My name is Cisco Cole. I am a father, a brother, a son, and a friend.
I grew up in a tough environment that promoted the strong and oppressed the weak. The concept of strong was founded on masculinity and how much of it you had, how much of it you exuded.
I am passionate about the issue of masculinity and specifically, Destructive Masculinity. Like many boys, I was bound by these very ideas of why it was important to be masculine. This meant I grew up in a world of unprecedented violence against not only other boys, but the rest of the world.
I grew up in rural Oregon and am a child of a Mexican immigrant father and a white mother. My father grew up in Los Angeles in the 60’s and 70’s. My mother, in the backwoods of southern Oregon. My father, having grown up on the streets of LA, learned that he had to be tough to survive. As early as I can remember, I was told that to be a man I had to be tough.
Tough was defined by how much punishment you could take and dish out.
We grew up with our fists, and a punch-first-ask-questions-never mentality.
This was what it meant to be a man: to be masculine, to be tough, and to have integrity.
It wasn’t until I stared having boys of my own that I noticed the impact we had on raising a new generation of boys that could potentially become men. Men that carry on the same destructive masculine tendencies. All of these things that I felt trapped by, oppressed with, and shackled to, I was putting on my own boys. How and when to fight, what it means to be tough, and what masculinity looks and feels like.
As a perceived white male raised in American culture, destructive masculinity directly impacted my life, my family, and my career. It was not until i lost everything from a destructive act that i had to take a personal inventory of how destructive i was to myself and those around me. The reality was that my kids would continue this cycle if i did not address it in myself.
As a Psychotherapist who works with both adolescent males and adults wrapped up in the incarceration system, as well as battling with mental health, and having teen boys of my own, I see the pressing need to address what it means to be a masculine person. I see the need to redefine what it means to be males in our current society, and how we can break the cycle and raise boys to be a positive force in today’s world.
The time is now to take a stand; to stop the old conversations and leave the outdated definitions behind and forge a new path that breaks down the nature of destructive masculinity. And, I believe, we can do this together!
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