The door and the room: what writing can and cannot do

Public writing alone cannot produce change in the men who read it – including this piece. The form (social media in the age of hooks and CTAs etc) rewards the claim that it can. Almost everyone writing in this genre, including writers who write about their own methods and frameworks cannot produce the change they/we are talking about through writing alone, even if the frameworks they’re describing can and do work in the right conditions. This article is about the claim, not the method.

Daniel Glyde wrote a piece recently about the CNN investigation into online communities of men sharing advice on how to drug and rape their wives/girlfriends. I commented that the framing – “if you are not part of the solution, you are passively part of the problem” – was diffuse, and that change in men doesn’t happen at the level of diffuse moral writing. Daniel generously responded, took my point, and wrote a follow-up article setting out a three-stage framework for the inner work he believes that men need to do. It is that piece that has inspired this one, and to write about something I previously hadn’t given much thought to.

This is the question though: what does specificity look like, and can writing deliver it? The answer has two parts. First, there is a layer of male experience where change happens, and it is structurally different from the level at which most writing operates. Second, writing about that layer can do something useful, and it absolutely has its place, but it cannot do what writing in this genre usually claims.

The two layers are these: categorical, and granular.

Categorical work happens at the level of types. Types of behaviour, families of belief, broad virtues, identifiable patterns. “Examine your beliefs, identify your limiting beliefs, challenge men around you when they speak about women in ways that reduce them”. These are real categories that have value. But they are also the level at which the reader can assent without doing the thing. Find some instance in the past of having done it, decide he’s covered, move on. Job done.

Granular work happens in moments. A specific 30 seconds in a specific kitchen at 4am (only a certain subtype of millennial will get this reference). The contempt that attaches to a particular tone in that colleague’s voice. Or what that content really is that you watch for an hour before bed.

The test for deciphering which is which, is the following question: can the reader from a piece of writing, identify a specific thing he did or didn’t do this week? If the answer is “I’m not sure, maybe, depends on what you mean by reducing women?” the writing is categorical. The reader sets, and passes the bar. They can identify themselves within the experience in whatever role they like, and the writing produces the experience of having done the work without anything happening.

I’m going to be extra careful here, and begin with this statement. I am talking about the writing of Daniel’s framework, not his actual framework. These are two distinct things. Frameworks like his operate in the categorical when encountered in an article, it is a feature of the medium, not a flaw in his framework. The same framework, used between two people in a sustained conversation over months would be doing different work because conversations can reach the granular level, whereas the article cannot. The article version is the version that is shareable and can scale, whereas the work two people do together, by definition, cannot scale, but it can produce change.

The distinction of method-as-written and method-as-lived is the point. Most writing about inner work blurs the lines between the two. This blur is what makes the genre work commercially but stops it working psychologically. The type of writing that I believe can bridge this gap is poetry, but this is again not particularly commercially viable.

This is not a new problem

This iteration of the male psychology space (it took a lot of self-control to not say ‘manosphere’ here) did not invent itself. It is the latest iteration of a project that has been running for decades.

Robert Bly published Iron John in 1990 (read it if you haven’t already) which gave a generation of men a vocabulary for something they had been half noticing. A kind of grief or absence underneath ordinary male experience. Bly did what good writing in this space can do. He pointed to something that men could relate to on a felt sense, but they hadn’t fully recognised it in themselves previously. For many men, this was the beginning of the real work, not the work itself.

Douglas Gillette and Robert Moore did the same with King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Now men had four archetypes for which they could organise their thoughts about their lives. Both books did real work, but they both came up against the same failure I am describing here. Suddenly we had many men who could talk about the archetypes, and had learned the language of ‘doing the work’ but without actually doing it. There are many men who can talk beautifully about their feelings but remain entirely defended against them. Talking about change, and change are different things.

So what the mythopoetic movement found in the 90’s, writers today are finding again. Categorical language about male inner work proliferates because it can. The granular thing the language is reaching towards is rare, slower, and cannot be delivered through the form that delivers the language. This reminds me of the Bruce Lee quote: “It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”

What is happening?

There are three things going on here that means it remains a problem. Firstly, there is material in a man that has not yet been thought, but exists as bodily sensations, flickers of affect, patterns of behaviour that go unnoticed that he has not yet turned into something he knows about himself. This is because he hasn’t developed the capacity to know it. Adam Phillips describes the unconscious as “that which one is most reluctant to know”. The pang of satisfaction at his wife's small mistake is real and operative long before it is registerable. No instruction can reach this material, because the material is not yet in a form that can receive instruction. It precedes the form in which instructions land. The work is to develop the capacity to know what has been felt but not yet been thought, not to examine what is already known.

