THAT'S MEN:Stereotype tells us very little about 'real' men, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
‘STOP CRYING and act like a man” is a message many boys still get as they grow up. The idea that men should not have a softer, vulnerable side is one which feeds into a particular concept of masculinity – perhaps we could call it the John Wayne concept.
In the old Westerns, John Wayne was a real man, a tough guy who stood up to all manner of bad guys and who probably never cried even as a baby. But the stereotype tells us very little about “real” men.
I was led to these thoughts by a letter written by the poet Francis Ledwidge a month before he was killed in the first World War. It is included in Liam O’Meara’s Legends of the Boyne and Selected Prose of Francis Ledwidge.
Ledwidge recalls that when he was about seven years old, “I was one day punished in school for crying and that punishment ever afterwards haunted the master like an evil dream, for I was only crying over Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, which an advanced class had been reading aloud”.
This image of the schoolboy crying over a poem is hardly that of a “real man”, John Wayne style. Yet this boy went on to volunteer to serve in war because the British Army “stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation, and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions”.
I was very taken by the fact that the schoolteacher who punished the young Ledwidge for his unmanly behaviour was subsequently “haunted” by what he had done. Even the enforcer of manliness departed from the stereotype.
Here was a boy who, in his own words, had “always been very quiet and bashful and a great mystery in my own place”.
“I avoided the evening play of neighbouring children to find some secret place in a wood by the Boyne and there imagine fairy dances and hunts, fires and feasts.
“I saw curious shapes in shadows and clouds and loved to watch the change of the leaves and the flowers, I heard voices in the rain and the wind and strange whisperings in the waters.”
Not what you expect of a boy who grew up to be a staunch nationalist but who joined the British Army on a point of principle and did not use his growing reputation as a poet to get himself a safe posting.
Yet this all seems unexpected only because of the expectations that have been handed down to us: namely that a real man is like John Wayne, not Francis Ledwidge.
Here’s an irony: John Wayne failed to enlist for service in the war which followed that in which Francis Ledwidge, the boy who cried, died.
Ledwidge had to endure being away in the trenches when rebellion broke out at home. It was for one of the executed 1916 leaders Thomas MacDonagh that he wrote his best known poem, beginning with the line “He shall not hear the bittern cry”.
MacDonagh, a poet and teacher, also does not fit the stereotype of the “real man” nor did his friend and the leader of the rebellion, Patrick Pearse.
Yet stereotypes carry on. If you asked anybody today to define a “real man”, you can be sure the definition wouldn’t include crying over a poem and hiding away in the woods imagining fairy dances.
Stereotypes blind us to the richness of reality and that, as we know, is only the start of the harm they do.
The identity of men is undergoing change alongside changes in the role of women. As we work out the new identity, let’s remember that Francis Ledwidge was a real man too.
You can read Ledwidge’s extraordinary letter on the dublin.ie forum at http://bit.ly/dublinledwidge (scroll down past the posts at the top of the page). The letter is posed in the forum by Twangman whom I suspect to be a well-known local historian.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail.