But there is more to be said: men also indispensably need men to be masculine. And it is at this point that we can begin to focus more keenly on the rationale for Mensline.
To summarise, I suggest that in recent decades men have encountered a situation that diminishes their chance of inhabiting a distinctive gender identity, resulting in a degree of role confusion. Mensline is one place where male callers can find help in identifying their issues, and where they can relate to a man who is not only counsellor but also gender role model.
Social Psychologist Roy Baumeister, in an address to the American Psychological Association (August 2007), acknowledges that culture has exploited women, but suggests that that same culture has also exploited men.
Culture is a trade-off, he says, meaning that cultural "advantage" for men is real only from some perspectives, and is "disadvantage" from some other perspectives.
An example he presents is the way that our culture has promoted what he calls 'male expendability'. He points out that "...cultures tend to use men for the high-risk, high pay-off undertakings". The rewards for engaging in these risky behaviours are well known. A man might come back rich from a perilous trade journey, or come back triumphant in battle, covered in glory.
On the other hand, there is a downside to the risk-taking. It is in this area that Baumeister points to "...a significant portion of [men who] will suffer bad outcomes ranging from having their time wasted, all the way to being killed."
It is not surprising that one of the commonest 'bad outcomes' arising from desire to fulfil the prescriptions of culture is men's neglect of their physical and emotional needs. Instead of being rewarded for attention to these same needs, men have been encouraged to view them as expendable, or not to view them at all, as they 'obey' the impulse to advance the goals that culture holds out before them.
Anthropologist Rene Girard echoes this thought when he asserts that woven into each and every human cultural system is an act of exclusion. In order that a society will "work", certain groups, or individuals, or aspects of life, will be ignored or even 'deleted', so that the success of the social system can be firstly achieved and then maintained. This exclusion may be good, apparently, for the group, but as Baumeister also says, is not so good for many sub-groups or individuals.
In the case of men, an example of what is expendable is their emotional needs. Men have traditionally bought into this arrangement because there have been sufficient rewards for them to do so. And perhaps the greatest reward has been a sense of male identity. But what if those rewards, as specifically male gender rewards, are withdrawn or at least diluted?
I suggest that the rewards on offer for men for high-risk, high pay-off undertakings have in fact been diluted, in the sense that those rewards are now there not only for men, but also increasingly for women. No longer do the payoffs (if gained) provide men with a defined social role and identity as men. What has identified men for centuries and millennia is now not doing the job it once used to do.
In tandem with increasing women's equality of opportunity over the last decades of the 20th century, has been the change from modern to post-modern culture. One of the key features of post-modernity, as identified by John Milbank (in Being Reconciled), is the collapse of boundaries. Specific to our present discussion is the collapse of boundaries between male and female.
John Milbank puts it this way. "Everything is made to run into everything else; everything gets blended, undone and then re-blended...and this means that new weight is given to plurality and the proliferation of difference."
Surely this 'proliferation of difference' would serve the interests of men in maintaining and developing a sense of identity, a sense of being me and not you, of being masculine and not feminine? Unfortunately the 'difference' being referred to is not as helpful as it first appears.
John Milbank continues: "However, none of these differences assume the status of a distinct essence: rather they are temporary events, destined to vanish and be displaced".
We might ask: does post-modernism overstress the passing beyond boundaries at the expense of the virtue of boundaries? Is the difference between male/masculine and female/feminine of no more importance than the varieties of skin colour?
I propose that men, following a dilution of traditional rewards for practising behaviours and qualities once valued as specifically male, now face an indistinctness of social role. This however, is not to recommend a return to the ways of the past. Male expendability, however it has been experienced, does not promote the fullness of male personality.
What we seek is a specifically male identity, which on the one hand is comfortable about the limits involved in boundaries, and on the other is inclusive of all that life is and can be for men.
Mensline is a service where men can meet other men who have recognised the male dilemmas of our time, wrestled with them, and made progress with them; where men can be re-fathered and re-brothered into knowing and accepting themselves more fully; and where there is on offer to other men, a liveliness and cultural perspective, which is not based on any act of exclusion or expendability, but rather on inclusion, especially the inclusion of emotion and inner experience.
Roy Baumeister, http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
John Milbank, Being Reconciled, Routledge, London, 2003