For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

by Liz Plank

we’re more comfortable with the image of a boy playing with a toy gun rather than a boy playing with a toy doll, because we’re more comfortable seeing a boy hold something that kills rather than something that cries.

Men feel compelled to hide depression from their partners or their own families because it clashes with expectations of ideal masculinity of self-reliance and strength.

If we viewed their violent outbursts as a weakness, rather than a strength, perhaps we’d properly pathologize rather than normalize the astronomical amount of male violence across the world.

rates of men’s violence against women are a better predictor of peace in a country than the level of sophistication of the country’s democratic development.

While sex is determined by our bodies, gender is a social construction. Just like we were assigned a name, we were also assigned a gender at birth and socialized according to what our culture has predetermined is acceptable and appropriate for that gender.

if you’re just trying to impress her, then you’re more into “look at me” rather than “I see you”).

masculinity needs to be constantly proved, while womanhood is more static, or fixed.

Testosterone does make men more likely to compete and seek status, but it’s the way they learn to do that which makes them violent.

Because we believe these are innate differences, children learn that they are expected to exhibit certain traits and then go on to exhibit them.

boys are not less emotional or empathetic than girls; they simply show less ability and comfort expressing those emotions because they are encouraged not to.

she suppresses her own needs because she’s taught that the needs of others are more important—he suppresses his needs because he’s taught he doesn’t have any.

So much of men’s sexuality is organized around his relationship with … other men. Sex is often homosocial competition. Women are, in this model, the currency of the male conversation.

for every one woman who Googled something about penis size, 170 men did.

“Toxic masculinity keeps people from talking, keeps people from reflecting on their own sexuality and emotional needs. Toxic masculinity is the utmost devolved form of the male psyche and it doesn’t want to nurture or empower those around them. It is egoic, and it takes and it gives nothing back.”

shame creates lies about how men should think and act, and when men don’t reach these impossible expectations they feel additional humiliation.

This idea that masculinity mysteriously strips away the basic human need for vulnerability, closeness, intimacy and connection is not only untrue; it also leads to an internalization of shame when men have those needs and an inability to properly manage them.

shame convinces us that we need to hide certain parts of ourselves to preserve connection and avoid rejection.

“Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives: secrecy, silence and judgment.”

Painful shame feelings lead to one of two coping strategies. Men may either isolate (i.e., social withdrawal or avoidance) or act out in masculine ways that can include compulsive work, substance abuse or aggression.

John didn’t express anger that women were able to open doors; he expressed anger that he couldn’t do it for them. It wasn’t about women not being allowed to be strong; it was about him not being able to show them that he was.

If you’re opening the door to be nice because a woman is carrying a bunch of bags (and because women still get burdened with domestic labor that largely goes unpaid), then you get ten points. If you’re opening the door for her because she’s the weaker gender, rethink that.

When he dated queer men (more on this later) he found that building and developing intimacy was harder with men than women. However, the women he dated felt threatened by his sexual orientation being open to men as well.

Many men told me about staying away from meeting women in public because they knew other men had made that that kind of environment harder for them because women were less likely to give them the benefit of the doubt.

If a man shows any resistance to traditional notions of masculinity, especially in his intimate relationships with women, it’s used as proof that he isn’t actually attracted to them. It can be used as evidence that he is somehow a fraud. “Everything is gay; if you dance you’re gay; if you sit a certain way you too are gay; if you pronounce your words correctly, congrats, gay,” Diosan Borrego said. “Especially Latinos.”

Queer relationships tend to be more fluid because each person is free to be who they are or want to be in the relationship based on their preference rather than predetermined roles defined by society. In a way, they are a social experiment for what relationships could look like where gender is not the most immediate organizing factor, as it often is. When you imagine what it would be like if we assigned roles in relationships based on arbitrary characteristics like hair color or earlobe shape, you see how ridiculous it is that we do it with gender.

We might not all have the luxury of being born gay, but all of us have the power to use them as inspiration. By letting go of preordained gender roles, responsibilities and power dynamics, men and women could dramatically improve their relationships.

