Eldra Jackson’s “How to Break the Cycle of Toxic Masculinity”. https://www.ted.com/talks/eldra_jackson_how_to_break_the_cycle_of_toxic_masculinity
Transcript:
The comments in brackets will not necessarily be cognisant with Eldra and his process.
The following comments are for my process in coming to terms with how ‘macho/masculinisation’ affects my life as a gay identified man, and, most of my brothers to varying degrees and at various times in our lives.
Only after viewing this video and reading the transcript several times, did I notice that homosexuality, transgender and intersex were invisible, given no voice.
It raises some questions
-What contributed to this absence?
-Is masculinity thought of as only an issue for heterosexual men because their sense of self is in relation to female, whether it be healthy or unhealthy?
-Was gender identified and addressed per se in terms of the abuse, kidnapping, robbery, attempted murder?
-Have we considered how the power and control aspect of toxic masculinity is played out through sodomisation as an act of initiation in prisons, sports locker rooms etc?
-Is not internalised and externalised homophobia part of the toxicity, also?
-Is it not pertinent that we give greater voice and affirmation to the individual difference and diversity of men and masculinity instead of adhering to being ‘colonised’ and cloned into thinking about what it is to be a ‘real’ man and masculinity per se?
Let us not dismiss Eldra’s story as an extreme exception to the norm, with little relevance for all of us as men. If we are willing to delve a little deeper, within the privacy of our own thoughts and actions, past and present, we will probably find an aspect of Eldra’s past that talks to us also, it’s only a matter of degree. Toxic masculinity comes in a variety of forms and disguises, so subtle and rationalised out of existence that we can hardly see them because we live in a social context that colludes with just that! Eldra’s story is allowing us to recognise a conspiracy of silence and collusion, and stand with each other, instead of separate from each other. Let us honour the human potential of all human beings irrespective of gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, psychology/philosophy/religion/spirituality.
Big boys don’t cry. Suck it up. Shut up and rub some dirt on it. Stop crying before I give you something to cry about.
These are just a few of the phrases that contribute to a disease in our society, and more specifically, in our men.
(1. Neurolinguistic Programming has referred to how language is the interface between experience and a society)
(2. Consider also the use of physical discipline in many societies until it was only quite recentally legislated against -a continuum from language through to war crimes
(3. A social construct of what it means to be male identified and ‘voiced’ by mainly men and their ‘paternalistic’ systems in a myriad of implicit and explicit ways)
It’s a disease that has come to be known as “toxic masculinity. “It’s one I suffered a chronic case of, so much so that I spent 24 years of a life sentence in prison for kidnapping, robbery, and attempted murder.
Yet I’m here to tell you today that there’s a solution for this epidemic. I know for a fact the solution works, because I was a part of human trials. The solution is a mixture of elements. It begins with the willingness to look at your belief system and how out of alignment it is and how your actions negatively impact not just yourself, but the people around you. The next ingredient is the willingness to be vulnerable with people who would not just support you, but hold you accountable.
(I continue to wonder whether the woman of a heterosexual partnership is more prone to supporting, but not able to expect accountability because of the inherent nurturing of women and needing to maintain the homeostatis aspect of any relationship)
But before I tell you about this, I need to let you know that in order to share this, I have to bare my soul in full. And as I stand here, with so many eyes fixed on me, I feel raw and naked.
(The ability to give meaning to visceral feelings and how they can be used as a resource to change and transform)
When this feeling is present, I’m confident that the next phase of healing is on the horizon, and that allows me to share my story in full.
For all appearances’ sake, I was born into the ideal family dynamic:mother, father, sister, brother.Bertha, Eldra Jr., Taydama and Eldra III. That’s me. My father was a Vietnam veteran who earned a Purple Heart
(Is not the ‘American’ War, as the Viet Namese call it, an example of toxic masculinity that is representative of, and all-pervasive throughout the systems (ie. ‘fabric’) of the USA and other countries that participate in and/or collude with war?)
and made it home to find love, marry, and begin his own brood.
(1. Can a man and father ever fully ‘arrive home’ because of the memories that remain consciously and/or subconsciously in terms of the trauma that was experienced in Viet Nam? -some veterans have become Thich Nhat Hanh practitioners so as to address and resolve some of this issue.
