This weekend and into early next week, the Gemini Sun makes a square to Chiron in Pisces. Chiron is conjunct another (very) slow-mover called Borasisi, and I’ll see if i can work that in at the end of this post. For now let’s stick to Sun-Chiron. Aspects between these two points talk about the struggle of men and also of maleness, and what women go through when subjected to the struggle of men and maleness. I’ve been reading, initiating and participating in many forums on the theme of sex and gender lately, and I’m observing that there is only a limited understanding of what men go through in the world. There is also a widely held presumption of man as persecutor or perpetrator (and that’s it), and considerable anger and antipathy directed toward them because they are supposedly inherently evil, ignorant or complicit.
Not everyone holds this view; the wise among us see the whole story, or at least see that the scenario is complex. Yet see it or not, everyone is affected by it, and many men lack a clear concept that what they have been through was a special struggle of some kind. That’s allegedly because it’s so commonplace, but may be because it’s hidden from view.
Sun-Chiron aspects raise the question of male vulnerability. What is it really like for men to be in a world where they are expected to swim or drown, kill or be killed, and then (except perhaps on special holidays) are prohibited by culture from grieving, crying or expressing any sensitivity? What about the American men sent to war, venerated as heroes for a while, then treated like garbage when they return home, as is happening today?
What is it like for women to be raised and/or to grow up around men living with this struggle? What about the men in our lives stems from the inner sense of being broken, incomplete, failures, or not having lived up to the expectations of their fathers? What is it like to bear the burden of initiative, especially in a world that seems to resist everything that is good?
These are the questions that I believe are appropriate for Sun-Chiron aspects — especially as Mercury stations retrograde in Cancer on Saturday, and we get to question the total influence of our early emotional environments. I would ask: do you really know what your father went through? If you do, how do you know? As for Borasisi, I will sum that up: Sayin’ it don’t make it so — but you might think it does.
One thing I have noted is that both men and women grow up looking for their parents in their relationships. This is not a new idea. The problem is, our parents were a different generation fraught with a lot of social strictures they had to operate within. We took on a lot of these even as we changed things. So I heard my female friends grumbling that men are either assholes are they have no strength and backbone. Male friends grumbled that women played games about their desires and acted like men owed them something. Both these scenarios seem to come from a child’s view of the parent of the opposite gender.
Girls see their dads as strong, protecting and always supportive (assuming they had a good relationship with their fathers; if not they wanted that ideal). Boys see their moms as emotionally open (again assuming a good relationship or desire for one) which means they learned that women are their conduit for expressing emotions but yet the only acceptable way our society allows men their emotions is through sex.
Yet we teach our girls not to “give up” sex. Think about this scenario through the real things going on:
Men are taught that sex with women is their only way of expressing themselves or opening themselves emotionally to another human being (yes, it is a hetero-normative programming which leaves out so many people).
Women are taught that they must withhold sex in order to be valued. So women are taught to withhold the only thing men are socially allowed to have to express their deepest connections and feelings.
Is it any wonder both sexes are so unhappy?
This makes everyone miserable.
As reported by the BBC, a new article in the journal Biological Reviews theorizes that men’s bodies have been shaped evolutionarily by violence.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27720617
What is of interest to me personally is that this information came to me in a dream when we were discussing the Saturn Juno Psyche event and I mentioned in that thread the idea that the absence of violence in our history might have had the effect of making male and female bodies develop over time to be more alike than dissimilar.
What has me feeling really sad inside as I read this is the unspoken assumption that violence has been with us for a very, very long time and has been an intrinsic part of the story of the male half of our species, literally shaping male bodies over time. This does not mean that every human male is violent, but it does mean that every human male’s body has a relationship with violence at the cellular level. No wonder it is so hard to re-write violence out of cultural programming.
I so resonate with P. Sophia on the Dad thing, trying mostly to ignore just how different I am from those who were raised by a kind and loving father … I cannot ignore this feeling that I must tend to that hole inside my heart where a dad should be. You see, truly, I’ll say this out loud here for the first time anywhere, he hated me. That is a tough thing to know and to schlepp around. I get he was in pain — of course hurt people hurt others. But the kid inside still wails and I find a way to make great distances from me to the rest of the world because of this inner wound that will affect others.
mmm.
I never knew what my Father went through, but as he was always so impatient with everyone (himself) and continues to show not much physical love and encouragement of/to others, it is pretty clear he never received this model of love and forgivness when he was growing up. What happened to him? I often wonder with one brother that completely left the family (his wife and two kids) and never looked back again. He obviously knew he was not able, or doing a good job in the a role of sensitive/caring.
