What does it mean to be a man?

What does it mean to be a man, to have grown up in a male body? This question reverberated in my head last weekend, sitting in a circle with thirteen men, united across age and sexual preference by the simple fact of being men. As I contemplated the answer I wanted to share in this men’s circle, several pieces of my life suddenly fell into place.

Growing up a white, European, middle-class, hetero man, my experience of life has felt limited. Yes, limited, in spite of – no, because of all the privileges that seem to come with the random fact of being born a man in a white, middle-class family in Western Europe.

Since elementary school, I have felt a great power harbouring inside me, a voice calling me out to work hard, learn incessantly and care for friends and strangers alike. While I enjoyed running around and playing with my classmates, I also felt that I didn’t always fit in. Rarely did I participate in the activities of the “cool kids” or was I invited to join in. I wasn’t good at them either, to be honest, for lack of interest: I preferred spending my time and energy expanding my horizon.

Not conforming with the predefined image of being a boy wasn’t always easy. However, as I grew up I came to understand that this was a privileged struggle. I learned about the poor people in Africa and the threats to indigenous people’s livelihoods due to natural resource extraction and deforestation. Over the years, inequality appeared ever closer in my life: homeless people, migrant discrimination, LGBTI exclusion all the way up to the daily battles women fight against invisible walls received a concrete face to me.

As natural as it was to feel indignation against the unequal treatment these billions of people face more frequently than I powder my nose, as easy it was to retreat in the cocoon of white, male, hetero, western privilege whenever I wanted to – something that I have done unconsciously more often than I would like to admit.

The most recent confrontation took place just a few weeks ago, as I was watching Nanette. Triggered by the recommendations of several feminist friends on Facebook, I was eager to gain a greater insight into a woman’s perspective on life. I did not expect to have my world of white male privilege shaken up and down that unabashedly.

Digesting tears of shame, I felt overwhelmed by a feeling of impotence. Whereas I didn’t identify myself with many images of male violence portrayed in the show, it was crystal clear to me that I have been contributing on a weekly – if not daily – basis to the structures of exclusion and discrimination that remain almost completely out of sight to men.

What could I do to change this? With which moral authority could I throw myself into the fight against inequality, not knowing what it really feels like, not realising how much I contribute to perpetuating it? This realisation paralysed me. I didn’t see a way out of this moral conundrum and resigned to humbled silence.

Up until the men’s circle of last weekend, that is. Earlier that day, we had been discussing how much our behaviour is conditioned by society’s appreciation and valuation of men purely in function of their performance. At the workplace, our payslip and our hierarchical position determine our value; on the field, our ability to outcompete other men; in the street, the price tag of our car and our manly appearance; at home, the size of our television and conformity to the male-female division of chores; in bed, our stamina and sexual virility rivalling that of porn stars.

For most of my life, many of these societal notions of manliness have dominated my life on a personal and professional level, until they caused me to crash. The fact that I survived this motorbike crash with not much more than a few scratches and a heavily bruised ego, was a wake-up call for me. Since then, I have engaged in a process of self-development ranging from reconstructive constellation workshops over meditation to men’s circles like the one of last weekend.

This work has helped me to recognise and deconstruct the structures that dominate our society and my behaviour in it. Creating space to devote time just to myself, has contributed to realising what my values are and what I want to do with my life – not what I ought to be doing for me to be appreciated or accepted by society or my family.

Last weekend’s eye-opener was the possibility to remove the objective out of sex, the disjunction between having an orgasm and ejaculation. While these two are generally believed and expected to go hand in hand (pun intended), this limits our sexual experience tremendously, making us focus – once again – on performance. Having an orgasm becomes an act that can be measured by me and my partner; not ejaculating receives the stigma of non-performance, something must be wrong.

But what if we decoupled these two? What if we removed the objective of ejaculation from the sexual act? Would it not liberate us from the yoke of performance and allow us to focus on the intercourse instead? It will invite us to become more present to the exchange of energy that takes place in this most intimate of spaces: to how I feel, to how my partner feels, to the exploration of many more physical sensations besides the genitalian one, to an extasis that can elevate us beyond the limitations of the physical and connects us with our essence.

This revelation opened a new world of opportunities to me. I realised that consciously removing the performance objective out of sex could be equally applied to all other areas of life. Removing externally measurable objectives as the (sole) way of valuing men (and by extension women who want to appear performing like men when trying to shatter glass ceilings and walls), opens the doors to connecting in a wholesome way with life, consciously including every living being in our thoughts, speech and actions, realising that we cannot thrive if this limits others in their capacity to thrive.

That’s when it dawned on me that this newly gained freedom comes with a great responsibility: on a personal level, to replace performance by the ability to connect inclusively and wholesomely as a guiding stick when appreciating my own behaviour and that of other’s; and on a societal level, to share this insight with other men, whether in existing spaces or by creating ones in which to extend this message.

This is a moral imperative that I – a white, hetero, western, middle-class man – can commit to in full conscience and without limitations, as my contribution to the fight against inequality, discrimination and exclusion, as my contribution to unconditional happiness of all living beings.