Post traumatic stress syndrome has only recently been recognised within psychology, while the re-entry of war veterans back into society is probably still lacking an informed and professional approach -why, because most of the professionals themselves will be male, and unknowingly self-fulfilling perpetrators of the masculinity mindset)
(2. Do we need to also consider inter-generational issues, whatever the dis-ease eg. food, gambling, alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, infidelity, sex etc.
So how did I wind up serving life in the California prison system? Keeping secrets, believing the mantra that big boys don’t cry, not knowing how to display any emotion confidently other than anger, participating in athletics and learning that the greater the performance on the field, the less the need to worry about the rules off it. It’s hard to pin down any one specific ingredient of the many symptoms that ailed me.
(Although an egalitarian country, New Zealand has one of the highest suicide rates for males in the world, and continues to increase, while at the same time sport triggers a form of national identity whether a particpant or a supporter!)
Growing up as a young black male
(1. Black and male are two of the systemic issues for an individual to possibly need to deconstruct and re-author to find new meaning)
(2. The issue of police prejudice, violence and shooting/killing/murder could be also considered)
in Sacramento, California in the 1980s, there were two groups I identified as having respect: athletes and gangsters.
(Are we ready for a newer and second generation version of the gangster, its a disenfranchised emigrant and it’s mate the terrorist -a volitile combination, yet to be addressed compared with just contained!)
I excelled in sports, that is until a friend and I chose to take his mom’s car for a joyride and wreck it. With my parents having to split the cost of a totaled vehicle, I was relegated to a summer of household chores and no sports. No sports meant no respect. No respect equaled no power. Power was vital to feed my illness. It was at that point the decision to transition from athlete to gangster was made and done so easily. Early life experiences had set the stage for me to be well-suited to objectify others, act in a socially detached manner, and above all else, seek to be viewed as in a position of power. A sense of power equaled strength in my environment, but more importantly, it did so in my mind. My mind dictated my choices.
(An essence of a narrative and collaborative style has the opportunity to offer greater perspective by not pathologising the individual, but putting individual behaviours into a systemic context -global, cultural, social, systems/institutional/organisational, regional and locational, familial and individual; while at the same requiring responsibilty and accountability with access to new knowledge and meaning)
My subsequent choices put me on the fast track to prison life. And even once in prison, I continued my history of running over the rights of others, even knowing that that was the place that I would die. Once again, I wound up in solitary confinement for stabbing another prisoner nearly 30 times.I’d gotten to a place where I didn’t care how I lived or if I died.
Initially, yeah, that was a little much, but eventually, I overcame my hesitancy. As it turned out, the circle was the vision of a man named Patrick Nolan, who was also serving life and who had grown sick and tired of being sick and tired of watching us kill one another over skin color, rag color, being from Northern or Southern California, or just plain breathing in the wrong direction on a windy day.
Circle time is men sitting with men and cutting through the bullshit, challenging structural ways of thinking. I think the way that I think and I act the way that I act because I hadn’t questioned that.
(As a gay man I had an opportunity to question, because as a seven year I recognised the inherent differentness and goodness of my sensuosity and attraction to other boys and men -what a gift, deep down from a greater well of knowing and lucid dreaming that transcended the socialisation of my culture, society and family, and has remained one of my closest ‘allies’ throughout my life)
Like, who said I should see a woman walking down the street, turn around and check out her backside? Where did that come from? If I don’t question that, I’ll just go along with the crowd. The locker-room talk. In circle, we sit and we question these things. Why do I think the way that I think? Why do I act the way that I act? Because when I get down to it, I’m not thinking, I’m not being an individual, I’m not taking responsibility for who I am and what it is I put into this world.
(Thankyou Eldra for giving me the opportunity to re-consider my objectification of men -that is the essence of why your video talked to me, and the need for a ‘greater good’ and transformation)
It was in a circle session that my life took a turn. I remember being asked who I was, and I didn’t have an answer, at least not one that felt honest in a room full of men who were seeking truth. It would have been easy to say, “I’m a Blood,”or, “My name is Vegas,”or any number of facades I had manufactured to hide behind. It was in that moment and in that venue that the jig was up. I realized that as sharp as I believed I was, I didn’t even know who I was or why I acted the way that I acted. I couldn’t stand in a room full of men who were seeking to serve and support and present an authentic me. It was in that moment that I graduated to a place within that was ready for transformation.
