Men, Art, and the Social Forest

Watch the essay that sparked this post: Men, Art, and the Social Forest (YouTube)

I’ve been sitting with a video that names something I’ve felt for years: a sickness in our social forest. Many men feel like isolated trees. They’ve been told their roots—their voice and heritage—are toxic, so they stop reaching out. When roots don’t touch, the forest weakens.

The proposed remedy is beautifully simple: make art. Send out new hyphae—vulnerability, making, sharing—so the network can move emotional nutrients again. As someone who has spent 30 years on the experimental edge (mostly music and photography), this framing lands hard. Let me add three observations from the frontier.

1) The Pioneer Problem (Why the edge feels male)

Out on the edges—noise, experimental forms, new tools—the pioneers are mostly men. Not all, but overwhelmingly. They’re not silent. They’re calling into the fog. The real problem is that the network doesn’t reach that far. Hyphae stretch out and find nothing to braid with.

What this means:
If the centre tells frontier-makers to “step back” while the frontier itself has no support structures, we double the isolation. Instead of fewer male voices, we get fewer connected voices, and the forest loses resilience.

What helps:

Invite pioneers back into the network without sanding off their weirdness.
Pair frontier work with small, human-scale showings (listening clubs, pop-up salons, open studio nights) where roots can actually touch.

2) Creativity Has Shape-Shifted (New mycelia, different soil)

A lot of the strongest makers I know aren’t in “the arts” now. They’re building systems, ventures, and tools. They’re writing code, founding small studios, designing experimental learning spaces, prototyping instruments, training models, hacking workflows. Same creative drive, new mediums. New mycelia, different soil.

What this means:
If we only look for “artists” in old galleries and old categories, we’ll miss a whole ecosystem of makers who are quietly feeding the forest in other ways.

What helps:

Treat product, code, and service design as creative acts, not second-class art.
Cross-pollinate: a night where a coder demos a tool, a poet reads, and a guitarist plays through a broken tape loop—one room, shared roots.

3) Creation as Sanity (Not a permission problem)

For real creators, making is not optional. It’s a non-negotiable condition of sanity. This is where I get cautious with the idea of “stepping back to make space.” Sometimes it’s kind. Sometimes it’s a polite alibi to dodge the graft—drafts, drills, dead ends, and the long, lonely bit between ideas.

What this means:
Telling any group to be quiet rarely grows a healthier forest. Connection does. Mentorship does. Shared stages do. When the network is rich, voices modulate naturally; you don’t need a megaphone or a muzzle.

What helps:

Replace “step back” with “reach in.” Pair people, rotate slots, share process, publish together.
Make “unfinished” normal. Half-songs, rough mixes, sketchbooks, version-ones—hyphae like to meet early.

Practical ways to re-weave the network (a small kit)

Micro-rituals (solo):

10-minute “one take” a day: one loop, one paragraph, one frame. Ship it to a tiny circle.
“Roots log”: one page on who fed your work today (a book, a friend, a walk). Name them.

Community (small):

Hyphae Club: 60 minutes, weekly. Three people. 15 minutes each to share a messy thing, 5 minutes of kind, concrete feedback. Done.
Trade windows: pair disciplines (bass + builder, poet + coder). Swap a constraint; make something in 48 hours.

Stages (public):

Listening Room rules: low lights, no phones, short sets, talk between pieces about process, not promotion.
Stacked bills: anchor with one known act, add two frontier makers, and one first-timer. Roots touch up and down the canopy.

A note on inclusion

This forest metaphor isn’t a call to recentre men; it’s a call to reconnect everyone. Women, trans, and non-conforming creators have carried the cost of bad norms for a long time. A healthy network needs all species active and seen. The point is not to swap one dominance for another. The point is to build a thick mesh where more voices can live, grow, and feed one another.

Closing

If you feel like an isolated tree, start by sending out one small hypha today: a rough demo, a paragraph, a photo, a tiny tool. Share it with two people who will handle it with care. Then do it again next week. Roots don’t touch by accident; they touch because someone reaches.

The enemy isn’t permission. It’s disconnection. Re-weave the web, let roots meet, and the forest heals.

Watch the original essay that sparked this: Men, Art, and the Social Forest (YouTube)

Resonant AI Notes: A concise record of how we produced the comment and blog post “Men, Art, and the Social Forest.”

Manolo Contribution: Defined the social-forest/mycology framing, provided frontier insights (pioneers, creativity shift, creation-as-sanity), set the plain voice, and delivered final edits.
AI Contribution: Drafted structure and prose, integrated the mycology metaphor throughout, added practical re-weaving tactics, generated tags, and logged the session.
AI-Human Iteration: AI produced successive drafts; Manolo corrected facts (30 years), simplified tone, and separated the three arguments; AI revised to align with his voice and publish-ready structure.
Visuals: Visuals created by Manolo and ChatGPT 5.