The worst part of the story of my Dad for me is how my Mom was affected. Their relationship and how she tried to fight him into feelings, emotions and just plain pleading for him to show some caring action and treatment of her and us kids. And then, in co-dependancy and victimhood she would turn around and take it on the other cheek. Again and again…the story played out her whole life. Untill finally today, over the last several years she unfortunately began to just shut off her emotions. Her dimential started diminishing her brain. I still feel in some respects this was/is a coping mechanism to ‘deal’. And now it became too much for my Dad ’emotionally’ so he and my brother and sister chose best to move her out to a home, which was against my wish. This would have been her worst nightmare had she been aware.
“What is it like for women to be raised and/or to grow up around men living with this struggle?” Of course in the early years we kids, especially me, the youngest, a sensative, took it all on, and got pulled in to fightling the struggle. With much of it directed at me because I was his nemisus in some ways. I called him on it. He probably felt the guilt of his wrongness and he saw it on my face as I ran to my Mom to protect when I was young and then openly I stood up to him in later years.
Although, through much inner work I became aware in my later 20’s and adult years it is not my Father’s fault. He was just doing the best that he could with the emotional tools that he was dealt, his family passed on to him, and what was acceptable behavior for men growing up in his time.
I often wonder how incredible it would have been to grow up with an encouraging, loving Father who verbalized, or showed his care and patience for others, his wife, and the kids. These kids, particularily girls who receive this healing in relationship with their Fathers are so lucky indeed. I imagine the great confidence I would have had through my development and what that may have ment to my direction and path later on. The choices made in my life may have been made from a place of wholeness v/s brokeness to heal. What would that may have felt like and meant for me? Yet, then again, this life I chose and where it has led I have had to learn pull myself out and bring myself to confidence in faith and strengh into today. So I continue to strive for forgiveness each day for my Dad. I hope that he may also find this healing one day.
Thanks for the lesson and article Eric.
DivaCarla, I’ve noticed that men are more comfortable being direct that women are. I’ve also had the experience of hurting female friends because I tend to be argumentative and they take it very seriously.
I love the men’s voices who open the comment thread. I hope you will keep commenting and respond to the women too.
I know I took on my father’s pain, and my boyfriend’s and my husband’s. I also learned they needed me to, it was part of our unconscious agreement. I stopped doing it, and all the relationships ended. Except the one with my father. That one got laid down so early I live with it.
Talking with a circle of mothers recently, one mother of four young sons talked about how they would fight, get it out of their system, and then be best buds again in minutes. She is learning to let them be. Another woman noticed similar pattern with her husband and his friends, with arguments. We marvel at how males are wired differently from us. Anyone else, male or female observed this?
It took me until I was probably almost 40 (I’m now 68) to realize that men too had a tough journey through our culture. Up until then, as a working single mum often frustrated by the lack of social & emotional support for women in general & single mothers in particular, it had looked to me as though men always seemed to have it easier. That was not, is not, true.
As a substitute teacher as well as just living in a small community where I have knowledge of a couple of generations in many families, I have seen naturally sensitive & gentle little boys shamed into becoming “tough” – into conforming to the male ideals of showing no feelings (except anger/rage), of assuming superiority over girls/women, of making sport of hunting/ killing creatures & destroying habitat while “playing” with noisy, polluting motorized toys.
And there’s alcohol. I can’t count very many boys (or girls) who have not been blotto drunk by the time they’re 13 or 14, other than a few who were too sheltered in family/church to go down that road – though religion brings its own problems, & occasionally provokes spectacular & destructive rebellions. Many, as adults, continue to abuse alcohol & some become alcoholics, while most probably settle into occasional social drinking. Nonetheless, the boy who doesn’t abide by the macho cultural norms can be ridiculed, bullied, or subjected to homophobic slurs.
That’s just a picture based on my experience of one small rural area. Thanks be that things are changing in other places, at least. Personally, I would treasure the presence of a older, wiser, gentle man in my own life. There must be some, somewhere, but not here. The village where I live was incorporated with the sun conjunct Saturn in Taurus: change comes oh – so -slowly.
This is an important topic, Eric – thank-you for opening the discussion. It has also shed light upon my relationship with my late father, but those thoughts are for another comment another time.
awordedgewise, thanks, I like the screen door metaphor. It leaves some breathing room. It’s always been hard for me not to take on my father’s crap. And my Neptune is exactly conjunct his Sun.
