Of all the rolling, ranting essays I've written, this one, especially when done as a workshop,
always, always, always, is a grenade in the middle of the room. Let's just dive in and see what's what though.
You've met a guy you find sexy, he's okay enough in however you measure okay (my hope is that you're taking a little time to listen for emotional, spiritual, physical, social and financial health) but as you're listening to him. (And just to interject here, you should be listening more heads have been cracked, bank accounts drained, STD tests flunked and laptops pawned because men didn't listen to what the other man said.) In the listening you like him but then he can't stop talking about, talking to her on his cell phone, cancelling dates, rearranging plans, selling his socks, complaining about, hinting that she abused him or worse yet, hinting that she would abuse you and at first you think the passion or the venom or the venomous passion is about some female ex of his. But then you realize, oh, no, he's going through all of this over another woman, yes, but it's not an ex....well, not a traditional ex.
That's right, now we're just going to travel into MSM Insanity # 2: His Momma.
Now you have to listen to what LEVEL this is occurring at:
1. He tells you he's really close with his family.<<<
2. He tells you he's really close with his mother.
<<<Yellow Alert
which means you need to put the sensors on high reception. You're listening now for degree of closeness.
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3. He tells you she's his best friend.
<<<
Red Alert
---The Borg have arrived.
4. He tells you they live together. "Molly. You in danger, girl."
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Run!
Run like hell.
Change your name,
dye your hair,
get lost....
and maybe you'll be safe from them.
"B-b-but"----trembling lower lip---"a man close to his momma is a Good Man, right?" you query.
"Look at him, Kyle!!!" you shriek. "Look at him!"
Depends.
Take out your mental measuring tape because it's all about figuring out how close they are.
If he has siblings---that's a good thing, she might not lean on him so hard.
If he's out about his sexuality to her---that's a mixed bag.
Now you have to run her through your Mental Health Sensor sweep.
Is she married?
Not married.
This has problem potentially all over it.
Does she have a job? If she's not dependent on him then it also broadcasts his generosity and the level of fulfillment in her life.
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Now if your questions keep coming back that they do the equivalent of Saturday morning food shopping together, he's her church buddy, her spades partner, they have date night, they hang out at clubs together (there's a Mommy/Son Duo at a club in Manhattan---he often wonders why he can't get a man for longer than ten seconds. No, really, he wonders this as he and Mommy tip strippers in the gay bar several nights a week.) and she's calling/texting him while you're together----it's a wrap, order a drink, knock it back and soak up details for your relaying this mess to your friends.
But why?
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Because of Nature. Nature builds us to be children with our parents, to go through a level of adolescence with them then socially/sexually experiment in adulthood then decide whether we're going to settle down and do the whole cycle over again this time as our parents or the adults. People might decide otherwise but it is the cycle of Nature. What normally happens in the cycle is that a heterosexual man's mother is replaced, supplanted by the Primary Woman as the primary woman in his life, his wife. He may still help care for and love his mother but his parents role as #1 in his life has been replaced. His friends are no longer #1. In fact, healthy relationships don't even place the children of the new couple as #1, unless both parties agree upon it (think when a child says something to the mother and the father points out there's a point where you, his own child, are insulting his wife, not simply the woman who is your mother).
This is all natural.
But what if he's already set her up as the competition, she's Wifey, at best you'll get to be the Other One. But what happens to the homosexual man who a female will not arrive to supplant/replace his mother (or father---great Russell Crowe film reversing this) with?
1.
A single woman, with her single son who will never have to compete and naturally lose to a woman (because a spouse can perform at least two other physical acts no one should be doing with their mom) has a built in male companion. And if she's single, been a single parent---a built in emotional incest partner. Are they friends, are they parent and child, or are they playing out a sexless couple dynamic? See why you have to listen closely?
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2.
Emotional incest is when Mommy is the dearest thing in his life. The center of his universe. The beat in his drum. The reason why you have to take your shoes off to sneak into his room at 2am. Or even more insanely, she can't know about you. Or even more insanely, she (or catshit crazy HE) wants you to meet each other immediately.
