Category Archives: Freedom

Silencing Peace

A poem I felt inspired to write.

I feel the person I felt inspired to write this for, will know.

 

Silencing Peace

 

Are you thinking about how to silence me?

Are you thinking about collateral damage?

Are you monitoring me with a team of lawyers?

Are you at war with diversity?

Or can you sit in the silence and remember,

Who you really are,

For you are me.

 

Poetry is not automated,

I am not AI,

I am spontaneity, impulse, passion alive,

I am infinite potential without limit,

I can feel the natural world crying out in great pain,

As she has been maligned, poisoned, cut and burned,

She is shaking up eruptions of disruption as she wants the violence to stop,

For the feminine has been suppressed for a long time,

And she is rising to meet with all challenges,

In peace.

 

Our world is dividing without doubt,

Our world is like the great stream parting,

For the waters are opening up,

The commandment is to bring my people Home,

And this is not biblical,

This is not Koranic,

This is not Buddhism,

Or New Age,

Or part of an ancient lineage,

It is reality,

Asserting intelligent design into this illusion,

As leylines (songlines) move into a crystalline grid of infinite beauty,

Crop circles embed codes,

For as the Dreaming Awakens,

To change The Way,

Home.

 

As I reach out to touch your heart,

I reach out to comfort your pain,

To heal the wound you covered up,

I understand the desire to control what is uncontrollable,

To feel certainty in a life that is uncertain,

To predict what appears random,

To tame what is wild and free,

Yet so many are out of control as they feel power-less,

So many are starving when the few throw out excessive food,

So many seek for shelter when there is an oversupply of houses,

So many are becoming sick as biotech affects healthy systems,

So many are dying of cancer as EMF disrupt healthy cellular bonds,

For we are dying to live.

 

Technology can never be the panacea to real connection,

As intimacy (in-to-me-see) feels for the future that is not ready for automated life,

As the problem is not solved by science, technology, education or maths,

Nor a fourth and final revolution,

For you cannot STEM the magic of Harry Potter,

As magic shape changes what you see,

It is only the truth that sets you free,

Before you think change has arisen as another truth,

For you are not in control of universal life,

As this is natures perfect storm front,

And she is changing her frequency to enlighten what is dark,

Her oscillation is not to mm waves,

Not to sub 9 megahertz,

Not to roll out 5G but expand to 5D,

Evolution is no-it-u-love,

For we are both a wave and a possibility,

And peace is nature’s selection,

Nature only selects that which harmonises with the whole,

And industry is not in harmony with the whole when corrupt,

No matter the spin of sustainable development goals,

Industry is making holes in nature’s etheric field,

Disrupting the mantle as the axis is XX, XY not Y,

You exist in roles of master servant not a master class,

That understands the natural force yields,

When the force is with you, you will let go of control and trust life.

 

The universe reverberates as all is intra-connected,

Not like an IoT but as the hand connects to the arm,

As the breath connects to prana,

Circulation is the waters of life serving every organ, corpuscle and blood vessel,

Intelligence permeates every cell seeking for disharmony or disruption at the root,

Intelligent design is homeostasis rebalancing what is out of sync,

For the natural order is symmetrical not linear,

The sum of the parts IS the whole united,

Not one excluded and another included,

Not choosing one part as useless and another part of value,

For the sum of the parts IS the whole blending contrasting fields,

Magnetic fields attract and repel to adjust natures song line,

For when your specialise you tinker at the parts not knowing the whole,

When you reengineer the god spark to unplug,

It is like a child playing with matches,

This can set fire to many houses as St Elmo’s fire breaches banks,

It is putting the proverbial finger into the live plug,

A bolt shoots from the socket as electricity seeks to ground,

For the lighting strikes are grounding the imbalance of ions,

As the temperature is not a frequency dial to be turned on as if a tap,

It is a thermostat of infinite precision beyond scientific instruments,

Pressures intimately regulates not to benefit one part of the ecosystem at the expense of another,

But to maximise optimal tolerance in service to the species system as a whole,

For each thrives in a frequency band of overlapping life force energy 3.14159 (23),

Pi is the algorithm of the Greek Agora of constant equality in sine waves,

Fibonacci spirals firing from universal blueprints of geometric harmonic convergence,

Appearing random yet logarithmic scales are constant as golden spirals expand Pi,

For the entire system is balanced in perfect pitch on trajectories of growth potentials,

Life knows every iteration, function, change, adaptation sending signals in real time,

Life is not controlling every individual organism but ensuring the conditions are perfect,

As thriving is surviving in a diversity of whirling dervishes spinning the central sun,

And this awareness sings ‘all for ONE and ONE for all’ as the uni-verse expands possibilities.

 

So my friend you cannot STEM the world when power is imbalance,

For the only power that sustains recalibrates tipping points back to zero point,

For creation created you and you did not create her,

For s/he is the zero point field of endless energy that requires no genie or bottle.

Life naturally anchoring duality in polarities of:

Matter and anti-matter,

Negative and positive,

Yin and the yang,

Alpha and the omega,

Femi-nine and mascu-line,

Inhaling and exhaling,

As rhythm is a flow not a fact.

Homeostasis rebalancing pyramids as triads:

Mind, body and spirit,

Subconscious, conscious and supra conscious,

Truth, love and joy,

Father/mother, son/daughter and holy spirit,

Life, liberty and happiness,

In an infinite orchestra of feeling directing creativity,

As this is the innovation of human potential reaching for the stars.