Eric, that is insightful. I think some my family–my mother and my father’s sister, for example–took on my father’s pain, but then pretended not to. Sometimes it turns into don’t do anything to upset him.
That is interesting, Shelley. As an uber “sensitive”, I’ve had to learn to put up barriers but more like screen-doors than walls (as walls are so self-damaging). It’s challenging, but a primary lesson was to understand that I didn’t have to take on other people’s crap — even though my upbringing trained me to think that taking on their crap was my primary purpose in life. Off topic a bit, but there it is.
I remember in grade school when he sang “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and explained it to me. He attributed it to Johnny Cash. Here’s an excerpt:
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Who’ll promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes to you
Someone to close his heart
Someone to die for you and more.
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
To pick you up each time you fall
To gather flowers constantly
And to come each time you call
And will love you for your life
And nothin’ more.
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.
My father’s rage and love made him a yo-yo — with confusion (at best) the result in his continually evolving relationship with me, his youngest and his daughter. As the object of (most of) his rage, I don’t have direct answers to specific questions about what formed it (because in his mind the only idea up for discussion is why I make him rage).
But my long-term exploration of family/community values certainly sheds a lot of light on the subject. Perhaps not surprisingly, my current studies of history (cultural/political) are augmenting the process of enlightenment.
Thanks for raising questions, Eric. They are immensely useful.
My father left when I was very young, disappeared for awhile, didn’t pay child support, and as a result we were very poor. I never really got to know him (saw him once or twice a year once he reappeared), and when I did interact with him he was selfish or yelled at me, though he was never physically violent. My brothers were very violent almost all the time, either in speech or physically. I didn’t fully see how all of this was deeply wounding to myself at the time, nor understand how it would stay with me through time. I couldn’t understand how I got stuck in this situation (and I couldn’t wait to get out). It was as if I soaked up all the broken parts of others around me like a sponge. I was fearful and depressed during my childhood, but learned to hide all of it, my external self was the opposite of my internal self. It has taken me a long time to heal this rift (and the seesaw between the two), and the abandonment issues. There has been a lot of shame and embarrassment for having this as my childhood experience and home life. I’m certain that there are a lot of children that go through similar scenarios. This clearly effected all of my relationships for quite some time. But I was on the path to push through, understand, heal, and change. And I have learned to have compassion for what my brothers went through and so understand their pain, unfortunately they took it out on me a lot. I have put it behind me, but it also included putting some of those relationships behind me (mostly because their patterns haven’t changed).
One thing I do know about my father is that he was in WWII, and I am certain this impacted his ability to communicate, along with many other factors.
I recently read an article about how little girls are taught to communicate in comparison to little boys, it explains some of the passivity and self-denial that gets ingrained in females through this process, (sorry, I can’t find the link).
It feels like so many have suffered because of lack of communication, or as someone mentioned, the inability to emote. It seems much of this is learned, and so we can learn a new process of communicating and expressing, to heal ourselves and these chasms in relating.
You make an interesting point, Shelley — if we believe that knowing about someone’s pain in some way means taking it on, that’s an incentive not to know. Yet that too will cycle into our intimate relationships.
I have always been deeply aware of my father’s pain, as though I am supposed to heal him. He is extremely sensitive and has a sense of responsibility. He worked a job he despised from the age of eighteen until he retired. He’s 73 now.
This is my interpretation, but it seems glaringly obvious; it’s just that it makes sense to the rest of my family. I am an only child and growing up he would give me insights that he couldn’t share with my mother because she doesn’t try to understand.
As a teenager I told him he needed to get a different job but he said he was too old for a career change, wasn’t good at anything else anyway, and he had to support us. He never had friends when I was growing up and has extreme social anxiety. I feel like he’s constantly battling what he was taught it means to be a man.
When I think of him, I am so grateful for his love and support. He has taught me to appreciate simplicity and to think critically and I’ve always known he loves me. But he’s also always felt to me like he was dying inside. Sagittarius Sun and Aquarius Moon and he spends most of his time watching television. This has been going on for years. I think it was the way he learned to deal with disappointment in himself and the world.
Poignant astrology. I was raised the oldest child and only daughter with three brothers. We seemed to live in different worlds, I my mothers child and they my father’s sons. My father was an abused child. Over the decades I came to understand that his main motivation in life was to earn his parents love, and it was persistently withheld until they died. This colored everything. One of my most terrifying memories was him sitting me down and telling me how much he loved me and weeping. I am not sure why he was weeping, but I thought it was because of me. I was thirteen, and had a normal emotional meltdown that set off a chain reaction through the family. I’m pretty sure now his tears were not about me. His moment of vulnerability terrified me. It was not a cathartic moment, but one that was exposed then stuffed, and armored never to be repeated.
