There is a general consensus, particularly in psychology, that boys inevitably reject their mothers. To find his independence, to be a 'mensch' among 'mensches; a boy must wave mummy goodbye and face the harsh realities of a man's life.
The present champion of this cause is Robert Bly. He argues that for men, to achieve true manhood, they must reject maternal links and become initiated into the male society. Charlie Kreiner, reference person for men's liberation in the Re-evaluation community and member of the board of directors of the US National Organisation of Men Against Sexism, disagrees:
"I think that's an insult to women and I think women are starting to realise that. If I was a single mother raising sons I'd be offended. Because it basically says that only men know how to train real men. It is based in 'opposite sex' gender mythology, which I see as social conditioning, and comes close to blaming mothers for men's difficulties. Mothers need to be celebrated and appreciated; sons, as men, would do well to commit to ending sexism which deeply affected their mothers and all women, and their mothers relationship to them as sons."
Kreiner sees the adolescent boys' rejection of his mother as a product of sexist conditioning rather than as a Freudian or developmental necessity:
"You probably remember the years when you started beginning to feel very embarrassed to be seen with your mother or very embarrassed kissing your mother or having your mother kiss you. Well, that embarrassment is not internal to your biology or to your relationship with your mother, it's coming from the systematic conditioning from outside to remove you as a male from true love and affection and closeness with your mother, as both a woman and a fellow human; and remove your mother from closeness and affection and love from you."
| "Men have to be humiliated. They would never choose to split from their mothers" |
"Men have to be humiliated. They would never choose to split from their mothers. For a lot of sons their relationships with their mothers is their safest relationship. That's why all the Freudian Oedipal thing is largely nonsense. You loved your mother. Your mother loved you. You had a more or less human interaction that was protective, secure, and safe (in most cases), where there was some semblance of a human relationship between the two of you especially if you father was physically and/or emotionally absent. And despite whatever mistreatment your mother passed on to you in her conditioned role as parent, older person etc."
"You don't choose to leave that relationship, you are humiliated into leaving - sometimes by the father, sometimes older boys, usually it's within the school system as an institution. That's about the age at which it's happening and that's the site of public visibility of you and your mum. Maybe it's picking you up from school, dropping you off, or participating in activities with you. You're made to feel ashamed of the closeness and love that you have."
"And of course your mother is made to feel ashamed. If you don't push away first she often does because she's been conditioned with the same stuff about 'mummy's boys'. So we push away from each other, because mothers are afraid that if they stay close to their sons they'll raise 'sissies', and sons are humiliated into pushing their mothers away because if they don't they'll be 'sissified'. Both mothers and fathers have been conditioned with this fear that if they stay physically and emotionally close with their sons past a certain age, their sons will become homosexual. This is nonsense. This first stage of 'gay oppression' removes sons from non-sexual closeness with both parents, as though it invariably led to sex."
"The result is a son who is disconnected, isolated, and thrown into the world within that isolation. He is left to build relationships with other males and females based on gender-roles rather than closeness, safety and love and is then conditioned to use sex as the way out of this isolation, which has nothing to do with sex, but with the lack of real human closeness."
But there is an alternative:
"Boys who have been allowed a base of safety, a base of connection, will have a security and a safety to build all kinds of other relationships. But you don't have to break away from one relationship to have another. This is the mythology that you can only get close to one or a couple of people at a time. You can build lots of different relationships that are unique".
"The conditioning considers men who are close to their mothers are 'sissies', 'mummy's boys', not 'real men'. But in fact men who are truly close to women and other men are more 'real' men than any man who buys into the male sex role, which has as its core sexism towards women and homophobia towards other men - the fear of closeness, openness and vulnerability with both genders."
| "Trying to turn your mother into a sex object would be deeply painful to you and to her" |
Kreiner also believes that the conditioned separation between mother and son paves the way for the sexual objectification of women.
Trying to turn your mother into a sex object would be deeply painful to you and to her. The one women that cannot be turned into a sex object, both because it's inhuman and because of incest taboos, just as well as because it's stupid, is the mother."
Once boys have been separated from their mothers they are then conditioned to de-humanise and depersonalise women. But the process has a backlash effect on men.
