Courage, Power, and Why Men Are Afraid
An excerpt from chapter two of A Farewell to the Patriarchy
What is courage?
[...] there were so many hints in the media about how a man should be. For example, in one food company commercial, the voice-over said, “It’s okay if he’s naughty—I just want him to grow up strong.” Most of the scenes were of a father and son exerting themselves outside together, and no girls appeared. They were overflowing with the idea that of course a man should be manly, which meant he had to be tough and possess the courage to take on any challenge.
But what sorts of challenges? Never the true unknown, but only the assignments and trials presented to him. Fulfilling his role in a group, conquering difficult academic subjects, and getting good grades on tests. Enduring harsh drilling and dedicating himself to sports. The things boys could be praised for at school and home were those already set forth as the rule. If the current way didn’t work for you, and you tried to do something different, you got shot down, your individual judgment deemed selfish: “That’s not how we normally do it.” We were only tasked with “correct” understanding. Since our individual judgments were seen as deviant, we strove to obliterate our sensibilities.
We wouldn't be praised unless we took care to stay within the range of values our parents and teachers believed in. If that was how it would be, then the “strength” and “courage” we had to acquire were necessarily perseverance, endurance, and submission.
At the end of the previous chapter, I wrote, “What was actually happening internally when we were ‘summoning our courage’? Did we experience an ‘overcoming’ that warranted the people around us getting all excited?”
The first thing I remembered when I thought about explaining this was the instructor during swimming class telling a boy who was scared to dive, “Be brave!” The boy squeezed his eyes shut, took a deep breath, and yelled, “Yaah!” as he jumped. He landed on his belly and made a huge splash. The instructor’s face showed a glimpse of disappointment, and the kids all laughed at the failure.
I’m sure no small number of men have had the experience of being rewarded for their courage with disappointment and derisive laughter. If you don’t get results, then your efforts aren’t worth calling bravery. Being unable to perform to expectations means you’re weak and unmanly. The kind of courage exhibited under such conditions usually ends up being the “Fuck it!” variety, that all-or-nothing desperation. You want to escape the fear of failing in shame so badly that you can’t focus on what you’re trying to do. You’re only thinking of the outcome, so you can’t value how you feel in the moment. As a result, you get nervous, and you fail.
But sometimes, even if you’re nervous, things happen to go well. And those are the times that come with a real sense of success—because you get the powerful feeling that you mustered your courage and faced your fear.
“I zoned out and somehow just managed to do it” is not a very interesting story. It lacks the spicy drama of overcoming. Rather than turning inward to see how we feel, we’re strangely compelled by zealous comments like “Just do it!” or “Show me your guts!” Spurred on by those comments, we step forward and mistake that as courage. Suppose we overcome trials in that way as ordered and achieve results that meet expectations. If we eventually begin to think, Hey, maybe I’m kinda brave, it’s probably easy to start seeing hesitation as cowardly and weak—because the sense that we’ve grown stronger makes us happy.
But we end up overlooking the caution and prudence that must have been hidden in that fear we once had. And then we unconsciously adopt the framework of toughing through on willpower, where no matter what you say, it sounds like the right thing.
As far as I can remember, I’ve almost always only heard people talk about courage in terms of willpower. What does it mean to say to a boy who can’t dive into the pool, “Be brave!” He couldn’t jump because he was scared. He was scared because he knew he didn’t have the ability to dive.
Once you gain a certain amount of confidence, you’re able to think, I’m scared, but I’ll give it a shot. That ability is the beginning of courage, but a lot of people, not just at school, but anywhere education is offered, seem to think that skipping that step and talking in the circle of, “Just be brave and do it. If you can’t, that means you’re not brave!” is valid instruction.
But is taking that step toward the object of our curiosity really due to “facing our fear”? Isn’t it more that our curiosity wins and we manage to shake off our hesitation? Surely we’re able to muster our courage because the novelty surpasses our fear and we want to pursue that novelty. And everyone pursues it in a different way—I think that’s what people in the position to teach should focus on.
We learn this misunderstanding of courage and eventually leave childhood behind; by the time we are treated as men, we’re members of a society where people value you for being brave. As long as we’re members of male-dominated society, the same encouragements used on the boy who was scared to dive will be repeated all over the place. For example, if you hesitate when someone tells you to “Just give it a shot” at work, you get told you’re a wimp.
