Some might say “the unknown,” “being broke,” “not being loved,” or “not being in control.” While these top the list, there are a few fears much deeper, mostly unconscious, and more secret that most dudes just won’t admit they have or have had.

The three big fears that stem from outdated male conditioning are:

1. Being perceived as gay
2. Being perceived as too feminine
3. A fear that your cock is not big enough, and therefore you are not adequate

If this is true that men fear these, then it is also true that these are the three areas to exploit and shame another man.

Men who are insecure in one or more of these areas will be highly susceptible to ridicule in these areas. However, he will do his best to hide it.  The mask he will wear will be thick and seemingly impenetrable. Be honest. Ask yourself from boyhood until now if you have feared these. I have feared all of these at some point in my life.

Let’s take a quick look at all three.

1. Being perceived as gay

Since so many men are simply out of touch with who they really are, and are fundamentally insecure, being called “gay” can be very threatening. For these men, gay = bad, wrong, weak, womanly, sensitive, and less than.

Think about it. In conventional male culture (particularly for teens and young men), the biggest put down you can give another man is to call him a fag. Men joke in this way all the time. But underneath the joke is a hidden truth. That to the men giving the put down, they are deeply afraid that they will be seen as homosexual or gay and they know the other man might have questions too.

Prior to having any self-awareness whatsoever, I shamefully admit that in college I participated in gay bashing by calling my male friends who I perceived had more feminine character traits. At the same time, I did my best to hide any aspect of myself that I felt was weak or revealed how incredibly sensitive I was.  I also questioned my sexuality in adolescence and had no one to talk to about it. So, like a guy’s guy, I puffed up, I hid it, and instead made fun of others.

Rapper Eminem was asked by MTV’s Kurt Loder in 2001 why he used “faggot” in all his songs to put down other men. Eminem responded:

The lowest degrading thing you can say to a man when you’re battling him is to call him a faggot and try to take away his manhood. Call him a sissy, call him a punk. “Faggot” to me doesn’t necessarily mean gay people. “faggot” to me just means taking away your manhood.

Sadly Eminem’s view is very common. And, even if it wasn’t meant as a putdown to gays, it is. Talk to most gay folks. Using “gay” or “fag” as a putdown perpetuates aggression, disrespect, and even violence toward gays.

Anti-gay behavior is so ingrained in our culture and starts from day one. If a little baby boy so much as gets a toy that looks like a “girl toy” he might be teased by a nearby watchful adult as gay or girly. So begins the cycle of the boycode.

William Pollack PHD, coined the phrase “boycode” to suggest that boys are put in what he calls a gender straight-jacket as early as infancy. Boys must only act like boys and if they cry, whine, don’t play sports, or wear girl-colored clothing, they are not being a boy. Sadly, this behavior is conditioned largely by fearful, insecure, adult men who do not want to be seen having a boy who is “not acting like a boy.”

Boys are conditioned to be boys and boys in most modern cultures have a “do’s and don’ts list” of behaviors. Since boys have no formal initiation in this culture, “adult boys” model boyhood and manhood, which becomes an incredibly narrow version of masculinity, and sadly one we are dealing with right now.

Michael Kimmel in his book Guyland pinpoints the “guycode”  which grows out of the boycode. The guycode is essentially the same as the boycode, but for adult men. It’s just another box we men buy into.

Read their books as this is not meant to serve as a research project. Rather it is to pinpoint the sad but obvious truth about the mainstream man in this culture.

Gay men are just as much men as straight men. Practice acceptance.

2. Being perceived as too feminine

I remember playing golf as a boy. If I putt the ball short of the hole, the older men used to say, “hit it Alice” to imply I was putting like a woman because I didn’t hit the ball hard enough. I also remember in college challenging other men to drink more by calling them “skirts” if they were not keeping up (as if 10 or 12 beers was not enough).

In men’s sports, coaches often uses terms such as “ladies” to describe men who are not stepping up, who are quitting, or who are acting weak. Even in the blockbuster Avatar, the “bad guys” called each other ladies to motivate each other.

Think of the cost here with our teenage boys. When boys and adolescent boys are trained day in and day out to put each other down with “girl,” “pussy,” “vagina,” “cunt,” etc, over time the association becomes entrenched. It can start out pretty innoscent, but pretty soon, this bleeds over to how boys treat girls. They begin to disrespect girls in an ongoing way and use “girl behavior” as the big put down to each other. They attempt to push away the feminine because they are doing their best to hide the feminine aspects of themselves.

