In the past few years, I’ve come to understand maleness and where men are in this moment, in this world, through the lens of loneliness. And I continuously receive both support and a bit of a side-eye for it, a skepticism that cuts across gender. Why is this so important to you? What about women and non-binary folks? Don’t men already have enough spaces for themselves?
Yes, of course. And yet, isn’t that precisely a signal for why contributing to shifting something here matters? In the way men relate to themselves, to others, including other men, and to the world?
I want to be clear about what this conversation is and isn’t. It isn’t an effort to sugarcoat, diminish, or justify the injustice and patriarchal norms that have caused — and continue to cause — harm. It isn’t a feel-good story of patting men on the back. But it’s also not a man-bashing narrative. It’s an attempt to look at all of it more soberly, to stay in relationship with one another, and to begin expanding from where each of us stands.
When I listened back to this conversation, what I felt was: discomfort, yes. Messiness, absolutely. But also tenderness. And something close to relief at how far men like my guests Jindy Mann and Jack Becher, and the groups they lead are willing to go, and at the fact that conversations like this one are possible.
This is where Season 2 of The Oneliness Podcast (Spotify | Apple) begins.
Jindy is a leadership coach, organisational consultant and facilitator with over 20 years of experience working with leaders and organisations across sectors. He is the founder of Leader Brother Son, a space for men to explore authentic expressions of masculinity, and has been facilitating men’s groups for five and a half years, now in its 17th cohort. His central question, the one that runs through all of it: what’s really going on?
Jack is a facilitator of interpersonal and systems change, working at the intersection of personal transformation and planetary systems. He co-stewards several projects including the Generative Journalism Alliance and Foundations Earth, and is the creator of Beyond Patriarchy. This learning journey takes men through the work of sensing, acknowledging, and beginning to dismantle their own conditioning. He draws on feminist, decolonial, and indigenous thinking. He approaches this, in his own words, as lifelong work.
We’ve hosted gatherings together (like today’s Shared Table Picnic for men), started many unfinished conversations. This felt like the right moment to continue there.
In the groups that Jindy co-facilitates, they often explore the theme of friendship; he invites the men to share their earliest significant male friendship. Every time, without fail, what comes back is this:
“What we hear — what we always hear — are love stories. These beautiful, romantic stories of boys who are six, seven, eight years old. And you can see and feel the emotion that’s present when men go back to that place and remember what their friendships were like as boys.”
Love stories. And then somewhere around adolescence, something happens. The tenderness gets trained out. Boys learn to perform distance, to not need, to disconnect from everything, including themselves.
Jindy draws on the psychotherapist James Hollis to describe what this actually looks like structurally: three unconscious promises a boy must make to become a man in modern culture.
“The first is to reject intimacy — because intimacy is feminine, intimacy is gay, it’s queer. Secondly, you reject embodied intuition — you disconnect from everything below the neck. And thirdly, you live by an external set of rules, by what it means to be a man. And since you don’t know who the author of these rules is, you can never go and challenge them.”
In resonance, Jack names a similar moment from the inside, a memory from age nine, growing up in Scotland:
“I can remember choosing: do I want to be part of this group, do I want to be accepted? Or am I going to basically out myself as something else — as one that’s then a target of all the cruel things that children can do to each other. And realizing later in life the price that I paid for that. And the harm that that caused. The guilt and shame of realizing you’re complicit in that — and also how that was a survival strategy at the time.”
This is the contradiction this conversation sits with for a long time and doesn’t try to resolve too quickly: that men can be both complicit in harm and shaped by a system that harms them. That these are not the same thing. That collapsing them, in either direction, is where the work goes wrong.
And then: the need for real solidarity. What it actually looks like. What it asks of all of us.
Jindy brings in the miners’ strikes, the queer communities in London who marched alongside the miners in 1984 because they recognized: our struggle is the same. Jack closes with the belief that keeps him going:
“The unwavering belief I have that alternatives are possible. And that this isn’t the way it has to be. I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know how long it will take to get there, but I know that we have to try.”
And Jindy, on what he keeps practicing in the meantime:
“I am continually practicing — which includes failing at my own integrity. Staying, practicing congruence between what I say I believe and what I actually do. Because I notice the more I do that, the more connected I feel to myself.”
Listen to the full episode: On Being a Man and What Men Long For with Jindy Mann and Jack Becher on The Oneliness Podcast (Spotify | Apple)
Thank you for being here, for listening, for ‘doing the work’ together.
If any of this resonates, share this post or the episode, and leave a rating wherever you’re listening.
With love and in solidarity, as always.
Monika
