Steve Biddulph - The New Manhood

There are men who wake up in the morning energised and happy.

Whose partners and children love and trust them.

Who do work they believe in and enjoy.

Have loyal and interesting friends.

And are deeply involved in the wider world.

They may not be famous or wealthy.

They value something quite different.

They are learning how to be real.

This book is dedicated to my son and daughter.

THE NEW MANHOOD

First published in Australia and New Zealand as The New Manhood: The handbook for a new kind of man in 2010 by Finch Publishing.

This edition published in 2019 by Simon & Schuster Australia.

Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited

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Visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.au

Copyright Steve Biddulph and Shaaron Biddulph 2010, 2013

Foreword Steve Biddulph 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission from the last known copyright holder for all the quotes and extracts used in this book.

The Author notes section at the back of this book contains useful additional information and references to quoted material in the text. Each reference is linked to the text by its relevant page number and an identifying line entry.

Cover design: Luke Causby/Blue Cork

Front cover photo: Alhovik/VectorStock

Back cover photo: Alexander Potapov/AdobeStock

ISBN: 978 2 76085 114 9

ISBN: 978-1-7608-5115-6 (ebook)

Edited by Sean Doyle

Editorial assistance by Catherine Page

Index by Madeleine Davis

L iberation is a wonderful word. You think of Nelson Mandela walking out of prison. Or of Allied troops driving the Nazis out of Europe, down streets lined with joyful crowds. Or of a wild creature an eagle or a tiger healed from its wounds and released into the wild.

Fifty years ago the womens liberation movement arrived to set women free from being tied to kitchens, low pay, dreary sex lives, and existing in a valium haze. Men, meanwhile, had no such movement. We were the last to be released. Thats why I wrote this book, starting twenty-five years ago and then in better and better versions up until today.

We know who reads this book. First of all, its men who have been given it by a friend. That has happened thousands of times. Then its read by men who have been handed it by a woman who loves them and sees they are in some kind of pain. Copies are passed around factories or mining camps. Several Australian army commanders bought copies for their entire base. Teenage boys in Western Australia studied it in Year 12.

And there are the brave men perhaps like you who bought their own copy and will read it without needing encouragement, who are, on their own, questioning the straitjacket ideas of what a mans life is and looking for a happier way.

There is a massive change going on in masculinity today. Its needed, and its the best news, the missing piece to unlock human progress. Messed-up masculinity, little boys in grown up bodies, are a dying breed, but they still, tragically, run the world in politics, and often in sport and business. We have to pension off this defective model of maleness and bring a better kind of manhood to the fore, before its too late. Thats why I am writing this message and not fishing.

What is masculinity? Is it something born inside you, like your testicles and your hairy chest? As a psychologist and scientist who has worked with men for forty years, I am pretty clear that masculinity our inner sense of how to be male in this world is a river . It flows to us from all the good men (and sometimes the bad) we have known, depended on and learned from, added to for better or worse by TV, movies and books, so that we are a kind of bundle of role examples. Its mapped into the way we walk, talk, feel and think. We learn enormously from women too, but only men know the sharp edges of this, how to drive a male body with its unique chemistry and varieties of brain. We weave all this together and make it unique in us. There are a million ways to be a man, but they all depend on that water flowing to us.

The river of healthy maleness in the twentieth century became just a trickle, like the mighty MurrayDarling. The reasons are clear in your own family history. Millions of mute and damaged men returned from war, or were hammered by industrialised life, cut off from nature and community. It was hell on earth for many generations, and harm compounded on harm. If you had a warm, loving, open-hearted and articulate dad, with some music and poetry in his soul, who got on with your mum, and was comfortable and devoted to you as a kid, then you were among the lucky few.

My normal workplace is an auditorium with seven or eight hundred people in it. Some of the things that I say to them always bring a deep moment of silence. I tell my audiences that every boy ever born has in his heart a dream dad the dad he hopes his real dad will be. We know, deep inside, that we need many male role models to lead us to healthy manhood. Thats always how human societies functioned each generation in our hunter-gatherer past teaching, training and nurturing the next, for hours each day.

Its now widely believed among scholars of human society that life for humans was happier ten thousand years ago than it has rarely been since. For one thing, we fed and clothed and sheltered ourselves with a couple of hours work a day. The agricultural era, and the age of empires that soon followed, turned most men into slaves. If I look at my grandfathers life on the factory floor, drinking himself to a stupor before staggering home, it looks like slavery to me. My dad exchanged a blue collar for a white one, but was still a wage slave who dreamed of snow-clad mountains and sailing across oceans. When he died, I shared his ashes between a Canadian mountain peak and the shores of Lake St Clair. He had never made it to either.

The outcomes of reading this book in your hands are known to us because I have heard it in a thousand venues, in airports and hotel lobbies. The messages are the same. A happier life. A sense of purpose. A warm and lively sex life. Choosing a job that has heart and meaning, even if its not the highest paid. Taking your family camping for a year instead of upping your mortgage for a McMansion. Getting into the fight for a liveable earth. Learning to dance and sing and embarrass your children while delighting their hearts at the same time.

Liberation is waiting. When six men a day take their own lives, and eighty-two men a day make serious suicide attempts, according to the latest shocking new figures, then we have a humanitarian crisis among men. Globally, when young men run down streets with knives, killing people, and idiots get elected to run the world, and rapists ride the trams and trains looking for a young woman on her own, and corporate fools ruin the earth, then we have to find ways to raise men of a better calibre. Men with backbone and heart, life-affirming and life-protecting, are hungered for by women, children and communities worldwide. Theres no future without them.