The second is that turning unthought material into thinkable form usually requires another mind. There are experiences a person cannot hold alone, they need to be received by another mind, held there long enough to take a form, and given back in a way that lets the person take them in. This is what parents do for distressed infants, it is what good therapy does, what supervision does, and what a good friendship might look like. The reason many men rarely change on their own is that the kind of material that needs to change cannot become thinkable in solitude. This is a failure of structure more than anything else.

The third is that the mind has an active aversion to knowing things about itself. The pang of satisfaction doesn’t go unregistered by accident, it is self-protection. Something in the man does not want to know it, it will be potentially destabilising because it could knock out a pillar of his own self-image of being the Good Husband (capitalised deliberately). Taking this pang of satisfaction seriously can threaten the entire structure, so sensibly, the mind looks the other way because it doesn’t have the tools to metabolise the experience yet.

Put these together and this is what we have. Writing about inner work cooperates with the looking away. This is true of both categorical, and to a lesser extent granular writing. It allows the reader to engage on an intellectual level without the disturbing thing happening. To be clear, this is not a failure of the writing. It is the writing functioning as the reader wants it to function. What the reader wants, mostly, is the experience of working on himself without the disturbance of feeling and experiencing what he's been avoiding.

The additional thing to consider is that a lot of men in this space’s primary defence mechanism is intellectualisation. This is why it proliferates while change remains more elusive. Articles in this space are not necessarily failing, they’re just doing something different. They are giving readers the felt sense of inner development without the disturbance that real inner work requires. Now, this felt sense is not nothing, it is valuable, but it is also not change.

This has been quite abstract so far, so let me offer an example

A man notices one evening a small flicker of satisfaction when his wife misreads directions, or to use a more personal example, when she puts the wrong coordinates into Google Maps in rural Wales the day before we got engaged. Anyway, this flicker has never registered before. There has been nothing to register; the satisfaction has been below the threshold at which thinking happens. It exists only in the body, it has not been thought.

The first thing that changes once the flicker has been registered is not his behaviour. This flicker now exists within him as something in conflict with his self-image as the Good Husband. So, the satisfaction and the Good Husband cannot both be fully true at the same time.

Czesław Miłosz wrote that the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person. The man has been one person, the Good Husband, the man on her side, for a long time. The pang, if he lets it become thinkable, threatens to make him two. So most often what happens at this point is that the recognition fades. The man does not have the capacity, alone, to hold the contradiction. The mind closes around the disturbance and re-establishes the previous arrangement. The pang continues, unregistered.

What does change this pattern is something like this: the recognition is identified in the presence of another mind that can hold it – a friend or therapist for example – without rushing to make it better or to brush it under the carpet. Naming the thing out loud to somebody who can receive it, lets it take a form that the man can begin to think about. He still might not know what it means but it now exists as something he can wonder about rather than something that remains elusive.

If he sticks with it, he may find that the satisfaction is not random, it connects to something. Maybe he has a history of keeping the score with his wife, building to a resentment and contempt sizable enough that he has to avert his gaze. Maybe it goes back further than the marriage to a parent or sibling. The specifics obviously vary but what is constant is that this enquiry takes time and requires conditions that ordinary life rarely provides.

Behaviour change can sometimes follow from this. They are mostly small and they trail the internal change by weeks, months, years sometimes. Public writing cannot do any of this. Yes, including this.

What can writing do?

It can add texture to an experience that was previously flat. It can give a man who has been half-noticing something in himself a vocabulary for it.  Not the kind that lets him classify himself and stop, but something specific enough for him to notice himself in that scenario. It can let recognition happen, in a reader who is ready for it, of something that was already half-formed in him.

Recognition is not change, but it is sometimes the condition under which change becomes possible.

This is what writing in the space can honestly hope for – including this piece. Not transformation or even a method, but an attempt to help men recognise and give words to something that is below their level of awareness. Help them find their own version of the thing. Bly understood this about his own work, Iron John was an invitation. The ones who got something lasting were the ones who took the invitation into actual rooms with other men and stayed there for years.

The actual work happens elsewhere. Therapy, coaching, conversations, group spaces – wherever you can find people you trust who are willing to go to the uncomfortable places with you. None of it fits into an article and it isn’t brandable. The article can be the finger, but it’s not the moon.

So, to close

Daniel’s question to me which was, “what does specificity look like?” does have a real answer but its not a sharper list of behaviours. It is a willingness to look where you don’t want to look, in conditions which make looking possible, with another person who will look with you. Mostly it will involve another person, and always involve time, and rarely do they produce the kind of clean transformation that travels well over social media and in public writing.

The conversation I had with Daniel made me think more about this, which is what good writing should do.

So, if you’ve got this far and found something small in yourself that you’d rather avoid, that is the best outcome this piece could possibly hope for. What you decide to do with it is the part that counts, because the change you want won’t happen here.