"When you see humans as sex objects it's hard to get close to them. You can't get close to an object. You cannot have real sex with an object either. You can only have intimacy with a human, and to the extent to which you objectify a woman or a woman's body you cannot get close to her. If you're objectifying a women or a woman's body then you don't have your self. You're inside a piece of your own isolation or your own gender role which leaves your true humanity, your true love, your true manhood behind. The conditioning humiliates males from loving. From real loving and real closeness as opposed to conditioned loving and conditioned closeness based on a sex-role. It seems to me that if men truly loved and were close with women, we would have ended personal and institutional sexism a long time ago. Women's pain would be our pain."
Sexism has a great impact on the relationship between mothers and boys around the age of puberty. But Kreiner believes it can affect boys much earlier than this. Mothers, as women, are constantly oppressed by sexism, and this oppression can filter through from an early age to their sons. And their sons, once older, can become vehicles of sexism towards their mothers.
"Anything that the husband does to the wife can become easily directed to any other male in a less powerful position - older son, younger son. Sons may be either resented or hated because the woman is not in a position to fight back the man or hate the husband/father or hate men who oppressed her."
"Also sons may become replacements for the relationships mothers don't have with their absent husbands/fathers/partner, in terms of physical closeness and affection; a male to express their love to, receive love from. So a lot of unaware or unthoughtful, inappropriate needs can get imposed on sons that actually need to be directed towards the mother's male peers (husband/mate/partner etc.): unaware physical closeness that is either semi-romantic or semi-sexual; needs for the sons to be a certain way - loving, approving, accepting; a need for the son to reach out to the mother to make her feel good about herself as a woman because the men in her life are putting her down, invalidating her, not being present or not cherishing her."
According to Kreiner, the mistreatment that males go through at an early age can then have a major effect on the way they consequently respond to feminism.
"When the issue of feminism and women's liberation comes up, men often feel like their needs aren't being met, they feel neglected, 'what about me'. They're feeling jealous, envious, resentful, threatened by women, putting attention on their own needs as women rather than taking care of men and putting men first; expecting women to be their mothers, or the mothers they never had. If you actually trace these feelings that get triggered off you find a lot of unhealed pain in relation to the mothers in their lives. The mothers not being there for them, not paying attention to them. The mothers being preoccupied by trying to endure the pain of sexism in the family unit."
"A lot of boys had the pain of their mother's victimisation by sexism thrown at them in the form of hate, in the form of bitter rage and anger and blame and attack. Whether being yelled at in the form of 'I wish I never had you' or 'you're a goddam shit' or 'you're worse than your father'. So that now, in their adult lives, when women are legitimately trying to shed their pain as women, men have a very hard time listening. In fact, they can hardly listen to adult women's pain at all, they just go under into that very early childhood place when they were young boys being yelled at."
"Listening as adult males to women's pain, rage, anger etc. makes them feel threatened. Their very existence is threatened, as when they were young boys. Men feel like victims of women's pain, when the oppression of sexism makes women victims of men's pain and fear and violence. Men inside feel so bad about themselves and guilty and hateable that they end up defending themselves or flipping into the oppressor role even more and jamming women back in the victim role even more, just as women are trying to rise out of it."
And so sexism reproduces itself The men take out the oppression they suffered as boys onto the women around them. And the women filter the effects of sexism back through to the next generation of boys. But Kreiner doesn't believe that the oppression men went through as boys justifies their oppression of women.
"The adult women in their lives are no longer their mothers and they are no longer two-year-old boys. The feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, fear, or powerlessness that many men actually feel around women or around a complete commitment to ending sexism was laid in when they were little children. But to act like little children in the present when they're forty, fifty, or sixty year old adults is unworkable. We have to move on. Women and mothers are not to blame. We must work to change the system."
How do men move on and break this cycle of oppression? Charlie Kreiner argues that it can only be done once men realise that the alienation and separation that they experienced from their mothers was a product of sexism.
"The difficulties that mothers face as women, as mothers, and as older women in relation to younger children is very much a function of sexism, and it's essential for men not to blame mothers."
"So men committing to ending sexism will work also to stop the boys learning sexism in the first place."
For Charlie Kreiner, the pain and alienation between mother and son is a product of sexism. It is neither inherent, desirable or necessary. But for men to liberate themselves from the distress of early rejection and separation they must begin to confront and dismantle patriarchy. In so doing they can both reclaim their mothers, true closeness with women and with other men, and their own humanity.
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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