Duncan Alldridge explores men’s inherent need for play as part of healthy masculinity.
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We men need to play. We need permission to be the lost boy, to rediscover that essence of boyhood that we either missed out on, had tarnished, or never discovered. Games have been the foundation of civilisations for centuries. Prehistoric figurines of male wrestlers show up in cave carvings dating back thousands of years in Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Sumerian civilisations. Physical play has long been part of our lineage.
Sport can be difficult for many of us in school, and unless we have a grounding in safe physical contact when young, participating in sport can be a minefield for many, turning quickly into something ugly or unhealthy. But we lost boys long for physical play.
Within creative play lies a blueprint for mature adulthood and especially for a healthy masculinity. It nurtures the hunter-gatherer instinct, prepares us to take care of a mate and develops crucial self-awareness. 
My father played with me often; I wrestled, fought and gently tumbled, delighted in his presence. This strong and gentle modelling showed me acceptable boundaries of behaviour. Here, in safety, I learned to test my strength and I learned when to stop. This provided a firm grounding in being physically relational with another.
I see this love of being with another male mirrored when with the young boys in my life. My good friend’s son, Adam, who is just two, adores the physicality of bouncing around on a mattress with me. Of course, his daughter does too, but what we experience is a culture in which men and boys are often physically dis-encouraged from engaging in healthy masculine activity, or the activity has become so polarised, demonised even, that it’s challenging to find it and fully participate in it without feeling out of place or an outsider. There needs to be more ways just ‘succeeding at sport’ that bring our young men forward into their bodies.
How do boys learn to live with our testosterone? How are the parameters set for us men not to ‘lose it’ when we get angry? With many men being physically stronger than their partners, the conditioning of ‘when to stop’ needs to be firmly established. 
We need to test our strength and we want it to be fair and safe. Women need this too.
I have been running workshops and making performance projects using theatre and film, and recently led a camp, Changing Man, for men. One of the things I notice, almost without exception, is that when given a safe opportunity men love the opportunity to play physically. It is in this tactile cooking-pot that masculine energies are channelled and that safety and unity is established among a group. Learning to talk openly helps too, though may simply support an existing comfort zone of only really living upwards from the neck.
We men need to be in our bodies.
I need to feel safe with him. I need to trust his body and that he can manage his strength. Then I’m free to enjoy beating him.
Play unlocks laughter. It is fun. And the male sense of humour, which for me is stuffed into a media and entertainment straight-jacket of clever, heady witticisms much of the time, is allowed time and space through play. Men are funny together. We bond over freely expressed humour. It helps us to establish common ground and levels out the reptilian brain’s need to establish pecking order. It helps us to accept leadership. I’ve heard many women say that they love a man’s sense of humour: a man whose laughter is fully embodied and contentment within his own skin is evident.
These conditions of safety, where there are structures allowing us to flourish and nourish each other, are how we create an environment where we celebrate and enjoy being males together. Here is where we challenge taboos of men gathering as something homo-erotic, something strangely artistic or of some esoteric practice. One of the strong things to come out of the Changing Man experience was that the camp provided conditions for any man to meet a man.
Talking about his theatre production Songs of Riots recently at a masculinity conference, Christopher Sivertsen explained how wrestling was the language he introduced at the first rehearsal to unite the company. Only a few years ago I was at a camp when a good friend introduced the idea to the mixed community on site—and it was great fun! We men long to come back to a safe playground, a playground where the challenge is to meet, play, compete with and take care of our playmate. As Steve Biddulph iterates, if you want to get along with boys, learn to wrestle.
Originally published on Deep Diving Men.
Top photo—Wikimedia Commons
Middle photo—Wikimedia Commons
Bottom photo courtesy of author
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