For decades,I kept being the victim of molestation at the hands of a babysitter a secret. I submitted to this under the threat of my younger sister being harmed. I was seven, she was three. I believed it was my responsibility to keep her safe. It was in that instant that the seeds were sown for a long career of hurting others, be it physical, mental or emotional. I developed, in that instant, at seven years old, the belief that going forward in life, if a situation presented itself where someone was going to get hurt, I would be the one doing the hurting. I also formulated the belief that loving put me in harm’s way. I also learned that caring about another person made me weak. So not caring, that must equal strength. The greatest way to mask a shaky sense of self is to hide behind a false air of respect.
Sitting in circle resembles sitting in a fire. It is a crucible that can and does break.It broke my old sense of self, diseased value system and way of looking at others. My old stale modes of thinking were invited into the open to see if this is who I wanted to be in life. I was accompanied by skilled facilitators on a journey into the depths of myself to find those wounded parts that not only festered but seeped out to create unsafe space for others. At times, it resembled an exorcism, and in essence, it was. There was an extraction of old, diseased ways of thinking, being and reacting and an infusion of purpose.
I was paroled in June 2014,following my third hearing before a panel of former law-enforcement officials who were tasked with determining my current threat level to society. I stand here today for the first time since I was 14 years old not under any form of state supervision. I’m married to a tremendous woman named Holly, and together, we are raising two sons who I encourage to experience emotions in a safe way. I let them hold me when I cry. They get to witness me not have all the answers. My desire is for them to understand that being a man is not some machismo caricature, and that characteristics usually defined as weaknesses are parts of the whole healthy man.
So today, I continue to work not just on myself,but in support of young males in my community.The challenge is to eradicate this cycle of emotional illiteracy and group think that allows our males to continue to victimize others as well as themselves.As a result of this,they develop new ways of how they want to show up in the worldand how they expect this world to show up on their behalf.
Why you should listen
Eldra Jackson III is a spiritual warrior who lives a passion of “saving lives one circle at a time.” After living most of his life devoid of emotions and coming face-to-face with the reality of dying behind bars, he came to a point of self-inquiry, seeking answers as to how his life had spiraled into a mass of destruction set upon self and others. From this point, the space was made to save his life.
Today, Jackson works to bring his spiritual medicine into the world while simultaneously guiding others to tap into their own internal salve and help identify wounds. Through his intensive awareness work, he is on a mission to show the world what’s possible as each person does their own internal examination to begin the path towards emotional and psychic health. Learn more about him in the documentary The Work.
Let me put this webpage in context -sometime between Christmas eve and Christmas Day, I got a different type of Christmas present, one that excited me and gave me the resilience to keep speaking up instead of being silenced, internally and externally. I Googled the latest TedTalks as I often do, a bit like watching a favourite time-defined short movie, I clicked on Eldra Jackson’s “How to Break the Cycle of Toxic Masculinity”.
I had just returned from a Rumi, the poet, festival in Konya, Turkey, and was tucked up in my homestay in Hoi An, Viet Nam, and, coincidentally; had finally got a reply from a man on Grindr who was willing to meet up with me the next day.
Eldra’s video clip helped me to enjoy that man’s company as a person and human being, while in the background the sexualisation and addictive tapes was still running but its habitualness had been lessened by my having watched this video. No, we did not have sex but I was smiling quietly inside, because I had lessened the cycle of my own “toxic masculinity” (to use Eldra’s phrase) as a gay man, and felt less alone and more capable of making a more healthy choice -sometimes we just forget and the habitual patterns take over, as they have been with us from a very young age: “Is it a boy or a girl?” are some of the very first words we are present to and thereby related to as such within hours of our birth.
My personal (counselling) and professional (supervision) life is steeped in a “narrarative and collaborative style” -see White, D., Epsom, D. and Bird, J. and the Dulwich Centre
https://dulwichcentre.com.au/
About Narrative Approaches
This project is based on narrative approaches to therapy, group work and community work. These approaches were initially developed by Australian, Michael White, and New Zealander, David Epston. Narrative therapy centres people as the experts in their own lives and views problems as separate from people. Narrative therapy assumes that people have many skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities that will assist them to reduce the influence of problems in their lives. The word ‘narrative’ refers to the emphasis that is placed upon the stories of people’s lives and the differences that can be made through particular tellings and re-tellings of these stories.