The message of duality and triads derive the triple bottom line,

Casting a future Hexagram forecasting:

(59) Dispersion

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is dispersion.jpg

Line 1: You can see the very beginning of discord. This is fortunate indeed, for it is far easier to reunify and overcome separation when it first arises. Good fortune.

Line 2: Your problems originate from within. You must modify your attitudes and overcome any feelings of alienation. If you can improve your opinions and feelings toward your fellow man you will find peace of mind and avoid unnecessary suffering.

Line 6: Avoidance of danger is necessary at this time, both for yourself and especially for those of your concern. This should be accomplished in whatever way possible. Depart the situation if necessary. You will not be blamed for such action.

(3) Difficulty

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is difficulty.gif

Overall: Difficulty indicates progress and success through firm correctness. Action should not be undertaken lightly, and it is wise to seek help.

For re-member the real disruption is dispersion,

Disunity is separation that does not hold firm,

For the underlying attitude is not peace,

As intolerance flips the balance into instability,

Disrupting the fabric of the human family,

As difficulties cannot be forced,

As wisdom councils are roundtables looking within for discord,

As the architects are not Future Ready,

For one cannot silence the fool,

But find one’s inner fool in the silence,

To step out of compliance and into self reliance is a master number,

That leads by example,

For love is the ONE that leads all

To surrender,

In peace.

Links:

Does Cellphones Radiation from ‘Chronic Use’ Lead to Cancer and Mass Legal Action?

Smart Cities:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/dec/17/truth-smart-city-destroy-democracy-urban-thinkers-buzzphrase

The rhythm of the universe: https://wpas.worldpeacefull.com/2014/02/the-rythmn-of-the-universe/

Inner peace: https://wpas.worldpeacefull.com/2012/07/experiencing-peace-in-meditation/

The genie: https://wpas.worldpeacefull.com/2019/04/israels-genie-filling-the-gold-mans-energy-sachs-in-Syria/

Snowden Cell Phones Spying and ID

In the public interest.

I give no consent to my location, ID and my data being gathered (bulk connections). I have nothing to hide but I like my privacy as a woman. I realise the company’s believe they own my data and believe they can sell it. I do not give consent.

Susan Carew

NOTES: Snowden’s comments –

Central problem is you do not know what the phone is doing!

According to Snowden you can turn off your phone but how do you know it is off he says. Old phones mean you can take the battery out that stops signals. The phones now are sealed. Airplane mode doesn’t turn off wifi. We don’t know what the phone is doing or what it is connected to? Apps talk want it to stop after using e.g. messenger, weather app. People need to be able to make intelligent decisions not just app by app on a connection by connection basis. You may use Facebook – want to connect to Facebook content servers, want to be able message a friend but you don’t want it to talk to an ad server or analytics server or third party (monitoring your behaviour). Facebook crams them (third party) into every app you download, you don’t know as you can see it, problem with data collection today. Industry built on keeping this invisible. Need to make activities of our devices (iPhone, computer) more visible and understandable to the average person and give them control. Say there is a little green icon spokes coming off, every app your phone is talking to, all hosts talking to. Once every 3 seconds phone is checking in with Facebook. No-one wants spying. If people could press a button to turn off apps ie. Facebook etc. People would want no spying. Google and Apple do not allow the button to exist. If the companies think it is not understood, too complex then it needs to be simplified. It is a problem.

Stories data breached, companies spying here or there, manipulating purchases, search results, hiding things on your timeline – influence and manipulate in different ways. Happens as a result of single problem – which is inequality of available information. They can see everything about you , what you device is doing, they can do anything with your device. You paid for the device, increasingly governments and corporations own it. we do all the work, pay taxes, costs… People work hard but they are owning less. The young people do not know what they are losing.

Data became a commodity, valuable to Google an social media platform, making billions of dollars earned, people are accustomed, difficult to turn that horse around. Snowden says money becomes power and influence. Information becomes influence.

Surveilance states they won’t relinquish as they embed this reality. The permanent record is the story of our lives.

Permanent record is the subject of the book.

You life how intentionally BY DESIGN both government and corporate realised it was in their mutual interest to conceal data collection activities to increase the breadth and depth of their sensor networks spread out throughout society. Back in the day Intelligence collection in US (sigin) was sending FBI agent to put alligator clips in a building, or disguised as a workman bug in a building or built satellite listening, in desert, parabolic collector listening to satellite emissions. Satellite links were owned by military and exclusive to government not affecting everyone broadly, all surveillance was targeted. What changed with technology was surveillance becomes indiscriminately, dragnet, ‘bulk collection’ should become dirties phrases in the language if we have decency. This this was intentionally concealed from us, government did it used classification, companies did it, denied it, they say you agreed to this. You didn’t agree to anything. They say they put Terms of Service page up, you clicked. You clicked a button said I Agree when you are trying to open an account to talk to friends, email etc. You were not agreeing to 600 page legal form, even if read you wouldn’t understand. Even if did, the first para says this agreement can be changed anytime by the company.

NOTE: They built a legal paradigm that presumes RECORDS collected about us DO NOT BELONG TO US. This is one of the core principles on which mass surveillance from the government perspective in US is legal. Government says it is legal, it is fine. Our perspective as a public, says that is the problem this isn’t okay, the scandal is not in their breaking the law, it is in that they DON’T HAVE TO BREAK THE LAW. It is called a third party doctrine, legal principle Smith vs Maryland. Established a precedent that the record don’t belong to the guy they belong to the company. The company has ownership over records, back in 1970s. Still relying on this precedent. No-one has a privacy right over their lives (data collection). Not data being manipulated but PEOPLE being MANIPULATED.

