My humblest gratitude to Charles for making this conversation possible.
Please go to his web site to learn about the full course.
Session One: How do we do “man”?
with Boysen Hodgson
This conversation introduces some of the themes and frames of our inquiry into masculinity. We start with some conceptual discussion of gender as distinct from biological sex — the interplay of biology and culture to produce gender, and a third element as well: the transhuman origin of archetypes and stories. Not only do we tell our stories, our stories tell us. Therefore, we arrive at the defining question of this course: It’s not what masculinity is outside of culture, outside of story. It is, What is the next story of the masculine? What are we ready to step into?
Then we go into some more ground-level issues: fatherhood, initiation, role models, and the New Warrior Training of the Mankind Project. We discuss the importance of relationships with other men, a ‘circle of men’ as Bill Kauth calls it, for a man to abide in a mature masculinity.
Finally we zoom back out again to take on masculinity and the detachment from materiality. What are we in service to? Could it be that the same unwillingness to hear and see women is related to our obliviousness to the needs of Mother Earth? What would civilization and technology look like, if instead of imposing a design onto nature, we listened first to what the land wants, what the water wants, what the trees want, seeking no longer to harness, dominate, and transcend materiality, but to make love to materiality?
A Conversation with Boysen Hodgson
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