Do women fear male vulnerability?
In my work men bring their vulnerability to me. It feels like a treasure. It is a treasure.
I am thinking of my sons, grown men. One a husband and father, the other finding traction in his career.
I am too full to continue right now.
I was the only one with my father when he died. We shared that moment of intimacy.
I really love the idea of asking our fathers what they’ve gone through. Whether through direct dialogue with them or family members, or in the imaginal realms. Thanks for this!
What you wrote touched me on a deep level. I came from a family in which I was the only girl of four children. The span between us ranged 18 years. Although my eldest brother has passed to the next side, I carry his gentle ways in my heart every day. There is no way that I could define my brothers as violent and aggressive men. My father was born into a wealthy Italian family, however due to complications far too great to list here, the family lost their money by the time my father was eight years old. He was forced to drop out of school in eighth grade and help support a very large group of other children. Apparently this had a deep effect on his ego as he ended up having to work in construction and often had to be laid off.
Although we had a lovely home in the mountains of New York, after first living in Westchester, money was a very large problem in my parents often had large arguments although my father was never violent towards her. My mother wanted to work but he prevented her from doing so for most of the years of their marriage. When my youngest brother was about 10 my mother had nearly completed her bachelor’s degree and was working full-time. She died suddenly at the age of 54 and he went on to live over 20 years without her but still very much in love with her. He never remarried and never wanted to.
I have had first-hand experience of the struggles of men, both within my family and with my relationships. I concur, Eric, that we all need to take a deeper look at the social pressures placed upon men of every race. I do know however and with certainty that men are not the cause of the pain that we see here. In fact, if we look deeply enough, we will see that we are all particles of the same loving light and conditioning from multiple sources is the basis of the problem. Getting back to my father, all see ever really wanted to do was to give his family all he had and I am very proud of him for that.
Thanks brother, for taking up this conversation. Chiron is Trine my Sun right now, so through this aspect. I am sensing my own patterns of being wounded, but I am also feeling very different about how I choose to let it affect me. Not in a controlling way, but in an empowering way. Confidence is built upon the ability to positively integrate every aspect of experience into a conscious participation in that which is productive, proactive, and fully connective to my higher self and intention.
Lot’s of love, Eric.
All interesting, and Chiron’s conjunct my natal North Node in the 8th, sextile natal Mars in 10th — just might be personally meaningful.
I have often wondered what motivated earlier generations to be so guarded with their emotions. Understanding the answer to what started it may help us be less fearful of expressing emotions now.
Eric sometimes talking doesn’t do it (voice of current experience – not ‘gender’ but work ) – what about seeking out the path with a heart as a model – maybe that can bypass ego and failure etc.
I’ll let you know how it goes…
Motivated by the spate of recent news reports about honour killings in Pakistan, gang rapes in India, abductions in Nigeria, institutionalized sexual assaults and female denegration worldwide, I find myself questioning if it is that men fear something about women which is causing ‘us’ to act in these ways.
I launched my question upon the internet and have now come across your blog and what piqued my interest was your reference to the relationship between fear and prejudice and how this may be a contributory factor in manifest behaviours.
Today, I see male and female imbalance, I see fear on both sides, I see fear of Truth. As sexuality and the truth of sexual nature becomes more clear to us globally, through internet and other modern forms of mass communication, so has the resistance to acceptance of this truth, which is challenging all of our precious religious and social constructs.
Both men and women are discovering aspects of themselves that they are struggling to maintain balance over. My personal experience is that women fear their fantasies over freeing their deepest sexual urges and are often as fearful of the sense of satisfaction that comes from experimenting with partial release of these urges. For men it is the same and they direct the energy of their shame, confusion and non-acceptance destructively on any other target group they can easily identify.
For clarity, I am a male in my early fifties and while I have tested myself with many types of relationships and encounters I find and accept that, so far, I am sexually attracted to females only, but I am comfortable and at peace with knowing that other people have different attractions, attractions that can also change from moment to moment as they grow.
Fear/Prejudice has two sides, two manifestations; I believe that the unnatural passivity, self denial and self-denegration that we see in many women, is as destruction as the abusive, aggressive and violent traits that we see in many men. So my own answer at present is that some men fear themselves, some women fear themselves and the behaviour arising from such spiritual imbalance, on both sides, can only be violent.