Over the last 30 years, narrative therapy has brought a wide range of new ways to respond to people and the problems they are facing. These include:
externalising the problem: ‘the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem’ (White, 1988/9, 2007)
the use of therapeutic letters, certificates and documents (White & Epston, 1990; Newman, 2008)
re-authoring conversations (Epston, 1992; White, 1995)
saying hullo again conversations which are a particular response to grief (White, 1988), and
narrative responses to trauma and traumatic memory (White, 2004; Denborough, 2006)
People from a wide range of perspectives are now engaging with narrative ideas – from family therapists, community workers, teachers, psychiatrists, academics, anthropologists, psychologists, community cultural development workers, social workers, film and video documentary makers.
Over the last decade, partnerships with practitioners working in contexts of profound hardship and social suffering (including within Rwanda, Aboriginal Australia, Palestine, Uganda, and Zimbabwe), have led to the generation of narrative ways of working that are used beyond the counselling room. These have come to be known as forms of ‘collective narrative practice’ (Denborough, 2008).
Collective narrative practice methodologies do not require young people to speak in the first person about their lives, and they emphasise the skills, abilities, hopes and dreams of participants. This ensures that these approaches do not ‘re-traumatise’ young people. Instead, these ways of working create contexts for pride, the acknowledgement of ‘hard-won’ knowledge, and the celebration of ‘goals’ that young people have already scored in life. A special emphasis is given to the ways in which people who have been through hardship can contribute to the lives of others by sharing their ‘hard-won’ knowledge. This project is an example of this (for more information about enabling contribution and exchanging messages between groups, see Denborough, 2008).
The next part of this paper will be some rantings and ravings, as I go back through the video and re-look at the comments made (saying hullo again conversations), and, over time, I will probably organise into a more coherent way. -perhaps it may have been more inviting for some viewers to have talked to masculinity as a process of socialisation (social constructionist) compared with the linguistic inertia of “toxic masculinity” -?
-Some of the comments became a ‘semantic game of tennis’ while others were an analysis through the use deconstruction and re-construction to gather meaning (re-authoring). The use of “I” with personalised statements can circumvent such positionings, together with perceiving the individual male as being within a social construct, may have helped further
-Toxic masculinity isn’t just a hetero phenomenon, as I have disclosed in my contextual introduction above, it comes from a variety of contexts and systems (intangible without a conversational voice/agency and tangible/observable; normalised)
-I look forward to the day when men acknowledge the attributes of a fellow male instead of the all too familiar scenario of the woman partner in a man’s life, bringing them back from the brink of self destruction! (re-authoring)
-Don’t we need to put masculinity within the contexts of bias, prejudice and racism also? (externalising the problem) The rates for the incarceration of coloured males is increasing at the same levels for males in a variety of countries. So there is a contextual (global, cultural, social, institutional and organisational (systemic) aspect at play here, not just the agency of the individual male, but the agency of systems
-Why is it that trans and intersex people are now the most targeted group in US society in terms of hate crime? (externalising the problem)? Is it because their greater ‘visibility’ challenges what has become normalised and unconscious, and thought to be normal, quasi-genetically and socially determined and a-given within a ‘paternal'(istic) and heterosexist society, and questions the very essence of what and who a human being is supposed to look like and behave? ie. the roles and identity of a male living within a ‘paternal'(istic) society and culture.
Internal and external homophobia continues to have an important regulating
influence on the identity, perceived roles and potential of male human beings.
As an out gay man and/or as a man who looked different in Turkey, it was presumed that gay men were living a discreet and coded life, with a noticeable level of conscious and/or unconscious self monitoring and cautiousness in terms of how they related to their gay brothers, and how straight men expressed themselves in terms of general spontaneity come restraint continuim, together with the context, the content and how they related to each other as men. Our current analysis of “toxic masculinity” and the human potential of all genders as a social construct within an increasingly controlled country such as Turkey may elucidate further, some of what we are talking about here. And, let us consider the “toxic masculinity” and human potential of all genders of a society that centre around a second generation family through marriage, of sons, and the addition of a femaile partner as a collective economic unit to survive financially in a country such as Viet Nam. Furthermore, let us also consider the “toxic masculinity” and human potential of all genders of an extended family of a minority cultural group to maintain their collective identity and values that may run counter to the individualistic identity of a majority population.
This paper is now starting to take on a voice of its own and highlighting how “toxic masculinity” and the human potential of all genders may need to be perceived from a wider lens, and in so doing elucidate greater understanding and living knowledge about masculinity from within the context of different governments, different economic family units and different cultural family groups.