Boys will hide any vulnerable or seemingly feminine aspects of themselves or face the ridicule of their peers and thus not belong or feel accepted by their peer group.

Tragically, boys will bury anything about themselves that resembles a girl.

3. A fear that your cock is not adequate

The other big diss boys and guys dish out to each other is to insult another man’s penis.  Find a way to call attention to another man’s inadequacy by attacking his privates. No wonder boys and men are so uncomfortable talking about their cocks, their sexual fears, or inadequacies. No wonder shame begets shame.

Countless men (and women) have fears of being inept, impotent, inadequate, worthless, not good enough, and not man enough. Men often associate these with their cock and their cock’s performance. In traditional guy culture your cock = your success. If your cock works, gets action with women only, and is big, then you are a man.

What nonsense. And yet this is often what young boys learn through other men, the media and through porn.

Internet porn thus becomes the guidepost for boys who have nowhere to turn. The basic message for a boy or man watching porn is the same as above. “Use your cock to take her, thrust, fuck, be in charge, dominate, control,” because that is supposedly what she wants. Again, another box. Boys and men buy into the box and if anything happens outside the box, there must be something wrong with you.

Believe it or not, your cock is fine just the way it is. You are adequate. Even if you lose your erection or believe you have a small penis, you are enough. It’s commonly understood that most women don’t care about size.

My advice:

1. The re-frame. Your vulnerability is your strength. Yup. Believe it or not, your vulnerability is your strength. Not in mainstream culture or traditional manhood of course. But who cares? If you read this blog, you are not a conventional, mainstream man. You are more conscious than that. Start acting like you are.

2. Be yourself and stop giving a shit what others think of you. Seriously. Have the balls to be yourself (not your ego-self) and blast out of the box your culture, your father, or your peers put you in.

3. Grow up. Move on past this juvenile behavior. Lead the way and practice not buying into these 3 fears. They only serve to keep you inside that box. You don’t need them. At the same time if you are secure in who you are as a man, skip dissing other men by using these deeply entrenched jabs. You just perpetuate aggression, violence, and intolerance in people that are different than you. If you are scared and want to protect yourself, fine. But get some new tools, seriously.

4. Start respecting your fellow man, no matter who they are. That’s right, criminals, democrats, republicans, gay, straight, black, white, red, brown, yellow. Practice acceptance and start with the guy staring you in the face everyday.

5. Challenge him. If you want to help another man step up, challenge him to reach his potential.

6. Call him out. When a man is thirty-five and he is acting like a boy, call him on that. This does not mean if a man is crying he is acting like a boy. Men cry. I cry. Crying and showing strong emotion is a sign of strength. But if he acts like he is fourteen or is trapped in “guyland” and refuses to be a man, call him out. Demand more from him.

7. Get out of the gender box. Men come in all shapes, colors, and sizes. Be careful about how you put boys (including your own children) in a gender box. Let your son be emotional, sensitive, and free. If he plays with dolls, get curious about why you care so much. It’s likely that you are afraid what others will think of you. Encourage him to be himself and trust himself, not some version of your rigid self. Do the same with your adult male friends and colleagues.

I have been known to challenge a man’s manhood to this day. I feel okay about it. Why? Because I am demanding that he act like an adult and be truthful with who and what he is. I want the best out of him. I demand what is behind his mask. I want his authentic version of him, not some box that his culture put him in. I don’t have some outdated, stoic, John Wayne version of manhood. That’s a bunch of crap.

If you decide to challenge another man’s manhood, come from a place of honor and respect and remember tip number 3. We can and do challenge each other as men. But let us do it by building one another up without disrespecting someone else or comparing ourselves to anyone.

This World needs less “adult boys” and more open-hearted, fearless, conscious men. Will you be one of them?

What does it mean to grow yourself up?

As grown adults, we are not beyond our emotional reactions to life’s situations. To react is to be human.

How we react is the key.

However, since most of us never work on ourselves, we react in the same, predictable, emotional ways issue after issue, year after year.

When we get “triggered” in life by circumstances and relationship challenges, we react. Most of the time the reaction happens so fast that it feels as if we do not have a choice.

