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Were treated to so many images in the entertainment media of comic dads and slacker losers that still manage to get the girl. What yardsticks are available to measure what it means to be a good man?
-Patt Morrison and Tom Matlack talk with callers on Southern California Public Radio.
Good Men Project cofounder Tom Matlack recently was a guest on Air America’s The Ron Reagan Show, with guest host David Bender. Following is an edited portion of that show’s transcript:
Tom Matlack: There’s this tendency on the part of men, particularly men who are successful, to have a complete separation between their public and private lives. That’s what happened to me. I was enormously successful at a very young age–financially and in every other way in terms of my public life. But privately I was a complete failure. When we look at Eliot Spitzer or David Letterman or Bernie Madoff, we see these men who are enormously successful on the public platform, but they have failed in their personal lives.
David Bender: And do women not have these same issues? Do women not bifurcate between their public and private selves?
TM: I don’t know. I can’t think of many. But I can name you ten very famous guys who have had this issue.
DB: Sure.
TM: We have trouble, I think, as men integrating and telling the truth from the inside out and having integrity all the way through.
DB: It is important for all people to exhibit those qualities, but there are things that are more difficult for men particularly.
TM: I think being a father is different from being a mother. Being a husband is different from being a wife. Being a male worker is different than being a female worker I’m not saying that one’s better or worse. I’m just saying that they’re different.
DB: And it comes back again to what we started off talking about, which is how the role of being a provider, which has traditionally been the role of the man in the American family, has now changed. That’s gone. It is now a two-income household, and an equal number of women and men are supporting their households. That’s the first time in history that’s happened. What’s that going to do to what it takes to be a man?
Let’s go back to the phones. David in Keane, New Hampshire. David, welcome to The Ron Reagan Show.
Caller: I think of the image of the cowboy, and I think of the image of the knight in shining armor, and a man is supposed to be big and strong. But to me, a man is someone who is true to himself. Harvey Milk is someone I would look to. But Joe Lieberman, the way he’s acting now, is spinelessness. I don’t like that.
DB: What I just heard there, Tom, was courage. Harvey Milk, a very brave man who died, famously, for having not backed down, for having been true to himself. Joe Lieberman is being described as someone who has convictions according to what’s going to benefit him in the moment. Is courage a part of being a man?
TM: Absolutely. I go back to that moment of truth, that crucible where you have to have the courage to stand up and, as the caller said, be true to yourself. It’s realizing when everything in your life is going one direction and that that’s just not going to work for whatever reason, and having the courage to change direction.
