To understand this, we'll have to look at how children become adults and at the effects on that process of being mother-reared.

Being mother-reared. First, remember that children need help learning about their feelings. They need adults to name for them what they're feeling ("you seem angry", "you look scared"), and they need to see adults having a feeling life so they can see how it works. The fact that each of us modeled our own feeling life on that of our parents becomes obvious every time we find ourselves reacting just like they did, despite having promised ourselves that we wouldn't.

Now consider the possibility that there might be two different forms of adult feeling life -- a male form and a female form -- and that these forms are passed down from father to son and mother to daughter. What happens when the men are no longer involved in child-rearing and it is all done by the women? Quite simply, the girls are taught by their mothers how to have a female feeling life, but the boys are not taught by their fathers how to have a male feeling life. A boy may learn the female form from his mother, but it will never quite fit for him or seem indigenous to his masculinity. Over the generations, the male feeling life gradually dies out until we arrive at the situation today, in which most of the men are undeveloped emotionally or even numb, and society believes that feeling itself is inherently feminine.

As infants, we form our sense of identity through our relationships with the adults around us. A little girl says to herself, "I know who I am, I'm just like Mom." Both her personal security and her gender identity are reinforced by being close to Mom. Dependency on Mom is okay because she and Mom are similar. All she has to do is wait and someday she'll be a Mom, too.

For a little boy, the story is quite different. As an infant, he needs his mother just as much as a girl does, but to establish himself in a masculine identity, he needs to shift his attachment to his father. If his father is physically close and available, all goes well. But if there is no man to attach to, the boy has a problem. He has to identify himself by differentness instead of by sameness. He has to look for security in separateness and distance instead of in closeness.

Dependency on Mom becomes a threat to his maleness, and he is constantly torn between his personal need for closeness and his gender-identity need for separateness and independence. This creates an unresolvable anxiety in him and to cope with it he begins to shut down his feelings and go numb inside.

EFFECTS ON MEN

Shame. The boy doesn't know that the whole child-rearing process is flawed. He only knows that his Dad is distant. He wonders, "Why doesn't Dad love me?" If he decides it's because "I'm bad," he will conclude "I hate myself." If he decides that "Dad is bad," he will progress to "I hate Dad," thence to "I hate men," and again arrive at "I hate myself."

And underneath it all he will long for his father and for his father's love. This longing will probably be denied and hidden under anger or indifference, but the size of the anger or indifference testifies to the size of the longing. He will decide that his father or masculinity itself is flawed in some way, that it is not lovable or trustworthy. He will feel shame around his maleness and may need to attack it in others or defend it in himself. He will feel anxious about whether he is a 'real man'.

Isolation. In order to keep these feelings repressed, he will have to isolate himself emotionally. He will develop 'The Wall.'

If he lets a woman close, it throws him back into the fear that closeness with Mom will erode his masculinity. To cope with this fear, he has to control the woman and/or his feelings. Much of men's violence towards women arises from this dilemma.

If he lets a man close, it re-stimulates his longing for Dad and all the shame, despair, fear, and anger associated with it. These feelings are generally even stronger than men's fear of being close to women, and are a main source of men's enormous fear of love between men (homophobia), and of the violence used to suppress it.

Sex becomes the only way to feel close to someone, so his desires for intimacy become sexualized. Since his heart is blocked, the energy of the heart gets shunted into the sexual channel. When he wants to be held or loved, he thinks he wants sex. This makes sex seem very important, but it also makes it unsatisfying to the extent that it is being used as a substitute for something else. So he keeps thinking that he needs more: more sex, more variety, more partners . . . It also makes him fear intimacy with other men, because he thinks feeling close means he wants to have sex with them.

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