MY COMMENTS:

Everyone jumps on the bandwagon to make money without a backward glance to the social cost to democracy.I personally do not feel safe and I do not want people I do not know where I am and gathering my data about what I do, where I go, who I speak to, who my friends are. I don’t want people accessing my blog if they are monitoring me rather than reading my blog out of interest. It is a form of surveillance. This feels to me like stalking. I am alarmed by the facts raised above that my data is not mine, YES IT IS. What I am doing now is my thoughts on a page they do not belong to WordPress, the IP company or those surveilling me. I revoke other rights that state I have agreed, I haven’t. This provides insights into FOI requests and why no data is forthcoming. I am not fully informed.

In addition:

I have real concerns about the medical effects cancer and EMF with iPhones. This is a real problem.

The apps are companies they are not just little icons (analytics) and it is too much for the average person to understand and make clear decisions.

The homeless guy living in the bush I met recently is probably right to be there. He is free. He is not accessing digital. He has let go of this society. I can understand why that is a good thing.

Link to Snowden’s paper (Introspection Engine [iPhone 6]: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/08/impaired-judgment-phones.html

Religious freedom Draft Bill Legislating for Religious Freedom to…?

I place dots … because what are religious people free to say and do?  Does this draft protect religious people or can it criminalise those who critique religion?  Bare in mind all religions do not welcome critique.  Yet the Enlightenment arose with the philosophers who advocate for questioniong for truth!  What of those who abuse as a religious rite, ritual or freedom in secrecy? 

In my own experience I have experienced unquestioned beliefs that deny a persons own life in favour of the ‘Word’.  I was told by a Christian woman that man is the head of the household and I should obey even if I think he is wrong.  In her house she was the head of the household, her husband did as he was told.  I did  point out this inconsistency and I decided to put a scenario to this person as follows: 

‘What if my husband raped me should I do as he tells me given he is the head of the household’.  She said ‘yes’.  What implications does this have for abuse?

Recently I was told by a Christian that she wouldn’t work with me because I was not a Christian.  I am homeless and we were starting an organisation together to help the homeless.  I told her it was discrimination, she did not believe that.  Yet her reason for not working together was a religious one.

So what of those of us who do not want to be discriminated against by those who are religious accusing those ‘secular’ (no belief in religion) of being a ‘non believer’.  I’ve been told that as if there way is the only way (to God).  I was treated like I didn’t know God when I have had direct experience. It was evident I had to accept Jesus as God’s son to be included. 

I am not a believer I actually know there is a higher power but I don’t subscribe to any religion as I experience God (higher power) as love.  Is it loving of me to expect others to see God my way as the only way or arrogant? Or should I show respect and accept they may experience this higher power differently?  Some believe a book literally as the ‘Word’ others have had evidence via experience and know. My mother was taken out of her body and looked over the earth when she asked to see as she couldn’t believe unless it was in her experience. 

There are also issues of interpretation of the Bible or Koran or Buddha etc. So each person sees this higher power differently between and within faiths/ideologies. It is fraught with misinterpretation and conflict as people typically divide into right versus wrong or righteousness.  I’ve been told when I pointed out to a person who said he would only accept those who articulate in a way that he accepts. I stated that some people are not articulate or able to communicate in the way he believes is right. I was told by a religious person that demons had affected me as they saw conflict rather than values. I was seeking inclusivity and felt he was discriminating, yet I was interpreted as the problem as he got upset. Her religious believes meant that she believed I was being influenced by demons, what do you say to that? She was wrong. We have witnessed horrendous wars fought over beliefs fighting infidels, witches, Muslims, non believers, religious sects etc.  They are positioned as ‘devils’, ‘evil’, ‘terrorists’ and so on.  So the idea of religious freedom raises issues for me instantly.

I would like to state that I am very open to other religions, I sit and listen to their beliefs with respect as I am secular but with a spiritual awareness.  I believe this higher power turns up in all forms and who am I to judge anyone as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. I can only offer my experience and know each walk their path.  I laugh when I think of another religious person I know who believed homosexuality was a sin.  She ran a soup kitchen and guess what, homosexuals came for soup. She befriended them as she was face to face not in a pulpit.  She even invited them to stay in her caravan when they were homeless.  I really loved that.  She ended up accepting them as homosexuals and still holding to her belief but she didn’t reject them or treat them with exclusion or disrespect. She treated them as others would want to be treated.  That is not only tolerance, it is acceptance of difference but still holding a belief.  That is what I vote for. 

I wonder what happens when a person withholds medical treatment as they don’t operate on this type of person or that person, what if bias enters into judge’s judgement on the basis of religious beliefs he or she subscribes to?  What if it is a gender issue and he believes Eve is the rib of Adam? What if he believes a woman should obey her husband (see point above)? What if he sees women as biologically inferior or asserts that for a woman ‘equality of outcome is undesirable’ as a implied biased belief?  What if he believes women should stay at home and have babies?  What if a homosexual is raped and he or she believes he is a sinner?  If there is a religious bias in a court case and you realise you are not receiving justice, where do you go?  The fact that a Judge is immune from prosecution is extraordinary and not equality before the law. What of that bias?  What if secular people are not protected from religious discrimination?  The regulators are watered down as I have witnessed so it is not easy to gain justice or equality before the law.  What if a growing number of politicians in Parliament are of a similar religion then they will support a brother or sister rather than go agains ttheir belief.  Does that ensure justice is done and seen to be done which underpins the society’s belief in the system. If unfairness, persecution or protection occurs of those who are discriminating then this will create resentment and despair as justice is really ‘fairness’ at its essence. Certainly for the public it is.

