence of this view is that not only the content of masculinity itself can be changed but also its salience to and relation with other social artefacts can also be changed. For example, in my ideal social world masculinity and femininity would have about as much relevance in social life as whether people have blue eyes or brown eyes, blonde hair or black hair.

So I talk often about "people assigned male" or people who accept their male gender assignment. The shorthand of this is the word "men", but I avoid "men" as much as possible because it elides the process of social construction of that subject position, and we readily mistake the term as a descriptor of some fundamental characteristic of the actual person or people.

This leads to clarifying another element of my viewpoint. To me it's obvious that the material and biological reality of a person's body is ineluctible; it has concrete characteristics and capabilities. But how a person and other people relate to their body, and the meaning and social significance of that body are totally up for grabs. This is the level at which bodies become gendered.

Here I should mention my understanding of the biology of sexual dimorphism. As with all other species that reproduce through sexual dimorphism, there's a bell curve of distribution of sexual characteristics across the species population. The vast majority of individuals clear fall within common definitions of "male" and "female", and the predominance of this pattern ensures that sexual dimorphism is a successful reproduction strategy. Alongside this majority pattern is a minority of people who don't fall neatly into those two categories - and this bell curve of the distribution of natural characteristics is and has always been true not only of sexual dimorphism in our species but, as far as we know, for all natural characteristics of all other species as well. In other words it's just part of how nature works: it's not interested in perfection. It's interested in what works - and quite clearly a steady stream of variety and unpredictability is not only beneficial but necessary for life to work.

Thus the claim among some people that there "are only two sexes" is demonstrably false, and highlights that such claims are themselves expressions of the discourse of binary gender i.e. the socially generated narrowing operation which seeks to assign billions of people to one or other of only two boxes.

So I locate myself as nonbinary in the current social gender terrain. Another equally useful descriptor for me would be agender: in my own relationship with myself, for instance when I'm in the forest with no other people, gender is not an element which helps me to relate to myself or develop that relationship. It's not how I think of myself or who I am to myself. For me gender only becomes relevant in interaction with other people.

Alongside this, however, I'm completely comfortable acknowledging that I have a very long history with masculinity, not just that I spent many years accepting the assignment "man" but also many years examining it, pulling it apart and understanding how it works and what it does in my own life.

That assignment, my acceptance of it and my critique and rejection of it are of the greatest significance in my life, and I actually continuously acknowledge and claim this history precisely because it has profoundly shaped my entire experience of life until I transitioned in 2013-16.

On top of this, my physique and physiognomy - I'm tall, slim and broad shouldered, bald, with craggy facial features and a deep voice - mean that I will always be misgendered on the street and by people who don't know me.

I recognised some years ago that, inspired by several transwomen and drag queens who are my height, in theory I could put a huge amount of energy into trying to pass as a woman. But I also saw three things about this course: (a) those inspiring people are all extraverts - "raving queens" is one description 😄 - while I am deep introvert, (b) such a project requires enormous commitments of time, energy and money, and (c) inevitably I would only ever "pass" - if you call it that - as a transwoman, which in my eyes does not seem to be of much benefit for me. From this I've accepted that I am constantly and will forever be subject to being misgendered by others.

It is quite clearly massively beneficial for me to recognise how this constant misgendering draws all my childhood trauma-responses to the surface, so that I can disrupt them and deflect social interactions into channels which open up space beyond binary gender assignments. As a result me claiming and owning my history with masculinity - in both facets I mention - is essential for me to maintain full spaciousness to grow.

But my history with and stance towards masculinity results in me having a personal bias towards supporting people to move outside of masculinity. I recognise this is bias: my values say I should be able to make sense of staying within either one of the poles. In practice I accept that most people do want to stay inside the binary, in which case I fall back on my academic tagline: that I'm into "expanding the range of legitimated choices for men."

Something that has been a constant frustration since my initial awakening in 1980 is that I haven't yet found any really foundation-level critical analysis of the structure of masculinity and an effective deconstruction, as there has been done in feminism around femininity.  So all the menswork I know of is inadequate and kind of incoherent. I also believe that this lack of a really adequate conceptual grasp is a major reason why so little has changed in the structure and effects of masculinity over the last 200-odd years.

One of the principal inadequacies in work to date is not being able to theorise the experiences observable among men of both power and vulnerability. Work tends to be either sociological inquiries into men's social power or psychological investigations of men's inability for self-care, successful relationality or care of others. What's needed is a broader and more extensive understanding of how all those pieces fit together and are created by and create each other, along with even broader-scale analysis of how masculinity is embedded in and held by the largest-scale social formations and institutions.

There's many excellent starting points in feminist and intersectional thought in the last half century. These starting points can usefully be applied to what it's like to be inside of masculinity, to have a life as a symbol of power. But there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here: there are as yet incredibly few people who seem motivated to reflect on and share their experience inside masculinity from a participant-observer viewpoint which incorporates both their personal experience alongside a structural analysis. So in a sense it's incredibly hard to access the insider data which could be used to develop more capable and far-reaching understandings of masculinity.

