Brian’s Reflection: Wednesday, November 3, 2010

A guy is a lump like a doughnut. So, first you
gotta get rid of all the stuff his mom did to him.
And then you gotta get rid of all that macho crap
that they pick up from beer commercials. And
then there's my personal favorite: the male ego.

Roseanne Barr, comedienne, writer, TV producer,
and director; she was born on this date, 1952, in
Salt Like City, to a working-class Jewish family.


Roseanne was pretty “rough-edged” when I first saw her on the TV. I didn’t think that she was a very good actress. But that didn’t matter. What I liked was what she was saying. To me, it had to do with Reality. That is: When are we ever going to see that so many of the problems of American society stem from the inferiorization of Women?? And I must point out again: we do this because of the peculiar twisted dynamics of American Christian religion.

What I want to comment on, from a “spiritual” point of view, is the infantilization of men ….. mostly of heterosexual men. Most Gay men I know have, I think, lost the gene that makes them the kind of men that Roseanne is talking about!. They became themselves because they learned to reject what their mother’s unconsciously tried to project upon them; they don’t “listen” to beer commercials even if they slug down beer; and their Ego is more biologically balanced. If this sounds a little self-serving, I’m vaguely sorry guys!

What Roseanne is saying is that heterosexual men are in desperate need of Liberation. She is right. Men have been emasculated in our culture. They think that to “be” men they have to be a version of Neanderthal killers. I suggest we remember all the great men of History. They may, because of their era, have had to be soldiers. But “soldiering” was a distraction. They were primarily poets, artists, philosophers, academics. This was their true masculine expression.

I say: let’s have more.

Brian+