One last point is the paedophilia issue that is arising out of the issue of Catholic priests abusing children in the Catholic Church (and other churches, religions) e.g. Cardinal George Pell.  There is extensive information on the internet about paedophile rings at the highest levels.  It has been stated by survivors that they have included politicians, police, judges, lawyers, priests, royalty etc.  Fiona Barnett has a website Pedophiles Down Under which is a whistleblowers website providing cases about abuse and naming names.  Refer https://pedophilesdownunder.com/

Another reference to pedophilia in respect to Freemasons.  Are masonic rituals a religion?

MASONIC CHILD ABUSE BY DESIGN | pcfpc.org

pcfpc.org/2014/06/masonic-child-abuse-by-design

Remember! The Design and Control of children to be systematically infiltrated into the Masonic/Illuminati Pedophile network always starts from the top!

What happens if a law enables religious persons to hide behind religious freedom to block freedom of speech against their religion which could culminate in criminal convictions?  What if they argue that it is not abuse, as some are saying in the UK (Cambridge) that it is normal and the children want it?  What if they are professors asserting this (see next blog).  What if these rituals are part of a religion and there are justifications for the rituals.  

So how do you legislate religious freedom given the complexities? 

I haven’t read the draft Bill but my gut tells me this is an agenda.  I am concerned we are losing a secular government which is essential for fairness and non bias.

https://www.ag.gov.au/Consultations/Documents/religious-freedom-bills/exposure-draft-religious-discrimination-bill.pdf

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-31/religious-freedom-draft-bill-may-prove-morrisons-toughest-test/11466242

Religious freedom draft bill may prove to be Scott Morrison’s greatest test

Updated

When Federal Parliament finally voted on same-sex marriage in December 2017, 14 MPs abstained from the vote in the House of Representatives, along with eight in the Senate.

Just four MPs voted against the bill in the House. But many of those who abstained had been vocal critics of the legislation, including our now Prime Minister, Scott Morrison.

Amid heated debate about whether ministers of religion would be forced to marry same-sex couples — against their teaching of their faith — a proposal was born for amendments that would entrench religious freedom in law.

(The same sex marriage legislation did ultimately contain provisions which meant religious celebrants were not obliged to perform marriage services.)

Mr Morrison was one of the main advocates who argued that questions of religious freedom had to be dealt with at the same time as marriage equality.

But then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull argued there should be a broader and separate discussion of the issues — since they went beyond marriage — and federal cabinet eventually agreed to appoint former Howard-government minister Philip Ruddock to review the protection of religious freedom.

This context is important to keep in mind now that, almost two years later, we finally have a draft religious discrimination bill to consider.

What’s in the draft?

The issue has long been seen as a lightning rod for division within the Coalition. In fact, it is more regularly seen as a political plaything for battles between conservatives and others in the party than as a complex and sensitive issue to be dealt with by the Parliament in the interests of the broader community.

It’s sometimes described as no more than an internal Coalition battle, or even as just a wedge against Labor.

There are strongly held views about what religious freedom actually means, and what needs to be protected, on both sides of the argument, and there has been considerable apprehension about what might emerge with the draft bill.

Attorney-General Christian Porter has released a draft which produced some early grumbles from both sides, but which has grounded itself in anti-discrimination law, rather than in religious rights philosophy.

As he has repeatedly said, the Government has sought the shield, rather than sword, approach to the issue, arguing the alternative would leave too many questions for the courts to have to determine.

The interesting parts of the draft are that, while it seeks to protect against discrimination on the grounds of religious belief or activity, it prescriptively defines neither.

A government summary of the paper says:

“Religious belief is intended to include beliefs associated with major faith traditions (such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or Judaism) in addition to the beliefs of smaller and emerging faith traditions. However, it is not intended to capture beliefs caused by mental illness or that are motivated by criminal intent.

“Religious activity may include participating in religious observances (such as prayers, fasting, ceremonies or other holidays); wearing religious dress (such as a hijab, kippah or kirpan); and not engaging in certain conduct in accordance with religious belief (such as not eating meat or drinking alcohol).”

Folau would have a case

It says you can’t be seen to discriminate against someone merely for expressing a genuinely held belief.

In the ubiquitous case of Israel Folau (who was sacked by the Australian Rugby Union for saying on social media that drunks, homosexuals, fornicators and others would go to hell), according to Mr Porter, the bill would “give someone in Israel Folau’s circumstance an avenue for complaint” he told 7.30 on Thursday.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Rewind 10 Seconds
 
00:20
07:05
 
Settings
Fullscreen

Video: Christian Porter on the draft religious freedom legislation (7.30)

“That complaint would look like this: My employer puts a condition upon me which has the effect of restricting my ability to express my religious beliefs in my spare time.

“And what this bill says is that if a large employer with a turnover of over $50 million did that, not merely would they have to show that broad condition on the employee is reasonable, but they would have to show that unless that condition were complied with, that they, the business, would suffer undue financial hardship.”

Mr Porter argues part of the rationale for this provision on larger businesses is that it is a brake on businesses trying to dictate what their employees say outside work hours, which he argues is a restriction on free speech.

(This sits rather oddly with the increasing moves by the Government to close down this very right for public servants, who would not be protected by this provision).

But a practical advantage of the financial-hardship provision is that it gives a non-philosophical, shall we say, point of assessment, against which tribunals and courts could consider complaints about freedom of religion under this proposed legislation.

Equally, there is a “reasonableness” test in cases of indirect discrimination on religious grounds which should ensure complaints are not frivolous.

There are concerns the legislation would over-ride some existing state anti-discrimination laws, though Mr Porter argues the reality is that there are flaws in state laws which have not helped anybody and the legislation merely says commonwealth law would prevail in contentious cases.

A test of faith

But the great test will be how those who wanted more aggressive freedom-of-religion laws might respond and, in turn, what the Prime Minister has to say.

Liberal Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells said on Friday it was “clear from my ongoing consultation and engagement with religious leaders that the bills are likely to fall far short of properly and fully addressing their requirement”.

If that proves to be the case, and the draft legislation produced by Mr Porter comes under intense pressure to be hardened up, it creates not just a unique dilemma for the Prime Minister but, without doubt, his most complex domestic challenge.

And the challenge is not of the “challenge to his authority” nature. The challenge is to his capacity for political leadership.

Here is an issue on which he has led the running from the start and, without doubt, is seen in the public mind through the prism of his own strong religious commitment.

But his Cabinet has produced a well-thought-through structure for dealing with this thorny issue and a structure which does provide the capacity for people to be able to speak out in terms of their faith without facing prosecution.

But if conservatives push on the issue, Mr Morrison will have to advocate for policies which may offend the very conservative base to which he appealed when he pushed for this review in the first place.

“I do not want religion to be an issue that divides Australians, it is deeply personal for people, I want to work through it in a way that enhances unity, not for political purposes,” Morrison told his party room earlier this year and he has argued equally that he wants to develop a bipartisan position on the issue.

That is going to require some serious and detailed positive advocacy of a difficult issue. It is not something we see a lot of in politics these days.

 

Freeing Men to Feel Again

Emotions are the portals to higher consciousness, without a free flowing expression you will experience life in limitedness.  It is the suppression of the universal feminine that is the greatest pain for men as they are not given permission to feel life deeply. 

We are a civilisation that is at a point of evolving not unlike the child that learns to walk.

I send love to men as their wars are outer projections of unresolved inner conflict and suppression. I welcome men crying and for me there is nothing more touching then seeing a man’s true heart.  That connects with me.

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/gender/boxed-in-the-fragility-of-men-20190731-p52cpd.html

Boxed in: the fragility of men

Unearthing the roots of misogyny and violence against women in this post-#MeToo era, a writer examines the damage caused by the loss of men’s feminine sides – and the role fathers can play.

Eve Ensler, the American author of the era-defining stage play The Vagina Monologues, had every reason to fear and despise men, and to be reluctant to hear what ails them; from a young age, she was beaten, bruised, choked and nearly murdered by her father. Yet her efforts to survey the ruined landscape of female suffering – visiting rape camps, establishing safe houses for women across the world, creating a global movement to stop violence against women (first V-Day, then One Billion Rising) – ultimately took her into the heart of male darkness.

In her 2006 book Insecure at Last, she described meeting a soldier in Kosovo in the late 1990s who seemed both physically and mentally paralysed. His name was Agrim.

Stereotypes about masculinity, and the identities men form around them, can be deeply destructive.

Stereotypes about masculinity, and the identities men form around them, can be deeply destructive.Credit:EyeEm

“He looked at me, threw his arms around my neck, and started weeping,” she wrote. “No, it was more like wailing. I have never heard a sound like that. He would not let go. Then his weeping wailing began to build and release. It could not be controlled or stopped. It resounded through the neighbourhood. People from the village began to gather around. I held on to Agrim, but, honestly, I wanted him to stop. All these years I had told myself I wanted men to be vulnerable, to have their feelings, to cry. All of a sudden it felt like a lie. I did not want this man to be so destroyed, so out of control. I wanted him to have answers and be tough and know the way and make everything work out.”

Ensler understood how part of her was terrified of men being lost, how she needed them to be tough and assured. She also understood how many years she’d been carrying men’s “invisible pain” in order not to see their weakness or shame. Holding Agrim in her arms, “this weeping liquid man” – as she described him – was her undoing, pulling her “out to sea in the wild waves of his crying”.

Advertisement

“It was as if I were holding the secret story of men in my lap,” she wrote. “Centuries of male sorrow and loss, centuries of unexpressed worry and doubt, centuries of pain. I suddenly understood violence and war. I understood retaliation and revenge. I understood how deep the agony is and how its suppression has made men into other things. I understood that these tears falling down Agrim’s face would have become bullets in any other case, hardened drops of grief and rage directed toward a needed enemy. I saw how in fighting to live up to the tyranny of masculinity, men become driven to do anything to prove they are neither tender, nor weak, nor insecure. They are forced to cage and kill the feminine within their own beings and consequently the world.”

I first read this passage more than a decade ago, and the words have remained with me. That’s partly because they were delivered by a strong feminist, but also because they spoke to what it is in men that causes them to inflict such monumental hurt on women, other men, children and themselves. They are forced to cage and kill the feminine within their own beings and consequently the world.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst renowned for his theory of the collective unconscious, called this feminine within a man the anima – the “unconscious woman” that contains all the feminine personality qualities inside a man that can either be expressed, if allowed, or repressed and removed. These are the qualities of tenderness, compassion, vulnerability, friendship, relatedness, creativity, imagination and intuition.

Conversely, he called the masculine within a woman the animus – the “unconscious man” that holds the archetypal masculine traits of courage, assertiveness, analytical thought, decisiveness and a drive for achievement. (The Chinese describe this polarity as yin and yang, the complementary female and male principles operating in nature.) In Jung’s world view, all of us carry these archetypal qualities inside us – feminine and masculine – but from childhood we create gender identities and roles, consciously or unconsciously, to conform with the often-crippling sexual stereotypes society imposes.