I feel that I do bring such a viewpoint, and some of my starting points below I believe help to construct an analytical lens which enables the collection of useful data from currently available material: the utterances of men in public, the publicly available records of their experiences via a wide range of cultural productions, and also records of their actions in the courts and in press reporting.

All this is to say that my viewpoint is in effect as a participant-outsider: I was assigned male and socialised into masculinity through the ordinary channels of white Western middle class suburban life, but I've also maintained an awareness of the parts of me which were excised and displaced during that narrowing socialisation. When I left home as a teenager I went and lived in the forest alone for 3 years, during which time, without any intention or awareness of what was happening, I came into an unusually intimate relationship with that area of forest, some species there and also some individual trees.

Alongside this I was passionately drawn to one of the most iconically "masculine" activities: logging and sawmilling. The men I got to know at that time also gave me access to their world and what drove and constrained them. The combination of my own deep love of the forest, and indeed the love felt by many of the forest workers too, contrasted with the brutal huge-scale extraction of timber by the industry, prompted me to ask how psychologically I and they can manage to destroy the things we love, and why we want to in the first place.

This led to a seminal moment of realising that the entire project of masculinity is a total con. I started inquiring into how I've become so isolated and disconnected, what is this thing of power, and how does it shape our individual experience and entire human cultures. I also came to ask some of the most profound questions about human life: Why humans, and what are good ways to make sense of our existence in the world and our difference from other species. And, given that we are one of many species who must kill in order that we might live, what are good ways to relate intimately with non-humans alongside exploiting their bodies.

After that initial time alone in the forest I was involved for 30 years in a wide range of "menswork": different approaches to understanding and changing men and masculinity. Towards the end of that period I studied at university to gain an understanding power, and get a more effective purchase on masculinity. But my grounding in the forest, and the non-human world being my guide and mentor at the threshold of adulthood, means that I have a standpoint partially outside of not only masculinity but the entire Western cultural edifice. I am definitely without question a Westerner, in background, in values and in inclination. But alongside that, as one therapist said, "I gave my heart to the forest" when I was 20, and my love of the forest remains the most powerful and stable element in my life, an immense ballast which is always there, rather as some people talk about their faith, or as securely attached people evince in their calm self-acceptance.

I have used this grounding in forest deliberately as a cross-check of the coherence of my thinking: for example, in this new theory A or speculation B is there anything which limits me embedding in forest or which requires a disjunction to explain how forest works. It feels like this approach means that the ideas I come up with tend to be new iterations of the same fractal pattern which pervades all of life. I don't know if this is true but it feels like that would be nice if it was true.

A term I use to describe this approach is Landscape Thinking: one is always located somewhere in the landscape, and the "features" we recognise in the landscape are simply us doing pattern recognition: there isn't actually "a mountain"; rather, this particular area of the landscape has its own existence independent of us and we are simply applying a pattern of observable characteristics we all agree is useful to describe and point to that bit of the landscape. The other lovely thing about Landscape Thinking is that elements - i.e. those bits we "recognise" as fitting our patterns - always exist in relation to other elements. Actual landscape has a continuous flow, and we can choose to attend to our experience of that flow as much as we can choose to attend to how the landscape matches with our culturally-recognised patterns.

This is one way to describe the distinction between direct experience and the abstraction inherent in using language. When I say I'm nonbinary or agender because defining myself as a gender category doesn't help me relate to or understand myself, I'm in effect saying that in my direct experience of myself in the forest there are no gender categories; there is simply my isness in the moment and how I am reflected by the landscape as I experience moving through it and acting in it.

This is perhaps one reason why I'm very clear that gender is a social appellation, kind of like smearing actual human life with a thick coating of vaseline in an attempt to obscure socially undesirable characteristics.

Landscape Thinking also tends to help me reduce the incidence in my ideas of such Modern-era habits of thought as taking the God-position, essentialising or anthropomorphising, unreflexive binary thinking, the creation of Grand Narratives and the like. I've found on many occasions how more segmented or fragmentary thinking so often leads to dead ends, judgmental mindsets and even justifications for violence.

Masculinity, its structure and impacts

I now turn to masculinity itself and the key starting points and perspectives I draw on in developing my understanding of it.

One of my favourite quotes is from Steven Pinker: his view is that the essence of masculinity is "the ability to convey a credible threat of violence." I find this so helpful because it emphasises just how absolutely central the generation and expression of violence is to masculinity, and thus to our Western public spaces, public discourse and indeed our entire Western culture.

The quote also helps highlight how vital it is for people assigned male to come to recognise this violence in ourselves and the violence-patterns we carry, and to acknowledge that part of being assigned male and accepting that assignment is to be socialised to objectify, invade and rape in order to get core needs met. This doesn't mean that every person assigned male violates in these ways, but rather, every person assigned male is offered the toolkit that enables those techniques and is constantly pressured by our culture towards enacting them. Violence is a foundational element in the social operation that is masculinity - it's nothing to do with people born with a testo-base system, and nothing inherent about those bodies and their hormones.