If a man wants you to meet his mother in less than a month---call your mother to ward off his. Use the Mother v. Mother lightsaber neutralization rule. But run. Keep running.
File this under: Too Soon.
3.
You might be all that and fantastic too but you don't want a man, you, his burgeoning engorged penis and his mother all in the same energy. You don't want him or her planning your deep dish involvement or exit in their psychodrama. You want time to scope him out, listening closely. Sometimes a man is using his mother as a foil to not have to grow to the next stage of the Mating Game. He's purposefully trying to come off as the Boy Scout good son so he never has to make a healthy inter-dependent love connection with another grown adult who will call him out on all the silly crap she's let him think was cute, adorably annoying, useful and not his responsibility.
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4.
The hard truth is you can't fix him. He needs to have her in her place in his life and men in another and a healthy space in between as he seeks partnership on an adult level. And you need to accept that unless there's been dysfunctional friction that he had to make boundaries for his own mental/emotional health around her that you want to listen to that relationship dynamic. But you're listening for a parent in her, not a partner. You're listening for a man who's learned great maturing lessons from his parents that he has packed into a mental bag and moved out to use as tools to build a new relationship. You're listening for love skills that he'll be applying with you of generosity, gentleness, patience, caring and devotion that she's taught him.
5.
If she truly accepts him and his sexuality, she's been preparing him for you. She's smart enough to know that she could double her caring child pool if she lets her boy become a man. She will back off, butt out, respect you and your rules and most importantly your relationship. Because she'll want your relationship to succeed because she'll want her son to be happy,
beyond her capacity to provide.
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However, as 21st century medicine progresses, we can keep everything from an apple to human being alive for a hundred years. You will probably meet someone who either directly then or eventually will have to have some responsibility for his elder parents' care. This isn't the same as the Mommy Man, this is healthy and responsible and it might make sense that they share a household---BUT you want to ask and hear about aides, nurses, his parents life and friendships away from that man. Then you'll have to decide whether to accept or not this component of the relationship, the same as you would if he had children from another relationship. You might not immediately become Primary Relationship #1 (in fact this takes at least a year for you to work your way up the ranks---you don't want to be promoted too soon or for it to take too long---a year is a good timeframe to see if you're moving up).
Lastly, what if you're the Mommy Man? What if you've been in the nest too long?
Pssst, Mommy can take care of herself no matter her protestations and bewilderment and occasional trip and slip on the rug to the contrary. Your mother is not to come first after you reach adulthood. Your past relationships have tanked because she was helping metaphorically speaking to put the condom on you while you and that special someone were getting intimate. In workshops I tell men to remember this---
no man wants to fuck a man who's fucking his mommy. If you came from a single parent household and a level of poverty you might mistakenly adhere to a matriarchal framework that might not work for you or your potential partners. It's not about you and mommy rocking out to the Golden Girls, it's about you having a full, healthy, normalized sexuality in spite of the fact that you're same gender loving. Look at your siblings---the ones who have left you as your moms best gal pal as they've moved out, on and married and even divorced once or twice, had kids, taken lovers---hint, hint---they're exampling adult maturity.
Unfortunately one's mother may be the one more sympathetic to her child's sexuality but she may also unknowingly or even more frighteningly, knowingly, take advantage of the fact that our society
is slowly (but surely) making a way for marriage and biological and adopted children for same sex couples. It can be comforting to have a dedicated adult that you have the emotional upper hand over that will put up with you where another non-related adult would walk away. But in the end, barring some odd pact, he will eventually be lonely and even more so, alone completely stunted in the skill set of how to date and mate.
And we've all seen and known him, Mommy's Man then Mommy died and now he's this bumbling, emotionally retarded, inept, introverted
manchild who's a middle aged shell that's lost 20, 30, 40 years to being a parent's child and not a man's (or several men's) husband. But creepily Mommy's life sized portrait hangs right over his bed, above the condoms and porn so that as you wander into his boudoir you can recognize Mommy might have left this plane of existence but Norman Bates style she's still in a rocking chair somewhere........