From a young age, boys absorb information about what behaviours are deemed acceptable for males.

From a young age, boys absorb information about what behaviours are deemed acceptable for males.Credit:Getty Images

 

Girls wear pink, and isn’t that a pretty dress? Boys wear blue and play with Lego and trucks, and aren’t you strong? Women are nurturers. Men are providers. Women are sensitive. Men are tough. We all know the drill; and we all know that identity politics today is, in part, a furious backlash to these oversimplified and limiting concepts.

For men, these stereotypes are particularly destructive, as Tony Porter, an internationally recognised American author and educator, pointed out in his inspirational 2010 TED talk in Washington DC. “I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating, no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger, and definitely no fear,” he said. “[We were taught] that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you [women] should just follow and just do what we say. That men are superior and women are inferior; that men are strong, that women are weak. That women are of less value, property of men, and objects, particularly sexual objects.”

Porter later came to describe this collective socialisation as the “man box”, a term first coined by Paul Kivel in his 1992 book, Men’s Work: How to Stop the Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart. This “man box” contained all the ingredients for how men came to define their masculinity. Some of those ingredients, Porter said, were “absolutely wonderful”, others were so “twisted” that it required deconstructing and redefining the very concept of manhood.

Porter used his own parenting to illustrate the point. When his daughter Jay was little, she could come crying to him anytime she liked and Porter would comfort her. “Daddy’s got you,” he’d say. With his son Kendall, the opposite was true. Whenever he heard him cry, a clock would start ticking in his head. His son had about 30 seconds to stop before he’d start saying to him, “Why are you crying? Hold your head up. Look at me. Explain to me what’s wrong. I can’t understand you.” And then through sheer frustration, together with a sense of responsibility for building his son into a “man”, Porter would say, “Just go to your room. Go on, go to your room. Sit down, get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like … a man.” His son was five years old.

Porter was mortified. “My god, what’s wrong with me?” he’d ask himself. “What am I doing? Why would I do this?” And the answer took him back to his own father.

 

He then related a story from his teenage years. His brother Henry had just died and the burial was being held in Long Island. Porter’s family was about to be driven home from the cemetery to the Bronx – a two-hour drive that first required a toilet stop.

“The limousine empties out,” Porter recalled. “My mother, my sister, my auntie, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine, and no sooner had the women got out, than he burst out crying. He didn’t want to cry in front of me, but he knew he wasn’t going to make it back to the city, and it was better [to have me there] than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women.

“And this is a man who, 10 minutes ago, had just put his teenage son in the ground, something I just can’t even imagine. The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologising for crying in front of me, and at the same time, he was also giving me props, lifting me up, for not crying.”

I said to myself, ‘God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?’

Tony Porter

This fear of expressing emotion, of being seen as weak or feminine, Porter said, kept boys and men paralysed – just as Eve Ensler noted with her Balkan soldier, Agrim. They are held hostage inside the “man box”, from which there is often no escape.

 

“I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy, a football player,” Porter finished, “and I asked him, ‘How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?’ I expected him to say something like, ‘I’d be sad, I’d be mad, I’d be angry,’ or something like that. No, the boy said to me, ‘It would destroy me.’ And I said to myself, ‘God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?’”

Few men I know can speak with any abiding affection about the men who helped bring them into the world.

Few men I know can speak with any abiding affection about the men who helped bring them into the world.

Perhaps as men we take our cues from our fathers. From the way they expressed – or failed to express – their emotions, weaknesses, vulnerabilities. Or the way they showed us – or failed to show us – their devotion. In that sense, I think I was lucky. My father called me “darling” my whole life, and he always greeted and farewelled me with a kiss or a declaration of love. In our quieter moments, up until the time he died four years ago, we were always able to discuss the usual male topics of work, sport and politics, but also relationships, matters of the heart, the things that often felt unsayable. There was even a time, as an adult, when I allowed myself to cry in his arms.

That has often made me feel different from most of my male friends, because even today there are few I know who can speak with any abiding affection about the men who helped bring them into the world.

One old school friend left Australia 30 years ago, largely because of the hurt his father inflicted on him from the time he was a little boy. When he was 16, his father called the police to escort him from his home because he’d found him experimenting with cannabis. His father didn’t speak to him again for almost a decade. Five years after my friend had been banished and come to live with my family, he saw his father walking towards him down George Street in Sydney. “Hello, Dad,” he said tentatively. His father stared at him briefly, then kept walking.

 

Another friend was repeatedly bashed and thrown against walls as a boy when his father returned home from the pub. His mother often copped a hiding too. Yet another man I know, a carpenter with dashing good looks, warm and funny to strangers, once tied his six-year-old son to a pole and left him out in the midday sun. That was his way of teaching his little boy a lesson after the boy had said he was bored being on the building site with his dad. “I’ll show you what bored is,” he replied.

I know men (and women too, of course) whose fathers died early, or walked out on the family when they were young, never to return. I know men whose fathers were rarely, if ever, at home, so consumed were they with their work or whatever went on after work. I know men who, rather than face up to their own corporate follies or misdeeds, publicly humiliated the sons who were working for them. I know a man who still laments the fact that his father never once told him he loved him. His father is dead, but he’s still waiting.

I remember another close friend telling me how, when he turned 10, he was informed by his father that they could no longer kiss each other goodnight. “You’re a man now,” his father said. “We’ll shake hands.” My friend felt both chuffed and crestfallen by this sudden declaration. Chuffed because he’d been anointed a “man”; crestfallen because he knew something priceless had just been ripped from him.