If you take a look at your internal state at the moment, though, it might simply be that you don’t want to fall in line with such an oppressive way of doing things. But between men, refusing to submit gets changed into timidity and a lack of decisiveness. Not doing the same thing as everyone else is a grave sin. Why? Because under the rules of male-dominated society, being different from others puts cracks in the system for maintaining authority. An extremely personal decision causes unrest in the group of ”everyone.” That’s because, to men who know that power can be maintained by stubbornly adhering to their weakness of refusing to deviate from everyone else, an outsider who doesn’t derive peace of mind by getting everyone’s acceptance should be removed. In order for a man to become a proper man, he mustn’t forget subordination.
It’s not only men; everyone has a desire for approval, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. So what is it between men that becomes a problem in particular? One fact that becomes important is how they don’t recognize each other as adults but only treat each other as “men.”
Values that could be appreciated in a man might include reliability, hard work, perseverance, decisiveness, a steady heart, kindness... The strength that these “manly” qualities equip a person with, as you might guess, is conformity. See how they all focus on the ability to continue saying yes? A strong body and resolute mind. Following through on what they are ordered to do. Taking on things that are borderline impossible. Refusing to say they can’t when they can’t. Performing without complaining. Protecting the weak.
When we lay it out like that, we see that “manliness” can’t be expressed by being yourself. In order to prove their strength, they must constantly “be strong.” Being the sort of man male-dominated society asks for requires negating yourself.
We’re not movie heroes, so we’re not indomitable, and we can’t work the miracle of making the impossible possible. Though we’re extremely ordinary humans who struggle to do many things, manliness finds that situation intolerable. Why? Because feeling things as your natural self involves admitting that you can’t do some things, which leads to admitting that you’re a weak human. This is where some shallow thinking shows up. I have some weaknesses is the simple truth. Yet we comprehend it as an invalidation of our entire self—I’m no good. Why does being unable to do something result in total disapproval? The background to this feeling is surely all the “You can do it if you try. You just aren’t trying because you’re weak” conclusions made about us in the guise of encouragement.
People who talk like that affirm you completely as long as you act. They’re confessing that all they know how to do if you don’t act is disapprove of you. What in the world do they gain by making their dearth of experience and the overwhelming superficiality of their sensibilities public? Perhaps men often speak without considering what significance their words have to them. And why is that? Because by continuing to say yes to the people around them, men are able to be men. Because they’re on board with that system. If you become the perfect stereotype of a patriarchal man, you will be esteemed. But it doesn't mean you’ll be accepted as an individual. You’ll be recognized as a man, that’s all.
If, when you can’t do something, that simple fact is made into an unacceptable “weakness” that people judge you for, you might end up thinking that strength means hiding it. Most of the time, this averting of your eyes from your self is called overcoming. We hallucinate that the self-restraint required to negate our present self is our strength.
The expression of determination that is self-restraint
Twice, at my father’s wishes, when I was in fifth and six grade, I participated in five-day seminars to cultivate the next generation of executives. The first day, we were told to say good morning in a big enough voice that someone next to us could only find it too loud, and to say thank you in the same big voice whenever anyone did anything for us. They must have wanted to instill gratitude and a perky demeanor in us. But all I felt was that they were making us insensitive and causing us to lose our humility.
The content of the seminar in a nutshell was “you can do it if you try” and “gratitude”—the end. There was a reason I felt I had heard the notions they were trying to teach us before: I was indeed familiar with them. In the study at home there were not only books and videos about the founder of Matsushita Electric (now Panasonic), Kōnosuke Matsushita, but tons of books singing the praises of “success philosophy”—how hard work and gratitude could result in profit, which would maybe even be of use to the world. I had read most of those books out of boredom. They all spoke of a crude theory of willpower that could only be called “the way of the salesman.”
In order to be successful, one must always strive for improvement, never resting on one’s laurels. If you make a good product people want, it will sell. These books said that this effort was mainly an issue of attitude, and they emphasized self-restraint.
Self-restraint was tied to victory, and this same diagram was apparent at the seminars I participated in. If your victory doesn’t come to fruition, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough; you mustn’t go through life with a wishy-washy feeling toward your own softness. That was what the instructor told us. It was a single-track notion that brooked no digressions.