For example, let’s say you initiate sex with your partner. But your partner is not in the mood to have sex with you. You then feel a wave of shame and anger, then you collapse and shut down. You make up a story that he or she does not find you attractive. You start to believe that you are “too much.” You feel rejected. Your story intensifies and you now believe you are not lovable or worthy. You feel like hiding now and you start to make your partner wrong in your mind. You say things like “Fine, then I won’t ask anymore, see how you like it.” Then you become passive aggressive and try to “get back at him or her” in some lame way.

Basically we feel young and are acting young, much like a hurt little boy or girl.

Later on when you have some distance from the situation, you might be quite surprised at how such a little event upset you so much.

But in the moment, specifically with those we love the most, we tend to react intensely to our own upset.

Why do people regress?

It is commonly understood in psychology that in the above situation and others like it, a few things are happening in a very short amount of time:

1. we get triggered by a person or event
2. we leave the front part of our brain and the hind brain takes over, thus rational thinking (front brain) goes out the window.
3. We have now regressed to a childhood a time where a similar event happened when we were a little boy or girl
4. We are now in a survival response and we do one of four things to “survive” the situation:

Fight–Lash out or fight back with verbal or physical aggression

Flight–Run away, go away mentally or dissociate

Freeze–Shut down or hide so it doesn’t happen to us again

Submit–Give up and collapse becoming depressed

In addition to your “in the moment” reaction is how it ties into past situations where a similar thing happened. You now “couple” it with other times where you were rejected. This is why it can feel so overwhelming at times.

But since most of us never learned how to work with our emotions and inner psychology and we were often taught to suck it up, we never learned what to do when we feel sad, angry, hurt or even happy.

Take me as an example…

Prior to any personal development work, I was a very reactive dude. All the emotions felt the same and I would end up having no idea what was going on. So I labeled it a “bad mood” or “my funk.”  I had no tools because as a kid, I was taught to stuff my feelings and taught nothing about emotions.

So, as I grew into an adult, I still believed being emotional was bad—that crying was weak, unmanly, and getting angry was “asshole” behavior. I was committed to not hurting anyone and getting others to like me, so I resigned myself to hide my emotions.

But the irony was that I was feeling everything but I had no clue how to be with it or even express it. Further, when I would get upset and reactive, I would act like a little boy.

When I got angry, I did anger like a little boy. I wanted to throw a tantrum and hit people. When I did sadness, I would shut down and hide. This of course is common for little boys who are not allowed to feel.

Kids repress their emotions because most often it isn’t safe to express them. And since it is hard to keep a lid on them, they explode when the pressure gets too great. Adults who have repressed their emotions do the same.

Time to grow up

So given this, what can we do now?

An adult with awareness doesn’t have to stuff their feelings, nor do they need to act out.  They have a choice. They don’t posture and they don’t collapse. An adult willing to grow, takes a break, feels everything fully, and then gets back in relationship with the person who they are feeling hurt by.

Just because we were robbed the opportunity to feel as a kid, doesn’t mean that we need to continue robbing ourselves from our emotional life as an adult. We have choices now we didn’t have back then.

If the external claim is that we say “I am an adult,” but the behavior is that we behave like a child in any situation, we are incongruent and this will have an impact on those around us.

Let’s just be honest. Let’s take responsibility that we sometimes act like a child and then let’s re-commit to doing what we need to do to grow ourselves up over time.

How to grow yourself up

• Be open to the possibility that a little version of you lives inside of you
• Take full responsibility for what is going on with you
• Take note of this dynamic in your own life. Start noticing in what situations you act like a child
• Feel your Feelings fully. When you feel like you are 5 years old and shameful, feel it completely
• Go to therapy or counseling to get more tools to grow yourself up
• Be an amazing parent to your inner child. Shaming him or her into oblivion does not work
• Stop asking or expecting your partner to parent the little boy in you. Yuch
• Join a relationship practice group or start one to get quality support
• Stay engaged in your own personal development

Remember, it is likely that we will continue to react in life and even regress into child-like behavior. However, they key is HOW we respond.

With practice, we can gain more and more mastery with the little one in us so we can parent him or her when need be. Why? So that the adult in you is captain of the ship, not the child.

If you want additional reading on this, a great book is “Growing Yourself Back Up” by John Lee.