Thank you,
Kyle Phoenix
kylephoenixshow@aol.com
http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us on Face Book or Follow Us on Twitter! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on
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Quite a few homosexuals due to lack of understanding of themselves or fear of disrupting their family/life, have been in heterosexual relationships and marriages (and may have children.) It happens. Being in a society that demands conformity down to sexual identity can mean that people take time, even a lifetime to discover and develop their own identity. If you're homosexual, and feel this aligns with your sexuality, your identity and your physicality---where does that identity come from? Within. Then if your sexual identity comes from within and you've done some heterosexual acts, how can you judge/project onto the bisexual or a heterosexual who is simply having homosexual sex? Sex is not an infection nor a barometer of identity. Sex is an act. Sex is not one's identity.
That leaves 1 guy, sometimes 2, and I say those two out of the 20, are the actual, full 6 homosexuals. The rest of you are varying degrees of homosexuals/bisexuals/omnisexuals.
Then the bigger challenge comes about: if you don't want others defining your sexuality incorrectly or pejoratively as a homosexual, how can you turn to someone doing heterosexual acts or homosexual acts and pejoratively judge/forcibly define their sexuality?
So now where does that leave someone? Honestly, learning how to navigate to get most of what you desire and understand that some other things are fantasy and some things you don't want will show up as well.
What isn't being considered in these hyper-masculine traits that are being sexualized to desire is how a man may've gotten that way. The pictures of the heavily tattooed man, who is an Alpha, in no way at all effeminate (the height of your insanity if you believe this exists) and aggressive and assertive sexually. There's a level of abdicating your free will in that but I'm not going to go there. Instead I'm going to look at the Lover /Fighter paradigm as a design from poverty. When a man is simply sexualized, to his body, his organs, this harkens in America not only back to slavery, but racism. Racism isn't simply a discrimination or stereotyping racialized cycle, it's also a predicating factor to poverty. Poverty, by being denied access to resources, financial, educational, social, then perpetuates the appearance that those kinds of people are poor, then folds back into racism. Poor people then are not able to educate, socially move and they happen to be standing there seemingly all brown, though that's the opposite of the truth in America, which recycles racism again.
Racism begets poverty and poverty begets racism (discrimination) but there's also a context of how do human beings occupy poverty, how do they act? Men in poverty are tough, they're fighters, they're misogynistic they make babies, they work hard, they sweat, they tattoo themselves. But then the question is what is manhood defined when one isn't poor? Simply put, if you're poor, a man for you might only harbor some of these traits without consideration for other traits. Of course, I'm painting broadly here but there's a limit to time and space here.
What can a man look like who isn't narrow stereotypes of Marlon Brando On The Waterfront? Is he educated, does he have good credit, does he take care of himself, is he on drugs or addicted to alcohol, is he caring to other human beings? What we're really getting at even as we circle back to sexual manhood is what constitutes manhood? What makes a man? What makes a Good Man?
You still want this fantasy concept though, you desire this balance, this man's man to take care of you. Why? Isn't that a female psychology? Or does this goes back to our estrogen measure of 80% of men as Betas and 15 to 20% men as testosterone heavier Alphas. The desire is then Betas for Alphas but the numbers don't work out. Why? Because Alphas seek to build the manhood picture of family, marriage, children, companies/businesses, accountability and personal responsibility. That's the testosterone impelling men to do and move forward, build, construct life and the world around them for their families and society.
2. He tells you he's really close with his mother..jpg)
If he has siblings---that's a good thing, she might not lean on him so hard..jpg)
Now if your questions keep coming back that they do the equivalent of Saturday morning food shopping together, he's her church buddy, her spades partner, they have date night, they hang out at clubs together (there's a Mommy/Son Duo at a club in Manhattan---he often wonders why he can't get a man for longer than ten seconds. No, really, he wonders this as he and Mommy tip strippers in the gay bar several nights a week.) and she's calling/texting him while you're together----it's a wrap, order a drink, knock it back and soak up details for your relaying this mess to your friends..jpg)
2. Emotional incest is when Mommy is the dearest thing in his life. The center of his universe. The beat in his drum. The reason why you have to take your shoes off to sneak into his room at 2am. Or even more insanely, she can't know about you. Or even more insanely, she (or catshit crazy HE) wants you to meet each other immediately..jpg)
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