.NO…….this is not shade on committed relationships, so stick with me….
“They” built an entire culture around a lie.
The lie of success, laced in romantic love, signed in ink as commitment and called monogamy. ( it is actually monopoly…but hay they could not even get the wording right..and society ran with it…)
And now it is systematically and slowly neurologically damaging an entire generation of boys.
Not because the commitment of two people who love each other inside of monogamy itself is wrong.
But because this style of relationship required under the “law” of monogamy, has basically weaponized and contradicted the way humans are designed to relate, support and live with and among one another.
Monopoly has twisted our existence into an isolated nuclear family model where only two people, and for much of our recent times. only one woman, carries the full weight of raising children alone. We have taken the human care of children by community ( the village ) and turned it into a cage of isolation, fear, poverty and desperation.
And the boys are paying the price.
Male infants are born more vulnerable than girls.
Boys develop more slowly than girls. Their brains undergo different developmental trajectories, they are more sensitive to environmental stress and they are more reactive to chaos such as poverty. When a child is born into scarcity, either emotional or financial, boys suffer more acutely than their sisters. Their immune systems are weaker and their stress response systems are more fragile.
Why?.. because their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, emotional regulation and….. critical thinking, is more susceptible to damage from cortisol exposure.
This is not just my wise womaned, re-genopaused upgraded mind opinion as I sit at midnight writing out my thoughts…. This is actual neuroscience.
When a mother is stressed during pregnancy, her body floods with cortisol. When a woman is over working, not supported, not touched enough or loved enough, that cortisol crosses the placental barrier and (among… basically everything…) it shapes the developing fetal brain. In boys the effect of high cortisol alterates the prefrontal cortex, effecting his ability to emotionally regulate creating a lifetime of compromised capacity for the kind of thought and feeling that builds resilience.
… take a moment to read that again…..and now think of who commits the majority of violence, takes up the majority of beds in prison and has the higher rate of suicide……… it is not the women….
The stress does not stop at birth. It just continues to get worse.
A boy born into an isolated household, where his mother is alone, underfunded, and unsupported by community, inherits that stress as a permanent feature of his nervous system. His immune system is weaker, which is why breastfeeding matters so much ( and not just for, but also especially ) for male infants. They need it and benefit more ( maybe explains the obsession of a boob man ) but fewer boys are breastfed long enough, because their mothers are too exhausted, too isolated and too overwhelmed to sustain it. Many mothers need to return to work……….into the culture that she is breeding the next consumers for….
Then we wonder why boys are falling apart……. it all starts at conception and pregnancy.
and i have NO PROBLEM saying…. The Monogamy Model has played a huge roll in this devastation.
let’s trace the line backward…..
For most of human history, children were raised by villages. Multiple adults and older children caring for them 24/7. Multiple income and resource streams. Multiple hands sharing the load. And all this trickled to the mother who was incredibly supported. She was rested and held and nurtured. Her and her families stress levels were manageable because the weight was not on her shoulders alone. ( nor on the shoulders of her one man to provide )
Then, monogamy was built into a nuclear family structure and it was called….. modern and progressive.
What actually happened was that we took the responsibility for raising, feeding and nurturing humans that an entire village took responsibility for and handed it to just two people. This trauma based structure then dwindled down through economic pressure and cultural shame to become in so many homes the responsibility of just one.
One woman.
One income.
One person carrying all of it.
We romanticized it, calling it love whilst making it a moral imperative. And we built an entire system designed to punish anyone who deviated from it.
The outfall of it all is Mothers in crisis. ….These moral codes of laws have stretched society thin and left mothers chronically stressed, financially vulnerable, socially isolated, with their cortisol levels elevated leaving their nervous systems in constant activation, leaving their sons, the most neurologically vulnerable of all, absorbing that stress like sponges.
Oh the boys we are creating…..
We are not raising emotionally intelligent men. We are raising boys whose brains were shaped by maternal stress and isolation. Boys with compromised prefrontal cortices. Boys with weaker immune systems. Boys whose stress response systems are set to high alert before they can even talk.
And then so many of these men bully their way up to roles that keep making horrendous laws that rape and pillage the earth that is meant to feed the women that need to feed the babies…..
We somehow expect boys to grow into men to be strong and provide. to be emotionally available and lead. To think critically and to regulate themselves. We are asking them to do things their biology, shaped by the stress of our system, does not permit.
Instead of blaming the trauma based isolation structure of how a mother is required to raise them, we blame just her. We don’t address the structure that broke her and damaged her son, or examine the culture that isolates the family, we blame her. Instead of asking whether this new romanticized monogamous nuclear family model actually makes biological sense for raising humans who need support we just blame her for choosing wrong.
We then watch our boys and men suffer, and act surprised.
The answer is not to necessarily burn the agreement of monogamy between two people down….. ( well in a way it is…. and i am not talking sexually ) Some people choose it consciously and it works beautifully for them…. the answer is to dismantle the lie that it is the gold standard of the only way. And to dismantle that a life worths of resources and care is to come from one person…. that is what needs dismantling, for the health of our babies.
What boys need is what all children need.
Mothers who are supported.
Rested.
Held by community.
Financially secure.
Emotionally regulated.
Present…so f*cking present!!!!
( foto taken one week day morning, building structures in the trees, eating breakfast by the ocean, realizing that 2 days of school that week was enough,. Tide pools and rocks were calling…. )
That requires a fundamental restructuring. Not of monogamy itself, but of how we organize care of women and babies, how we fund it and who carries it out.
Women are the original protectors, and yet in our current culture they are not protected as such, which is quite the oxymoron seeing as everyone is either a woman or came from one.
AND a community centered model does not mean everyone is freely having sex with everyone. It means everyone shares responsibility. The food, the shelter, the childcare, the emotional labor and the financial burden. This is where the weight is distributed and the stress is shared instead of one or two people carrying the load of 36.
When a mother is supported this way, her cortisol drops, her nervous system is settled and she can actually be present with her children. She can nurse longer, think and breathe without wondering how she is going to pay rent. And in this environment her sons born with the neurological deck already stacked against them, get a much better chance.
We have built a system that takes the most neurologically vulnerable members of our species and places them into the care of isolated, unsupported, chronically stressed women, and then wonder why they are not thriving.
The crisis in boys is not a crisis of masculinity.
It is a crisis of care inside of a structure so fundamentally broken that it is damaging the brains of our children before they are even born.
Romanticized love monogamy gave us the idea that two people, or one, could handle what requires a village. It let us call isolation “intimacy” and wrapped it up in the hallmark tissue paper of love.
There is nothing wrong with exclusivity when it comes to sexual connections, but we have to stop romanticizing how this means requiring the marriage to do everything for those involved. it is just f*cking dangerous.
Our boys are not failing.
We are failing them.
And it starts with how we treat the women raising them. Everything…everything begins with the mother……… there is just no way around it for gods sake.
This is yet another one of our societies wake up calls…. how ever it lands with you….
M…
sitting here writing with tear smudged cheeks and a rage in her belly.
xx