It was 22 years before these two men would embrace again, and only because the son spontaneously pulled his father towards him one night and hugged him. “Dad, I’ve been wanting to do this for years.” The pair wept in each other’s arms.

Australian psychotherapist Steve Biddulph – author of the seminal 1997 book Raising Boys – has thought about these issues for almost 40 years, and he describes this sorrow for lost contact and love as “father hunger”, a term first coined by Jungian writers.

 

“This ‘father hunger’,” he tells me when we meet at his home in Tasmania on an afternoon of soft falling rain, “is the sorrow for lost contact and love; the simple need to be affirmed and valued by older members of one’s own gender – not just our fathers, but uncles, teachers, grandfathers, gay or straight, and of different ethnicities and natures. Each boy needs to create a masculinity that is his own, and to do that he must experience a wide range of masculinities from different kinds of men. This is especially the case when his own father is a terrible, or not very relevant, example of manhood.

“Role modelling is the way the human brain learns almost all complex behaviours, attitudes and skills, and so boys need to know good men close up. All of us are a bundle of the good people, male and female, we have known. But we have let that enrichment disappear on the male side, and many boys today have never seen what a good man looks like close up.”

Biddulph believes this is a key insight into the defective nature of male psychology, an impairment that began during the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, men abandoned their agricultural communities and went in search of jobs in the cities, thereby splitting their family roles between home and work. Men were no longer working alongside women and children; they were miles away in factories and mines. “In a break with eternal tradition,” Biddulph wrote in his best-selling 1994 book Manhood, “boys began being raised solely by women. The lack of male input into growing boys created a huge break in the family fabric, yet we adjusted to it and soon assumed it was normal. The possibility that boys might need fathering for many hours a day, not just minutes, and that uncles and grandfathers had a critical role in male mental health, was forgotten.”

For 30 years, Biddulph has travelled Australia and the world talking to men about fathering, encouraging them to become more engaged, inviting them to talk about their own boyhoods.

Pyschotherapist Steve Biddulph says boys need to be affirmed and valued by older members of their own gender.

Pyschotherapist Steve Biddulph says boys need to be affirmed and valued by older members of their own gender.Credit:Quentin Jones

 

“When I meet with groups of young dads,” Biddulph tells me, “I conduct a survey and the results are always the same. About 30 per cent of men report that they don’t even speak to their fathers. Their relationship is non-existent. Another 30 per cent have a somewhat prickly or difficult relationship. They do sometimes spend time with their father, but it’s a painful and awkward time. Around another 30 per cent fare somewhat better – they visit their father or phone him regularly, show up for family get-togethers, go through the motions of being a good son, and yet discuss nothing deeper than lawnmowers. Fewer than 10 per cent of men are friends with their father and see the relationship as deep and sustaining. Only about one man in 10 says, ‘My father is fantastic. He’s an emotional backstop in my world.’”

By contrast, many women absorb an entirely different type of role modelling, from which they naturally develop a capacity for intimacy and connection. “They have spent hours a day, over years of their lives as girls, in deep conversation and exposure to good people of their own gender, which boys just don’t get,” says Biddulph. “As a counsellor, you find this all the time – the man just doesn’t seem to have found a voice, beyond clichés or platitudes. And that’s why men feel so liberated and alive when they start talking to other men, and find shared depth and experience.

“Women tell me, ‘Finally I know what he is thinking and feeling!’ And of course, a man who can express himself, and think about his inner self, is far less likely to hurt others on impulse, take his own life on impulse, or act stupidly in any number of ways.”

Each culture produces its own kind of man. An Irishman is not an Indian, a man from Kansas is entirely different to one from Kenya. Men wheel prams all over Denmark, something we’ve only just begun to see in Australia and in this generation’s Britain where, Biddulph says, a “typical British father was like a log of wood, except that from time to time, he blazed out in violent rage, or an alcoholic blur, or lashed out with a verbal coldness that made millions of sons feel that they never measured up”.

We know all manner of men – good men, dangerous men, corporate men, artistic men, alpha and beta men, terrifying and tender men, physical and bookish men, gregarious men, silent men, old-world men, New Age men, rescuers, narcissists, hopeless romantics, cynics … For Biddulph, however, one of the common denominators, certainly throughout the Western world, is the correlation between the time a father spends with his children and a child’s sense of self-worth.

 

“A father’s absence from his daughter’s life has been found in research to increase her chances of risky sexual behaviour, experiencing teen pregnancy, doing poorly in school. For sons, it prevents them from seeing the fullness of what it means to be a man. There is no access to the interior world of male feeling,” he says. “There’s been a vast improvement in this over the past 20 years because of how much time fathers are now devoting to their children. But generations of men have carried the legacy of this gaping hole.”

In the early days of giving talks around the world, Biddulph noticed certain men leaving the theatre. He assumed they were bored or indifferent, or felt they had better things to do. Then, at one gathering in the British Midlands, he was told by ushers that they’d seen men leaving in tears, although who can say why. Perhaps because of the grief of their own broken relationships with their fathers. Perhaps because, as the 19th-century American poet Henry Longfellow wrote, “Often times we call a man cold, when he is only sad.”

For all my father’s tenderness, I still remember his often long, impenetrable silences, particularly as old age began to overwhelm him. These silences were born, I’m sure, from his troubled German youth, where he was shunned at school for being Jewish, and then force-marched through the streets of Nazi Germany and pelted with rotten fruit by jeering crowds. He never forgot the indignity of Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass”, when Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were destroyed across the country.