But of course saying “just let go of toxic masculinity” to a man is like saying “just relax” to a person having a panic attack. Men will only break free from the masculinity trap when they have a safe alternative, but for the time being they’re growing up receiving the message that they are being surveilled and that any deviation from the ideals created by rigid masculinity will be grounds for embarrassment and rejection from men as well as women. The change is first and foremost individual, but it also has to be collective. No one is free from gender norms, and the messages that men receive about their gender is setting them up to fail, particularly in their intimate relationships.

Emotional vulnerability is not a sign of being weak; it’s one of the essential and key strengths of any healthy relationship. But if men are getting the message that showing emotion is bad, so-called feminine or weak and that it means they’ll be less valuable in the dating world and they’ll publicly be shamed for being “soft,” the results can be catastrophic for their intimate relationships. The paradox is that demanding that men be tough actually makes them weaker emotionally. Expecting men to be emotionally intelligent in their relationships is like expecting people to know how to do a butterfly backstroke when they’ve been instructed to never get wet. If you get the message that being in touch with your emotions means being weak, you’ll repress any feelings that come up, often unconsciously, which...

You will never meet a man who is homophobic and also not sexist. If you hate women, you’re bound to hate anything that acts like one.”

While women tend to build activities around their friends, men approach friendship in a more transactional way, building friendships around activities. Whether it’s watching sports, playing sports or socializing as part of a club, men are focused on the doing more than the being, especially when compared to the way women do friendship. Men are even more likely to focus friendship around joint activities and are more likely to speak about those activities when they are interacting with each other. While women prioritize smaller groups or one-on-one interactions with their friends, men tend to engage in larger all-male groups, which obviously makes intimate bonding less likely.

most of their friends are guys but that their closest relationships were with women.

All this time we’ve focused on the changing role of women inside the workplace and inside the home, not realizing that this would also shift men’s. We updated what it means to be a woman, but we didn’t update what it meant to be a man. We’ve had articles, books, entire conferences, dedicated to helping women navigate these new shifting roles while expecting men to figure it out all on their own.

Providing money is important. Providing care is important. It had always been confusing to me that only one counts as providing.

In fact, men with children are viewed most positively by employers, whereas women with children are seen most negatively, despite no evidence that they are less productive. Because the standard is so low for fatherhood, being a dad is seen as noble and a sign of a good character and work ethic. Mothers, although doing the same or more work inside the home, are not viewed so positively.

Given this arbitrary rule we’ve made up that boys and girls play with different things and that if boys play with anything that develops empathy and care for themselves or for a child it can ruin their development or go against their biology, when children choose outside of the bounds of our rigid cultural norms they often get told there is something wrong with them.

Although there are many different kinds of campaigns to encourage girls to take on male-dominated jobs like those in science and engineering, the same gender-expectations expansion hadn’t occurred for boys.

Buddhism teaches us about conscious eating, conscious walking, and I think men need a practice of conscious flirting, especially in a work setting.

being a man doesn’t make you take more risks; being a man who thinks men take more risks is what’s associated with higher risk-taking.

“adultification“of girls of color, where they are perceived to be older, more independent and less deserving of as much protection.

The paradox is that across the board, men are less likely to seek therapy, but they benefit just as much as women from therapy, and some research shows they may even benefit more.

When he asks male participants to describe a “good man,” they would answer “integrity, honor, being responsible, being a good provider, protector, doing the right thing, putting others first, sacrifice, caring, standing up for the little guy.” It’s beautiful, right? But something striking would happen when he would ask them to describe a “real man.” This is when the men would start talking over each other and even shouting: “never cry, be strong, don’t show your feelings, play through pain, suck it up, win at all costs, be aggressive, get rich, get laid.” In other words, the pressures the men would face to prove they’re a “real man” would conflict with their capacity to be a good man. So masculinity wasn’t toxic, it was the monster masquerading as masculinity that was. In other words, masculinity is not the problem, it’s the solution.

freeing ourselves of gender rules doesn’t mean we have to remove it entirely from our lives, but rather that we take and leave the parts that make sense, and that we all are afforded the personal freedom to make those decisions personally and privately.

Intentional masculinity is the cure for toxic masculinity. It’s by attending to masculinity that we can heal it. Mindful masculinity is how we can cleanse it from all the lies it’s been associated with. It encourages men to look inward to remain connected to all those things that make them a good man instead of the unhelpful trash they’ve inadvertently absorbed and are inadvertently carrying around about what it means to be a “real man.”