Where Are The Men?

A few weeks ago I attended a question-and-answer session with a woman with elderhood status within the local indigenous community. She spoke eloquently and with an authority based in cultural values and history. I left the session feeling privileged to have had the opportunity to listen to, and be transported into, a realm of the heart.

I also left with an unsettling question: Where are the men?

In the room there had been approximately 80 people. I didn’t count them, as there were too many. I did count the number of men present though. Only six!!

Six men in a group of 80, only 7.5% of the total. Women outnumbered men by a factor of 13:1.

I have been involved in community development, social justice, and environmental movements for more than fifty years. In those fields I have noticed similar ratios in gatherings of what might be called politics of the heart.

Politics of the heart could be a phrase for utilising emotional responses, personal experience, and deep internal reflection to inform one’s philosophy and practice. Politics of the heart asks questions of my own self, it asks me to consider how my choices and actions impact upon social, community, and international situations.

Politics of the heart requires me to stand aside from my ego and to honestly look into the feelings of my heart. It is not easy. It is not straightforward. It may not even be conclusive.

Where then, I wonder, are the men when it comes to this politics of the heart? Why do women, time and time again, vastly outnumber men in workshops, seminars, retreats, and presentations that deal with the politics of the heart?

Yet, when it comes time to march on parliament, or to organise protest actions, or to stand for governmental positions, why is it that men tend to outnumber women? Although this latter situation is changing, it is a tendency I have noticed over 50 years as much as the tendency for women to outnumber men in politics of the heart.

I have not found any serious research attempting to answer these questions, so all I can do is offer some thoughts based on my personal experience.

Historically, and still mostly the case, men have been the privileged gender. It may be that this privilege means that men consider the issues raised within the politics of the heart unworthy of consideration because men are not impacted by such issues. Men have the privilege of not having to think about these issues.

Men have been socially conditioned to believe that politics of the heart involves soft issues, whereas the role of men is to deal with the hard issues. Becoming involved in soft issues for men opens us up to vulnerability – a notoriously soft issue. Male conditioning is for men to be strong, logical (not emotional), and to take up positions of leadership.

Male politics, in general, tends to be outwardly focussed. Questions dealing with law and order, foreign trade, defence systems, financial markets, machinery, and building and construction are more often seen as the male realm. These are all outwardly directed activities.

The politics of the heart, in contrast, is inner directed and deals in emotions, intuition, feelings, compassion, empathy, true connection, and self-reflection. Men (at least westernised men) have been told for many decades that these are not matters that men need to consider. Indeed, men have been led to believe that such matters are beneath them.

The sad thing about all this is that what men have been conditioned into is untrue. Sad too, is that what men have been told, what men have been led to believe, is also untrue.

So, men, let us overturn that ratio of women to men, and start involving ourselves in the politics of the heart.