I’m taking this Sunday off from my series on male suffering voices… kind of.
Up until yesterday around noon Eastern Time, I was planning to publish today my next essay on Male Suffering Voices.
Scott Galloway was going to be my subject, given how prominently his PR team has placed him in the masculinity space and the substance of his messages and the depth to which he appears to hear the suffering of others.
Scott is not a bad person, as far as I can tell.
But he does sit precariously on an all-too-common masculine knife’s edge, a precipice where men can either fall forwards into a stronger sense of a compassionate self, or backwards, into places that can lead to harmful behaviors.
Like pumping bullets into innocent human beings.
In a matter of minutes this Saturday, as I learned about the cold-blooded murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis, I knew there was only one thing I could write about today — the suffering voices of men who are so removed from compassion, love, self-love, that they find it instinctively preferrable to discharge a firearm in order to claim a sense of self-worth.
Less than three weeks ago in the same city, Renee Good was fatally shot by another immigration officer. She suffered three gunshot wounds, including one to her head. The officer’s reaction to what he had done wasn’t shock and regret. No. He called Good, an unarmed mother of three children, a “fucking bitch.”
The brutal murders of these two individuals, two humans who carried so much compassion in their hearts that they literally put their lives on the line to protect others, represent the extreme consequences our society faces from men who pursue might and physical dominance over care and love for others.
I do not know the two men who murdered our fellow Americans.
I have watched the videos of these murders, as well as countless other videos of ICE goons abusing people. What I see are tell-tale signs of how depraved a man can get when he adheres rigidly to a form of masculinity that relies on being THE authority in his world.
Recently, a man, I have to assume his gender since his Substack name (TriTorch) and his profile picture mask his identity, opened his first comment on one of my bell curve essays by writing:
“Put the world’s strongest woman fighter in the ring with an average male professional boxer, cross your fingers she doesn’t get killed, and then come and tell me the genders are the same. They are not.”
Brute strength was his response to my essay calling for gender equality and equanimity, for seeing behaviors as human, and not as masculine or feminine.
In her 1992 book, Revolution from Within, Gloria Steinem wrote about how a positive sense of self is not only an act of personal liberation, but also the jumping off point for political liberation, while “self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated.”
TriTorch and I went back and forth a few times in my comments section, with my arguing that his focus on physical strength was increasingly unimportant in a society where earning an income depended more on brains than brawn, and where muscles are completely neutralized by a woman’s ability to purchase a firearm and be properly trained in its use for self-defense.
He held rigidly to his beliefs without providing any logical counter argument for them, or in response to my arguments.
What I see in his comments and these violent thugs parading around Minneapolis in military gear, are men so filled with self-hatred, that dominating others is their default response in stressful and non-stressful situations.
As we head down the Bell Curve of Male Suffering Voices the next few weeks, and likely months as I explore female voices — like Steinem — and everyday voices, unsupported by six-figure book deals, I’d ask you to listen for both the subtle and not-so-subtle rigid, so-called masculine voices.
Listen not just to what they say, but how they say it, and importantly what they fail to say. Listen to their rhetoric and how it is designed to appeal to a certain kind of person who is either a reflection of the speaker’s image, or perhaps someone they want to attract to sell something to.
I created this Substack, and this specific series, because too often men and women are choosing to listen to voices that temporarily ease their trauma, reaffirm a belief system, or help them claim a dominant footing they need to get through their day.
When we fail to help men listen to these voices carefully, we place them on that razor’s edge that either permits them to fall into compassion and care or needlessly pull the trigger of a gun.