At home, that was an existing set of rails, and I saw it looking at those around me as well. If you got low scores on tests at school or cram school, you were chewed out as a lazybones. A test is literally just that: a test to find out how much you currently understand. If you get a low score, it means that’s all the understanding you have; there’s no good or bad. It should have no relation to a person’s nature as a human, but to a strange degree, our parents and teachers didn’t think that way.
Society was pushing forward as one corner of an economic power, so acquisition and expansion was correct. Naturally, it was difficult to question the idea that someone who failed to be victorious was lazy. And the “someone” here was mainly “a man.” Surely executives had children who weren’t boys, but no girls participated in these seminars. The path of self-restraint and victory was indispensable along the path of a boy’s development into a man; this mindset was there as a matter of course without anyone being particularly conscious of it.
The adults around me had been emphasizing “self-restraint,” but when I think back on it, the things they said never had anything to do with self-restraint. All they ever focused on was overcoming your current self—that is, determination. They weren’t actually valuing restraint of the self. They had a fondness for set phrases like, “It’s not about whether you can, but whether you do,” and whenever I heard things like that, I could only see it as them being intoxicated by their own tone. It was obvious that they were trying to show us how they were out in the world having guts.
The more you emphasize this determination called self-restraint, the more of a rub develops between your actual self and your desired self, but apparently the adults didn’t find anything problematic about that incongruity. Even if they did sense a disconnect between reality and their ideal, they probably chalked it up to a weakness of mind. Hence the resilience of their belief in the persuasiveness of this circle of incredibly low-chroma, emotional words that didn’t ever explain the why—Self-restraint is important, so ya gotta have self-restraint.
In male culture, logic is supposed to trump emotion, so why didn’t they put this incongruous disconnect into words? It puzzled me so much. I suppose it was because they didn’t feel it or forced their sensibilities to be such that they weren’t allowed to feel it.
With emotions, logic doesn’t follow
Perhaps men are frightened of putting the incongruities they must surely be experiencing into words—because when you put emotional understanding into words, it looks messy. It’s not backed by knowledge or data. It’s not very persuasive to say, “Well I just kinda feel like it’s the case,” and it feels like poor footing for expressing yourself to someone. So they suppose that it’s not worth discussing. They would never think, It’s such a rich topic that it’s difficult to put into words. Why not? I have to be able to speak in concrete terms, and if I said something like that, I’d be invalidated. That fear is deeply ingrained in their bodies.
But why do they avoid feeling anything deeply, including that fear? Because there’s something they can’t attain if they do: strength and the victory that is brought about by being stronger than everyone else.
Men pursuing victory keep an attentive eye on not their inner senses and emotions, but the way in which they should confront the given, external environment. There, the rough sort of methods like whether you can hack it or not are valued. Conversely, sensitive, emotional understanding is treated as weakness and considered a waste of time. As you would expect, the idea that manly behavior means making a resolute decision holds sway.
If we list the things that are objects of this manly approach, we find things like sales quotas and issues to be resolved, and society already values these things. When we simplify our relationship to the problem and get obsessed with overcoming it, that’s when we do the verbalizing of “how.” But no one thinks about the off feeling brought about by the question of “why.” Why do we always think we “must”? Compared to “how,” “why” doesn’t lead as directly to a resolution, so it’s harder to find the value in it.
So now we start to see more clearly what sort of thing masculine “logic” is. Aren’t they just calling the process of using know-how to overcome current problems and achieving goals “logic”? And the goals are never at eye level, always above. Men try to clamber up to the next highest goal that they’ll never be able to achieve unless they grow stronger. No one even has to call them small and weak—they believe it and voluntarily wither.
Really, it shouldn’t be possible to live a forward-thinking life in a frightened body. But it’s precisely at that moment that the senior members of male-dominated society say, “Right now, you’re weak. You’re powerless. That’s why there’s value in growing stronger.” You may be powerless, but the ones who went before you are higher in status, and they’re guaranteeing your path forward. So this isn’t about self-restraint, but the spirit of self-restraint. If you don’t break the rules and give big “I’m working hard” vibes, the higher-ranking men will welcome you—because they can safely esteem you.