“Toxic masculinity” and the human potential of all genders also traverses the context of sexual orientation, as it pertains to the LGBITQ+ population -it is more than just a male/female phenomenon, lest you forgot because of heterosexist amnesia!?
-Let me go further, vaginal, oral and anal sexual intimacy are equally pleasurable (re-authoring). It just so happens that one part of the human body has been ‘colonised’ as normal (normalised) (ie. a quasi-genetically pre-determined function, cleaner, less animalistic etc.) while the other is deemed unnatural because some heterosexual members of a given population hold on to a paradigm and a subsequent myth-making that says that sex is for procreation. Please do your own ‘bedroom research’ and self-publish your data, the conclusions of current research are incorrect!
Let’s shift tack -instead of dialoguing with masculinity as a concept that hasn’t been defined for meaning through the deconstruction of such, let us switch to considering masculinity as the outcome of a process of socialisation for male babies/children/adolescents/adults within a variety of contexts.
*To be continued …
Breaking out: Notes from Session 3 of TEDWomen 2018
Posted by: Brian Greene, Chelsea Catlett, Oliver Friedman, Samantha Resnik, Tom Carter and Yasmin Belkhyr
November 29, 2018 at 7:18 pm EST
“I have seen a world where women are denied, and I have also seen what can happen when you invest in the potential of half of your population,” says activist Shad Begum. She speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 29, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)
In session 3 of TEDWomen 2018, hosted by social justice documentarian Jess Search, a lineup of speakers and performers — Eldra Jackson III, Shad Begum, Emily Quinn, Shohini Ghose, Climbing PoeTree, Maeve Higgins and Lindy Lou Isonhood — explored toxic masculinity, quantum computing, immigration, the death penalty and much more.
Eldra Jackson III shares his work breaking the cycle of emotional illiteracy that allows men to victimize others. He speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 29, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED)
An empathetic cure for toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is a disease that victimizes both its targets and its perpetrators, says educator Eldra Jackson III. Growing up, he had a “chronic case” of it — “so much so that [he] spent 24 years of a life sentence in prison for kidnapping, robbery and attempted murder.” As a teen, Jackson’s heroes were athletes and gangsters. So when sports didn’t work out as a career path, he gravitated toward what seemed the only other option: a life of crime. Jackson landed in jail, “where I didn’t care how I lived or if I died,” he says. He found a cure for this disease through Inside Circle, an organization founded by Patrick Nolan to combat gang violence in the prison yard. Through an exercise called Circle Time — “men sitting with men and cutting through the bullshit and challenging structural ways of thinking” — Jackson learned that “characteristics usually defined as weaknesses are parts of the whole, healthy man.” Today, as a free man, Jackson teaches his own sons what he has learned, and in doing so, he seeks to “eradicate the cycle of emotional illiteracy and groupthink that allows our males to continue to victimize others.”
“If there are infinite ways for our bodies to look, our minds to think, personalities to act — wouldn’t it make sense that there’s that much variety in biological sex, too?” asks intersex activist Emily Quinn. She speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 29, 2018, in Palm Springs. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)
Let’s talk about (biological) sex. We put people in boxes based on their genitalia, says intersex activist Emily Quinn, as if what’s between somebody’s legs tells you anything about that person — their kindness, generosity, humor. As an intersex individual who was born with both a vagina and and testicles, Quinn has been told since she was a child (and still as an adult) that her biology puts her at risk — despite the fact that a surgery to remove her genitals would most likely do more physical and emotional harm than good. Quinn asks: What constitutes a man, a woman? Does lacking or having certain organs disqualify a person from being who they are? Much like gender, biological sex exists on a spectrum and shouldn’t be boiled down to just male and female, she suggests. There are so many other human traits that have more than two options — think: hair color, eye colour, complexion, height, even noses. Globally, intersex people aren’t rare or new; they’ve existed throughout every culture in history and represent about 2 percent of the global population — the same percentage as genetic redheads. (For scale, 2 percent is roughly about 150 million people, more than the entire population of Russia.) “If there are infinite ways for our bodies to look, our minds to think, personalities to act — wouldn’t it make sense that there’s that much variety in biological sex, too?” Quinn asks.
www.sacredrainbowcreations.nz *oneroa, waiheke is., auckland/aotearoa 