Men's Movement Artists and Artisans - David E. Reiser, MD.

In Search Of The Masculist Artist

September 30, 2002

by David E. Reiser, MD.

The Masculist Artist I am concerned about our failure, despite concerted and diverse efforts, to influence public opinion. Most people persist in their beliefs that men perpetrate the overwhelming majority of spousal abuse, child battering, stalking, and child abuse. In spite of many levelheaded and thoughtful articles demonstrating that the facts do not support these prejudices, the prejudices persist.

Often, we then go on to decry the clever manipulation of emotions in the media by shrewd feminists. Perhaps we should be more humble and try to learn from them. If a picture tells a thousand words, then a well-crafted TV spot that portrays men as goons is tantamount to dropping propaganda leaflets on a country.

Facts, logic, and reason appeal to the human conscious. In reality, our prejudices, fears, boogey-men, and atavistic emotions originate in our unconscious.

The unconscious is enormously powerful, and it is very real. Like it or not, it rules all of us far more than we wish to believe. What captain of his ship wants to be told that he’s actually paddling a dinghy? The unconscious speaks a language all its own, comprised of symbols, paradoxes, and in fragmented and often confusing imagery. There are distortions of time, and baffling juxtapositions of logical thinking that induce intense emotions, which in turn influence what we believe to be true. Sometimes it is; sometimes it isn’t.

The most venal (and sophisticated) example of how people master and exploit this language is found in advertising. But manipulation of the unconscious is also exploited by totalitarian regimes and unscrupulous adults who wish to exploit children. Parental Alienation Syndrome is a mysterious and rampant problem around the world. The term everyone uses to describe how a cunning adult can subvert a child’s entire reality, often within hours, is usually called brainwashing. I think this is an unfortunate term.

What we often fail to appreciate are the positive uses of a language that speaks to the unconscious. All art, for example, regardless of its chosen medium, communicates its greatest truths to the unconscious. Who among us has not been moved by the final scenes in Casablanca or Romeo and Juliet? Consider, for that matter, the profound effect of the World Trade Center disaster of Sept 11. We do not remember the casualty count. What remain emblazoned in our minds are symbols: the beleaguered firemen carrying limp human beings out of the rubble. The anguish in people’s eyes.

The morality of tapping into the human unconscious does not reside in its ubiquity and power, but in the morality of those who have learned to speak to it.

I believe that it is time to harness that power. Many people in this movement are artists. Among our ranks, we have poets, novelists, filmmakers, actors, and cinematographers, and many others. Yet, in the “real world” they are invisible.

The crippling impact of this became clear to me today when a friend and colleague was turned down for a modest grant to fund a video project. The official explanation given was replete with all the predictable bureaucratic gibberish one might imagine. Careful reading of his rejection letter, however, made matters crystal clear. Feminists overwhelmingly dominated this particular grant-funding entity, and those who controlled it had no intention whatsoever of giving him a dime to put a human face to male suffering.

TV spots cost money. Films and videos are expensive. Yet, it seems to me that the industries that depend on men for their profits should be approached to give something back. Whether we consider magazines such as Playboy and Esquire, or automobile manufacturers—we find corporations with very deep pockets that can and should help to fund these projects.

If the statements we make prove in the end to be hollow and corrupt, then shame on us. But I believe that the artists among us can deliver powerful, positive, and authentically uplifting messages, too.

I offer this idea hoping to encourager future thought, cross-pollination, and dialogue. We need to identify our corporate friends and develop mechanisms that will endow the artists among us who have so much to say.

David E. Reiser, MD.

David E. Reiser is a writer and physician. His books and articles in the 1980s addressed medicine's urgent need to make education and patient care more humane. Along with others, he quietly changed the way students are taught throughout the world. The New York Times described his book, Medicine as a Human Experience, as a textbook that revived "a long-lost skill" in physicians--"compassion."

In 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."