I’ve forgotten the details of the seminars I mentioned earlier, but we were meant to work out how to complete a given assignment in groups and present our solution. The group that got chewed out was one that cut out hard work and anything unnecessary—that is, they shaved off the power aspect—with an engineering-style solution. They were scolded because the instructor couldn’t sense any willingness to work. The most highly praised groups were the ones who showed a willingness to confront the problem, whether or not their solutions were realistic. Their solutions were judged to be active, assertive, and cooperative. If we could chalk that up to an old attitude that ended with the Shōwa era and has nothing to do with the present day, that would be great, but that’s probably not the reality of the situation.
The goals men must achieve are always at an angle of elevation, and the ones who will recognize the men as men are always higher ranking. That means those relationships are always built on the vertical axis, either gazing up or looking down, and never a horizontal connection. We may be deeply familiar with domination, but we don’t know much about joining hands in solidarity. That’s where men are currently at.
We’re incapable of setting power aside
Boasting about strength with stories like “Self-restraint leads to victory, so it’s important” isn’t very compatible with solidarity. Joining hands in an understanding relationship doesn’t require strain. But even if we know that we should be able to relax as we work together, circumstances don’t allow us to be so carefree. Men who go along with this power of the spirit of self-restraint will never give up the power to dominate. If they tried to build horizontal relationships without paying attention to people’s stations in society, the association with power they’re accustomed to would cease to be valid. And men know that.
Having an equal relationship with your neighbor requires kindness and care. You need to disclose things, not just have the other person take a hint. If you’re going to be candid and say, “This is what I think. How do you feel about it?” you need to appear before the other person without showing off your titles or connections, without decoration. If you’re going to have a calm discussion, it won’t get off the ground unless you both convey your feelings and senses honestly.
For that sort of heart-to-heart, we have to set power aside. In other words, we have to let go of the “strength” that is gained through power. But for the majority of men steeped in the patriarchy, this is extremely difficult.
I’m sure even if I asked them, “Why is it so hard to voice your feelings?” they’d be lost for words. Probably that’s because they’ve never stopped to think about the power they have. But that can’t be all. Surely it’s also that they’ve hardly ever had the intuitive experience of considering the minority’s position.
If you’re part of the majority in male-dominated society, you acquire an attitude that matches your social standing, like a sort of cookie cutter. But that’s merely societal; it doesn’t say anything about whether it’s human or not.
Take for example the relationship between a boss and subordinate, or a patriarchal husband and wife. There are more than a few men who think of communication in these situations not as How does the other person feel and what do they think? but Good or bad? Right or wrong? Despite this, they think they’re listening, but all they are really doing is automatically sorting the other person’s statements according to their own values. Someone with ideas different from me becomes “mistaken”; they won’t acknowledge the simple fact that the other person just lives differently from them.
I wrote, “like a sort of cookie cutter,” and the majority, by nature, don’t question the route of compulsory education, higher education, and employment laid out for them. This isn’t a question of good or bad. They’re members of the majority precisely because they fit into society as it exists, i.e. That’s what everyone does, so... and That’s the norm. If all you’re doing is conforming to “everyone” and “the norm,” it’s hard to consider the idea that maybe all you’re doing is cultivating homogenized thought patterns.
Tasting the senses
Say you encounter a lifestyle completely different from your own. You’re not that person, and you can’t live your life as they do, so you can’t know the significance of their experiences. But you should be able to taste the sensations that bubble up by coming into contact with another point of view without judging the person’s past or their ideas. The majority doesn't have enough of these intuitive experiences. They don’t meet people with different values, and they don’t have any sense of fellowship with their friends. At some point, we decided that sympathizing with like-minded men is what it means to live in society. And the moment we understood life as managing to get by, we took a definite step toward losing our means of intuitive connection with others.
Intuitive connection with others. Not the consensus of a team working on a project together, not the sharing of concepts that allows for complicated debates, and not the exchange of information about your hobbies. It’s not about validating someone as “one of us” because of their abilities and feeling relieved about it, but about whether you can sense someone as an other, different from yourself.
You and I are different people, and the things you can do, I cannot. The things I can do, you cannot. When we discover this otherness, we find a distance between us that cannot be bridged. That should be how respect is born.
