Three nights ago, someone invited me to attend a close door workshop among (mostly single) men to talk about ourselves. [See main picture with writer in yellow. Courtesy of @banimiyad on Instagram]
Yes, you read that right. To talk about ourselves.
Admittedly I remember asking why would I accept an invitation to give up one night in the middle of the week to meet, greet and converse with other men? Aren’t I already steeped in multiple conversations with many members of my own stay home dad community? Do I really need to meet more men than I already am? (Oops, that came out “weird”!)
But I was curious.
As someone who regularly facilitates male conversations among stay home dads, I’m already fairly familiar with topics to do with fatherhood, parenting and marriage.
But what are those in men groups not comprised of husbands and dads talking about? That was something I was definitely less familiar with.
And so, with that question in my head, I took up the invite and showed up three nights ago to find out.
The Men In sgMAN
The organiser of this close door workshop was someone I knew from a couple of years ago when I attended a train the trainers workshop on how to conduct Playback Theatre lessons for youths.
It was a wonderful and liberating experience that led me to subsequently run workshops over the next two years for teens on how they could dramatise their personal narratives to elevate their communication skills.
It even inspired me last year to pen this commentary, published in my country’s largest English newspaper. The piece was all about how to promote the power of drama to build lifelong confidence and communication prowess for our future generations.
All thanks to the trainers I learned from back in 2024. One of whom was this mid week evening event’s organiser Ghaz.
Since 2020, Ghaz has been kept up at night by questions surrounding masculinity and the male identity. Having witnessed gender conflicts in his family and friendship circles, he decided to launch a network he calls the sgMAN community. It was an attempt on his part to unpack the challenges surrounding what it means to be a man in modern times.
According to its description on threads, sgMAN (which stands for Singapore Male Allyship Network) aims to hold spaces for the learning, discovering and practising of healthy liberating masculinities, and allyship.
In its Instagram account, this group’s mandate is even simpler and more streamlined: Practising compassionate, healthy masculinities, together.
One of the ways Ghaz works to make this mandate a reality is to host what he calls a monthly Community of Learning. That’s when guys gather to better understand themselves and the lives they are living.
Which was what took place three nights ago.
My Personal Wish List Of What Makes Me A Man
In his invite this week, Ghaz mentioned that this was an opportunity for men to gather together in a relaxed and informal setting (actually it was a kind of studio office space so not exactly informal) to pause, take stock of ourselves, question the narratives we inherited, define our own masculinity, check our blindspots, and exchange stories about our journeys as men.
It was to be an evening full of learning, with hopefully lots of wisdom shared. Tantamount to a study group of sorts, where men learn together to unpack and figure out how to live life as guys in our busy cosmopolitan city.
After attending the event, I certainly picked up on what kept single men up at nights (and to a lesser extent, married dads — there were four out of the 10 who showed up that night; including me and my good pal Suraj).
But first, let’s talk about what I picked up for myself.
In one of the workshop exercises, Ghaz got all of us to draw a sketch of ourselves on a piece of A5-size paper. Then he asked us to write down in the white spaces OUTSIDE our sketch what words came to mind when we think of what were terms and descriptors that define men and masculinity.
He then asked which of these we wish to identify ourselves with and to ‘pull these words’ into the white spaces found INSIDE the sketch. In other words, of all that we listed, which do we desire and most wish to see ourselves as embodying.
I found the exercise fascinating, and it wasn’t long before my paper filled up with words like tough, career, successful, leader, man-up, sports, STEM…let’s just say it was a long list!
As I started to pull words inside my sketch, I could see that what I wanted for myself as a man were more inner qualities like thoughtfulness, fearlessness, creativity and being an illuminator (one that affirms others). As opposed to what oftentimes are outer qualities society expects of us, as listed in the preceding paragraph.
Surprise. Surprise!
(Maybe I’ll expound on this discovery some more in future posts)
Anyway, let’s come back to what I wanted to find out at the event.
What Keeps (Single) Men Up At Nights?
As I listened to the younger men in the room — these days, I am almost always (sigh) the oldest in any given space — I came to the following conclusions:
- These men were willing to open up and speak vulnerably about their challenges navigating the complexities of being men in today’s world.
- They understood that the “dance of life, identity, purpose and relationships” was a constant oscillation between the rational and the emotional. Both are “tanks” to be re-filled constantly as life sucks and drains them dry. With self-awareness and regular re-fill, we can better function to the best of our abilities.
- Many of them had fluid understandings of masculinity and male identity. They see these as social constructs imposed by tradition and set ways, and that they need not follow these constructs but instead carve out their own meaning and gender identity.
While I applaud the first two points, I have some reservations on the last one. To me, while it is true that many expressions of gender in society are socially-formed (dressing, greeting behaviours, etc), to dismiss all of them might be a bad case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
All of us today have arrived at this moment in human history thanks to much trial and error by our forebears. So let’s not discard all their hand-me-down wisdom, simply because we think them archaic or out of touch with current individual needs.
Hmmm…maybe I should ponder these learning points some more in future posts.
For now, I’m just grateful for the invite and the insights I got in that male space that evening. If not for Ghaz, I would not have had the opportunity to listen to men with such vastly different experiences from my own.
Let’s hope more similar opportunities are on my horizon.
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