In those few brief moments, Daemon’s cousins taught him that “man up” meant he must ignore both physical and emotional pain to be considered a man. His tears were bad and his pain inconsequential. Cultural and familial messages that reduce masculinity to a bland soup of physical strength and stoic emotional response limit the full range of human expression needed for boys to develop a healthy sense of radical self-love. We call these dangerous ideas “toxic masculinity.”8 Specifically, narratives that reinforce masculinity as synonymous with muscles can lead young men to “crash diets,
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