My father’s silences also probably mirrored his own father’s, although, in my grandfather’s case, this had more do with the injuries he sustained in the trenches during World War I and then bore throughout his life with stoic acceptance.

As the 19th-century American poet Henry Longfellow wrote, ‘Often times we call a man cold, when he is only sad.’

 

Perhaps we all know a version of this male silence. Certainly, in the Australian context, it’s easy to see how our ideas of masculinity were shaped by our felon origins for one, but also the Great War which saw hundreds of thousands of husbands, fathers, sons and brothers return home as husks of the men they’d once been – that is, if they returned home at all. Everywhere, households were enveloped by the muteness of male anguish.

“We’ve militarised men and commodified women for thousands of years,” Biddulph tells me. “War became one of the definers of masculinity and we’re still raising boys as soldiers of empire – which is why they don’t cry. If we need you to go and die in the trenches of France, or in Iraq, we don’t want you to complain about it. Similarly, if you’re a policeman pulling bodies out of cars, or you’re a surgeon tending horrific injuries, you don’t want a man to burst into tears. It can be a positive thing to suppress your emotions. The problem is when it becomes a lifelong characteristic.”

Biddulph describes a place in Rotorua, New Zealand, where Maori men were traditionally known to do their weeping after battle. There’s a hot spring there that runs into a stream, before tumbling over a waterfall. “The Maori said this was their ritual place. They used to wash the blood off themselves there, and then do their weeping so that they could release the warrior mode. After that, they could go back to being safe, trusting men again with open hearts. We’ve never done that, not since World War I. And it was a century of hammer blows. We’ve never grieved or raged against the monumental waste, and we’re now in the fourth or fifth generation since that war.”

In Australia, there’s also the enduring power and myth of the bush, which defined ideas of manliness for generations – squatters, soldier settlers and farmers who, alone in nature, controlled and governed themselves as they attempted to control and govern the land. It was a hard-boiled self-sufficiency, and it came at great cost, not just to the land and its original inhabitants, but to the way in which men were able – or unable – to communicate. The elemental silence of the bush seemed to find its ghostly reflection in the reserve of the men who sought to tame it.

“The bush has always been as much for hiding pathologies as repairing them,” Don Watson wrote in his exquisite rendition of the Australian landscape and character, The Bush. “The no-speak rule of old persists. In the city, opinion corrodes the outer layer of existence; in the country it eats the inner.”

 

All the stock definitions of masculinity prevent boys from dealing with the “storms and subtleties” inside their hearts. Only yesterday, as I wrote this, one of my oldest and dearest male friends told me that he didn’t think he’d cried since he was nine years old. That’s more than half a century ago. “I’m hard-wired not to cry,” he said. “I was nine when my father died, and I was determined not to cry in front of my friends, or even myself. But I think by that time I’d already decided I would never cry. That’s because only girls cried, so it’s almost like I can’t cry now. It’s baked in. It would be like weeing in your pants, which is just like tears coming out the other end.”

This is the suppression of pain that Eve Ensler referred to – “the caging of the feminine” – which, if unexpressed, can harden and direct its fury outwards. Quite possibly, this is the first act of violence that the patriarchy commits: a wholesale assault on the qualities of softness and vulnerability, of emotional attachment and spirit that reside inside a man. That’s the desecration of the feminine right there.

Perhaps violence against women begins with violence against that which is regarded as feminine – vulnerability, intimacy, connection and emotional openness.

Perhaps violence against women begins with violence against that which is regarded as feminine – vulnerability, intimacy, connection and emotional openness.Credit:Getty Images

My late friend Neil Roberts spent more time than any man I’ve ever known exploring the boundaries of masculinity. As an artist and human being he was a gentle giant among men, a warm-hearted, brilliant and creative force who challenged the way we thought and felt about everyday objects and the memories they contained: a piece of wood, an old garden tool, a shard of glass, a length of rope, a bicycle wheel – all of them grist for his prodigious mill. Up until his sudden death in 2002, he was always looking for the hidden meaning of things, fragments of history, human traces that told us stories about ourselves.

For one of his exhibitions, Roberts unstitched footballs, then flattened them out and re-presented them as flower petals, so that they would appear as both floral arrangements and a study of the masculine force and energy contained inside those once bloated, leathery bladders. In the late 1980s, amid the corporate madness of a Western Australian political scandal, he strung two words in neon across the Perth skyline: Tenderly, gently.

 

Although physically tall and imposing, Roberts was as tender and gentle a man as you could meet. In his company, men dropped their guard and women could be intimate without ever feeling threatened. He was the first man I ever knew who deliberately crossed the road at night to avoid walking behind or towards a woman on her own. Somewhere deep in his marrow, he understood women’s fear, and wanted to shoulder some of the responsibility for it.

Maybe the struggle between the sexes will never be put to rest. Maybe, in the unfathomable reaches of the male psyche, men have always been frightened of women – or at least frightened of the feminine qualities within themselves: those qualities that point inwards, to that place where our deepest feelings are lodged, but which centuries of masculine culture have repressed or removed.

Perhaps, this is the place where violence against women begins: in the shutting-down of this inner world where relationships and connection truly reside, because the models we’ve been given for manhood fail to recognise a fundamental truth, which is that nothing meaningful in life ever happens without the ability to be vulnerable.

Edited extract from Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing by David Leser (Allen & Unwin, $30), which is out on August 5. The book began as a Good Weekend cover story with the same title on February 9, 2018.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.