This leads to another tenet which is in a way a challenge to how we often see men: I try to always accord their full humanity to men, especially to men who appear to be monsters. The principle here is that the horrific violence and breathtaking cruelty which men obviously are capable of comes out of a world and an experience of life in which that violence and cruelty seems both practical and coherent. In other words the violence and cruelty expresses how those men experience life. And, when we stop and really absorb this, it gives us a more direct line into the unbearable hell many men inhabit.

Dare we accord full humanity to those men?
Might we stand together hand in hand
Holding each other tight and venture into that frightening world?
In what depths of unbearable hell might their words and actions make sense?
What horrific pain do their furious attacks and cold disdain express?
Can we allow that they speak their truth, as we demand our own speech is our truth?
Might we view their disrespect, their disregard, their violation and brutality
Not as something which is right or wrong but simply - information?

This excruciating and literally unbearable hell is entirely normalised in our culture to the extent that it really takes a deliberate effort to stop and put together what is really going on with serial rapists, brutal murderers and the like. Some people will hear of such crimes and respond "how could they - how could they be so cruel?" My answer to that is simple yet contains a stunning and deeply confronting truth: their experience of the world and their experience within the norms of masculinity normalise that horror and brutality within their own life to the extent that they are unable to notice it as anything other than normal.

Huge social power and privilege is accorded to the "normal person" aka people assigned male who comply with that assignment - it's the reward for the suffering.  But because of the necessary abandonment of self required to survive the brutalisation process, these people's wellbeing and self-respect all come from outside themselves.  This is a structurally vulnerable and unstable place to be.

In other words men's relationship with social power is one of disempowerment: the power is experienced as coming from outside self, so that one is constantly struggling to gain certainty and control. Many men report they feel a constant doubt about whether they are "man enough", and confusion around what it is to be a "real man".

But because of the imperative to convey a credible threat of violence it's centrally important that the disempowerment and uncertainty are thoroughly denied - disavowed and buried. So anything femme, feminine, girly, gay, faggot etc etc is violently pounced on and disowned.

This leads to the psycho-social formation of what I call a "concrete cap" over all the disavowed stuff. It's like a brittle shell and it is the area where the dissociation from the violence and the disavowal of everything less-than-tough becomes sedimented and reinforced by the connection between social power and authorisation and successful disavowal. The achievement of the concrete cap - the successful disavowal enabling one to "convey the credible threat of violence" - is met with immense acclaim and much celebration: doors open, red carpets are unrolled, the ears of powerful ppl are bent towards one, and so on.

Accordingly, not only does a person experience their own internal terrors about what they have pushed away beneath the concrete cap, so that they are motivated from a deep personal place to reinforce it. In addition there are very powerful social inducements to remain above it: one gains an enormous amount by tamping down the cap and dancing on its lid.

What I'm describing above is the overall social structure and how it works: how masculinity and major institutions are interdependent elements of a whole, and how people assigned male are inducted into that whole through brutalisation in childhood.

The final foundational piece for working with masculinity is about objectification. The normalisation of violence renders it invisible to us as violence in itself. Instead we consider that the violence we experience and perceive all around is not really violence, e.g. violence on the street is an unavoidable characteristic of the street, public life has risks to emotional safety cos that's how public life is, animal production and forestry are inherently violent, and so on.

The people who carry out this violence likewise are seen as having "natural" abilities to do it, because "that's how men are". When we see men in this way - that "that's the way they are" - we are not seeing their full humanity. We're not seeing the unbearable hell in which that violence is perfectly ordinary and makes sense as daily practice. We are seeing these men not as people whose violence exists within an experience of life but as objects: we're seeing their behaviour but not seeing their interior world. In other words, beyond their surface there is nothing to know.

And, given the very close association constructed between masculinity and the normal person, between masculinity and the hallmarks of social power, I call this process seeing men as Power Objects.

The term is analogous to the feminist recognition of how women are commonly objectified as Sex Objects: not seen as actual people but rather seen as what is only available on the surface. Here is the same operation as with Power Object: beyond their surface there is nothing to know.

Obviously Power Object is positioned extremely differently in the social landscape of power to Sex Object. But they share the same characteristic of dehumanising their targets.

Power Object is something we do, habitually, chronically, extensively - something I'm only now starting to be able to notice in my own behaviour and able to not do.

In a sense when we see men as power objects what we are doing is reinforcing the utility of the "concrete cap". We're colluding with the social operation of masculinity which claims that beneath the concrete cap there is nothing to know about a person assigned male, while everything above the cap tells us everything we need to know.

Alongside the social operations of masculinity, though, is individual agency, character and circumstances, which are always present for everyone. So another foundational starting point for my masculinity work is that every person has their own unique relationship with this whole arrangement and finds where, how and to what extent they take it up and find a place within it.  Most people reject and struggle against at least some parts of it, so that many men will say where they hate it or have modified some areas or adapted them. This is especially true as people get older.

On top of this are many dissenting and intersecting discourses which intersect with and complexify the singular coarse terrain I map above.

But I think it's helpful to understand the overall structure of the operation of masculinity and the flows it produces because everyone but especially very pointedly and intensely people assigned male are subject to it.