PEOPLE, IT’S TIME TO SET MEN FREE!

I started my career back in the 90s writing about the way social change was tearing women apart. Twenty years later, I think women have made huge strides toward an altogether new way of viewing themselves and moving through the world. Our wonderful tribe of coaches is made up almost entirely of women who have found ways to be true to themselves no matter what society tells them.

Now, it’s time for our boys.

Even when I was researching the crisis of role stress for women, I could see what was coming for men: while women were ripped to pieces by conflicting social demands, men were being compressed into tinier and tinier role definitions that I call The Man Cage.

Here’s the best way I can describe it: when I tell a woman she needs to quit her horrible job, she must deal with her own fears and uncertainties. When I tell a man that he has to quit his horrible job, he has to go home and have a fight with his wife. We women may be fragmented, but we are relatively free. We can wear a skirt or a pair of pants without raising anyone’s eyebrows. Men must show up in a very limited array of colors and patterns—primarily the bleak colored suit with the colorful noose around the neck—or their masculinity will be called into question. In many minds, a man without a job is not a real man.

So, men, whose minds and bodies were made to run and climb and build and sweat and love, compete for soul-destroying occupations where they must sit, complete with noosed neck, in a fluorescently-lighted box taking orders to do things so boring that they make computers want to kill themselves.

Now here’s the kicker: the jobs for which men give up their happiness, usually in service of their families, are disappearing. It’s not a political issue, it’s a technological one. Robots and silicon chips can do the vast majority of things that once gave humans jobs.

So, that’s the situation. Men are being socialized to relinquish their joy for horrible pastimes that are no longer even available. So many of my beautiful male friends feel trapped, desperate, afraid, and separated from everything that gives them true happiness.

Guys, listen up: we women who love you want you to be happy. There is a new way rising in the world; a way to raise a family without extinguishing your inner light, a way to make your heart’s desires attract abundance. A way for it all to make sense. Joy to the Boy is my current obsession. It’s the title of the book I’m writing and the foundation of the workshop you’ll see offered in this newsletter. Start now. Set yourself free. You can do it. All good women are on your side.