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During World War II, my father was stationed in what was Burma. Sometime during his deployment, there was a gasoline dump explosion at his base. He suffered some burns that were serious enough that he had to be shipped to Washington state, where he spent six months recuperating from his injuries.
In 1947, I was his firstborn after he came home. In all the years I knew him, he never spoke about the war or what happened to him. Any attempt to speak about it, he would tear up, then clam up. The reason he gave was to spare us from the pain. I've come to believe it was to spare him from the vulnerability he felt when remembering his past, connected to his learned belief that "big boys don't cry," or "masculine" men aren't vulnerable.
I thought about this when reading Sharon E. Carlson's July 9 commentary, "The predicament of today's white males — and their response," about her brothers sitting and conversing around the campfire. She mentioned white males' need to think they're exceptional as opposed to their lack of "strength" in the normal areas of their lives and the thinking that they're ordinary. At no time did she look at the possible underlying cause of the brothers' responses to life, most of which seem similar to my father's responses.
In the "patriarchal male" system, the expectation men grow up with is that being "masculine" means being "aggressive" and "in control." They learn to expect women to be passive, to give in and take orders, and feel threatened when they don't.
In order to be empathetic, however, one has to care. But caring involves feeling vulnerable, and to care about others makes one feel, at least, somewhat vulnerable. The last thing patriarchal males want, though, is to feel vulnerable, because then they can be affected or even hurt. Many end up trying to keep others away so they won't be hurt. What this means is the man hasn't learned how to be honest about his vulnerability, much less deal with it. Because they haven't accepted it, or learned to deal with it, they fear it.
Hatred and anger are derivatives of fear — so, many times, those who are in denial of their fears will end up acting in hateful or angry ways. This brings me to the front-page story, "Her daughters live on in new book" (July 9), about Jessica Lee Peterson and her three daughters who were killed by her husband 10 years ago in an "unconscionable act of hatred." The question then becomes was it an act of hatred or an act based on fear? Could it be that all three situations I've written about are connected by the learned male fear of being vulnerable and the tendency to not analyze the problem correctly?
