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

by Liz Plank

if we abandoned the old rules, if we let go of men’s obligation to open doors and pay the checks, perhaps we could have a more interesting conversation about coming up with other ways for men to be men and show respect to women.

degendering my generosity

If you’re only doing it for one gender, you’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons.

Instead of giving up our obsession with distinct gender roles, there’s a tendency to further entrench ourselves in them.

More money is only a problem for men in a society where their identity has only been defined by what they do rather than who they are.

It’s about letting personal preferences, not collective ones, guide women and men’s relationships with each other.

Contrary to popular belief, every time a woman earns her basic rights and freedoms, a man does not lose his manhood.

In a way, they are a social experiment for what relationships could look like where gender is not the most immediate organizing factor,

It’s worth thinking about what deprogramming ourselves could mean for heterosexual 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.

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.

lack of interrogation around masculinity as a form of self-inflicted avoidance.

straight men are uncomfortable with gay men because they believe gay men are performing acts that only women should.

this mandatory empty space that men are expected to hold between each other is not only present in washrooms; it’s also visible in men’s friendships.

the health of one’s relationships is a better predictor of longevity than one’s cholesterol levels.

too many men remain comfortably ignorant about the prevalence of men’s violence against women.

But although the gender revolution has been so far remarkable, it has been grossly incomplete: while women have been taken seriously as workers, men have yet to really be taken seriously as caretakers.

All this time we were so focused on getting people comfortable with the idea that women work, but that revolution was never followed by a movement saying it’s okay for men not to.

We updated what it means to be a woman, but we didn’t update what it meant to be a man.

Masculinity norms have a hand in both making it hard for men to be fathers and also making it hard for men to have fathers.

Masculinity is a powerful vehicle that motivates behavior for men, too, and if it’s redefined in a positive way and framed as responsibility for others rather than domination of others the impacts can be tremendous.

Women don’t need to stop working, they need to be paid fairly.

When men are freed from the box of what a man can or cannot do on the job, their lives dramatically improve.

When I ask who has told their son that he can do anything that a girl can do, the room goes silent because almost every single hand goes down. I often ask myself how come we’ve progressed to a point where we don’t think girls should be limited by gender, but boys can be.

This uneasiness with boys playing with anything that could be attributed or associated with girls relies on a steady fundamental belief that cuts across society: that being feminine is a weakness.

If there was nothing wrong with femininity, no one would be worried about men exploring it.

the reason why we as a culture are scared of men acting like women is because we diminish the feminine.

while privilege is fixed (it’s based on fixed identities: being white, male, able-bodied), power is relational. It changes depending on situations and the people you are associating with.

It’s discrimination. Women are not the problem. The men harassing them are.

Opening the door for your female boss is nice, but booking the conference room so she doesn’t have to is even better.

Women don’t want to be treated differently; they want to be treated equally. Don’t

hug the women you work with unless you

are hugging the men you ...

Feminism is the antidote to shorter male life expectancy, not the cause of it.

Men’s rights activists fear that any examination of idealized masculinity is an attack on men when scrutinizing it might be one of the most effective ways to help them.

Although testosterone is often associated with giving men an advantage later in life because it’s associated with muscle development and stamina, it’s associated with many of the factors that put men at higher health risk, like cancer, heart disease and HIV. Because it lowers the body’s immune response, male embryos are more fragile, and that explains why premature girls are more likely to survive and thrive than their male counterparts.

The first time I realized that the glorification of men who take risks without protection had gone too far is when my friends made me sit through an episode of the MTV show Jackass.

that children adopt the idea that risk-taking is suitable and free of consequences for boys (not girls) very early on.

“Masculine stereotype conformity turns out to be a better predictor of risk-taking than biological sex,”

When the world is not an equal-level playing field, neither is our relation to risk.

Cordelia Fine, the author of Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds,

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white men, especially those who score high on individualism and a belief in hierarchy (as opposed to egalitarianism), are the most risk ignorant.

So it’s the intersection of whiteness, maleness and a penchant for individualism that creates what we often mislabel as stereotypical “male” behavior

Make no mistake: this is a manufactured preference.

So when we raise men to have to prove their manhood by taking risks, they can resort to hazardous means to fulfil those expectations.

We see its effects in one of the worst epidemics on earth, HIV/AIDS.

Men who have sex with other men are twenty-four times more likely to contract the disease and yet men are less likely to get tested, visit clinics or get treatment.

70 percent of the men who end up dying from HIV/AIDS never even sought treatment. In many regions, HIV status is still associated with being an effeminate man, which in a society riddled with toxic masculinity is the worst thing a man can be.

masculinity, as generally conceived, is a condition whose very validity in any individual instance consists in its being experienced as under constant threat.”

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