But according to the sensibility of those who believe in homogenized values that emphasize sympathy, when faced with someone different, we feel anxious that we’ll never be the same. We’re different, so we could complement each other, but that’s not how it goes. How does an other appear to someone brought up in a culture where anything you can’t do is seen as a weakness? If the other is less capable, then of course they’re blamed for their weakness and bullied.
If, on the other hand, the other is more capable, feeling that and putting it into words is only admitting your own weakness. Then you have to turn the blade on yourself. That’s why speaking of emotions and senses is treated as weakness, and why we hide them. And then we even say stuff like, “Actions speak louder than words.”
“Actions speak louder than words” means we should do something rather than talk about it. You can discuss ideals and hypotheses as much as you want, but you’ll never know what you can or can’t do until you act. But in this culture where masculinity is implied, the “words” part has been construed to mean “no whining”; we have a tendency to say, “Just do it.” Complaints disrupt the harmony; they must be neither voiced nor heard.
And if we rephrase this power to act as being unbending and indomitable, then being inflexible is a trait that gets praised as purity of focus. Maybe that’s true, but what was the deal they made to get this unyielding strength? Didn’t they give up the ability to accept their weakness? Don’t they have to be stubborn and refuse to listen? Can a person who can’t acknowledge their own weakness have empathy for and understand another’s? I imagine it’s pretty difficult.
Unable to accept your own weakness... Yet even as you reject yourself, you want to be accepted by others. If anyone around you is going to let you get away with that, it will be through sharing the conflict of that refusal to accept weakness.
In other words, a man gets his existence acknowledged not by accepting his weakness, but by ignoring it. Men are positioned in society not based on their character, but as flawed types, and that hierarchy gives us peace of mind. As we continue forever saying yes to the hierarchy, living our lives without any doubt we should conform, we eventually forget what it even means to open one’s heart—because saying yes even when it’s a struggle means ignoring our bodily senses. Soon we end up neglecting our feelings as well. We clean everything up as, “A person in authority said so,” or “Logically, it’s not wrong.” We lose the ability to believe our initial, gut-feeling judgment that something is off.
And we even begin to think that decisively saying yes is a strength. At a glance, such decisiveness seems to be a sign of an unflappable spirit, but it speaks to an inability to move flexibly and a dulling of our moment to moment judgment skills.
Continuing to say yes is an approval of the status quo—put another way, a rejection of independence. The fear of leaving the crowd of men makes you into someone who can’t say no. You’re tempted to voice how rough that feels, but you want to avoid being sympathized with, comforted, or encouraged, so you don’t say anything. You don’t think of those things as empowerment, but as dependence and licking each other’s wounds.
There are lots of men who like to say, “Society is harsh. Don’t depend on others.” But in the first place, at the point where we feign strength and refuse to acknowledge one another’s weaknesses, haven’t we all become dependent on this relationship style where we never speak the truth? We’ll never admit we’re weak, but we want you to understand. It’s because we’re so overly familiar with our expectations that we take the structure of domination that we conform to and apply it to others, so readily bragging and mansplaining.
When someone says, “Society is harsh. Don’t depend on others,” it’s in a reproachful tone, and the words are enveloped in anger. If you’re a man, you have to be strong even when things get tough. “So what’s wrong with you?” That anger seems to censure any deviation from masculinity as unthinkable.
But when we examine what thoughts and emotions drive those remarks, isn’t it obvious that these men came up against the harshness of society and got hurt sometime in the past? They complained and were refused help. Or they wanted to ask for help but were afraid of being branded a wuss and decided to keep their mouth shut. With nowhere to go, the sadness of not being accepted by others turned into unresolved anger. Isn’t it still there, smoldering in men’s breasts?
The self filled with a sense of power “trying to be strong” is the true self and a true man. We have this firm belief. But in reality, we know that a sense of power has nothing to do with actually demonstrating power, so the more we talk up our strength, the more our inabilities and internal weaknesses stand out to us.
With a hurt in the past that is never soothed, the pain just keeps making its appeal. And it feels like a weakness that is impossible to overcome. Dealing negatively with the reality that there are things you can’t do becomes a never-ending self-education that makes it harder and harder to trust yourself. Through this learning process, men carve fear into their bodies.
さよなら、男社会 (A farewell to the patriarchy) by Yoon WoongDae
205 pages | 2020 | published by Akishobo
Translation by Emily Balistrieri