Caging the Wild Man
I’ve talked elsewhere that I’m active in the Mankind Project, an organization that conducts New Warrior Training Adventure (NWTA) weekends as a modern rite of male initiation which, if a man chooses, serves as a gateway to healing and empowerment through participation in a men’s circle.
Because the Project has elected to make the following data explicitly public, I am making comment on it and my judgments on the broader cultural context. The NWTAs have, with the exception of a few pilot weekends, included nudity. The nudity is not about sexualization—men have been getting naked together in war, sweats, to dance and in ritual, in locker rooms and other places throughout history and the world. In the modern era, my judgment is that this natural interaction has become more challenging as men have become objectified much like women and the open presence of gay men.
Another cultural trend rich with feminine concepts of power and social structure is to make everything safe and to provide maximum space for personal agency; I am not saying this is a bad thing, but I am saying as with all things there are caveats to any expression of political norms. Why were NWTA’s created in the first place? What is the MKP identity? As the MKP founders have themselves said, there were many available workshops for men but none of them quite satisfied. Are the current MKP leaders sacrificing the mission to save/support their positions within the organization by focusing on quantity instead of quality? My take has been that the MKP identity is to provide men a modern rite of initiation and that the rite should be challenging and difficult. Men throughout the world and history have undergone such rites which often meant putting one’s life on the line. Clearly, a NWTA cannot go that far. The NWTA was however designed to push at the comfortable world we have created-- there are plenty of avenues out there for men who want to stay safe and comfortable while doing their work. At its core, the NWTAs were intended to be a hero’s journey; if the hero is never in danger, there isn’t much of a journey and the hero is never called upon.
Yet here we are where the NWTA’s have evolved always towards more safety, more comfort. Let’s not trigger men. Let’s not put men in distress. Let’s not put men under pressure. Men are weak, broken and stupid who need to be coddled less they fall apart at the seams. This narrative saturates modern culture and it’s impossible to escape it. Have men gone along with the nudity (even though they could have chosen otherwise) because of group pressure or because they were caught off guard? Assuredly so—and that provides an opportunity for them to look at themselves—next time in the outside world (external to the NWTA container) when confronted with going along with group pressure, maybe they will find the grit to be authentic to themselves. Have gay men sexualized each other and straight men in the containers—no doubt. For straight men, there is an opportunity to understand how women feel in that context—it’s uncomfortable, isn’t it (or it can be)? For gay men, it can be a challenging process to explore our reliance on self-worth through the validation of others. Body shame is prevalent in our culture, and there are few opportunities to explore that in a way that’s real and vulnerable. The fact that men are not naked together as much as they were in previous generations means it has only been pushed further into shadow, which is all the more reason to have spaces to explore it. Most men do their work when they are uncomfortable. I don’t like it, I have been there many times, but at the end of the messiness is healing and gratitude.
I do believe in the concept of “yes / and” whereby there are compromises that can be made without diminishing what was. For example, there are nonbinary and trans persons in the Project. If such persons are present, then yes, use inclusive language but that doesn’t mean using only genderless terms. For example, brothers and siblings may be used to address the circle instead of one or the other. When addressing someone who doesn’t identity as male, use the term they prefer. When addressing me, use male terms—the idea that siblings or other genderless words are inclusive is false—I identity as male and such terms do not resonate. I was a little boy, not a little child. But where there space where the language can be inclusive without sacrificing anything—I’m all for it.
With nudity vs non-nudity, I don’t see this as a “yes / and”. You either have it or you don’t and most of the leadership is in the non-nudity camp whereas most of the membership is the former. The leadership is requiring 6 months notice for a nudity weekend which for me comes across as manipulation to convey that the leadership heard the memberships’ complaints given that the default is non-nudity and most of the men/persons running the weekends are in the non-nudity camp. The default is non-nudity which conveys the preference of the leadership while stigmatizing nudity as something unusual. Over time, nudity during weekends will fade away unless there is constant pressure from the rank and file. Informed consent sounds nice, but it will be a tool to ensure the demise of nudity on the weekends; if I had been given a choice, I would likely have chosen non-nudity, and the culture is more bodily self-conscious than ever. Let’s be safe. Let’s stay in our comfortable distrust of each other. Taking the safe road sounds so reasonable. The call to adventure is for those fools willing to expose themselves to risk/danger— let them go elsewhere if there is anywhere to go. The leadership has embraced the mantle of tyrant because they know better, they know what’s best, they are more evolved.
Does MKP even understand who it is as an organization? A fundamental tenant of shadow work is that once you name something, once you put it to the light, it can no longer hide. Yet MKP is now saying that men should hide behind their clothes because nudity is too difficult for them (are we really that fragile?). Unnamed shame and trauma thrive until it becomes normalized into our psyche. Once we put our unnamed shadows into the light, we become accountable. We look into the mirror and we see our truth in a way most sacred when we are used to hiding if not destroying it. We see and we can no longer hide from ourselves as a moral cover for how we are in the world. MKP is moving to keep something fundamental to the human experience unnamed. MKP is caretaking a lack of accountability.
NWTAs were never meant to be for everyone. The weekends were created in opposition to the greater culture for those men who heard the call of the wild man and wanted to let his soul out of the cage. But as the NWTAs conform more to the greater culture’s expectations, it feels like the wild man is being herded back into the cage. Masculine expressions and ways of thinking are toxic (if done so my men), so says the dominant narrative in the culture. In truth, there are immature men, those who are mature, and those on the road between those two points. Immaturity is a symptom of not being challenged enough. Let’s do what pleases us, what gets us the dopamine hit in the moment, avoid deep relationships, avoid having children, feed the ego (often with things, power and the pursuit of agency) instead of the soul.
In the let’s not make anyone too uncomfortable mindset, I feel the erosion of one of the rare and precious spaces where men were allowed to be challenged, to be made uncomfortable, to tap in to their wild man that the broader culture so wants to smother and contain. Beyond that, I judge that MKP is being inauthentic to itself in order to be liked, which is behavior that should not be modeled to men who already struggle with that shadow. For me, this is a great sadness and stirs up an animal anger of defiance.
One day, when the modern world passes, the wild man will be called upon. I hope there is someone left to answer.
