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

by Liz Plank

While we’ve spent a fair amount of time examining the negative effect of princesses and Barbies on the development of girls’ perception of themselves, we haven’t paused to question the consequences of the video games marketed to boys that have names like “Manhunt,” “Thrill Kill” and “Mortal Kombat.”

But before a boy can even make a choice about who he becomes, a cozy relationship with violence is encouraged, even rewarded, while proximity with tenderness is penalized.

We live in a culture that teaches boys stoicism over authenticity, dominance over empathy, and that if they don’t follow their script, someone will take notice and take their “man card” away.

Male toddlers emote more than girls, but scientists notice an inexplicable drop in the boys’ emotional expressions starting at the ages of 4 to 6 years, while it remains steady for young girls.

The US Department of Education projects that by 2026, 57 percent of the college population will be female. The majority of bachelor, master’s and doctorate degrees across the country are held by women, and since 1982 they’ve earned more than 10 million more degrees than men.

Toxic masculinity also turns men into the greatest threat to themselves. Men aren’t just more likely to carry guns; they’re also more likely to die from guns. In every single country around the world, male homicide rates are higher than the female homicide rate, and overall, men make up 79 percent6 of homicide deaths.

The gap left by the absence of a conversation or identity around positive masculinity has been filled by hate groups who offer men a missing sense of belonging and sense of identity.

Because we are a social species, most of us intuitively integrate the roles we’ve been socialized into and this is largely unconscious, especially when we’re young.

I became obsessed with a study that found that when male subjects were in the presence of women, they ate 93 percent more pizza.

When we create a cultural environment where men can’t ask questions about masculinity, any interrogation of masculinity is interpreted as an admission that one is not a real man.

The system works because it’s not questioned. The system works because men think they are passing it down out of love, when of course denying boys the full experience of their humanity is what truly loving them would look like. The problem is not boys; it’s us.

Researchers at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor discovered that where a man is raised heavily influences his levels of testosterone. When they created an experiment where male subjects were accosted and insulted by a passerby, the men who were raised in the South were more likely to react aggressively and have an increase in testosterone than those raised in the North.

In order to indoctrinate men into being “tough,” we teach them to deny parts of themselves. And keeping things in is glamorized so that men are obedient to the code and stay quiet. We all grow up being taught that a cool and collected man keeps emotions on the inside, so bottling up feelings and thoughts becomes a practice so common and so ingrained that it becomes second nature.

Feeling understood and connected to her husband was the strongest predictor for a woman’s level of marital satisfaction.

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 only magnifies them.

While women tend to build activities around their friends, men approach friendship in a more transactional way, building friendships around activities.

If you want to know how our culture feels about two men having emotional intimacy, look no further than the term we use to speak of it: a “bromance.” Male friendship is so fraught that we as a culture have invented a special term to characterize the extraordinary phenomenon of two men having dinner together.

British research shows there are 2.5 million men who have zero close friends in the UK. That’s roughly 7 percent of the male population.

same job as a man because she didn’t have a family to support. The argument that men needed to fulfill their role as economic supporters justified the creation and the persistence of what we know as the wage gap today.

“African-Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites,” she writes. “But they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct.”

Men don’t see themselves taking jobs that are primarily done by women because their model of masculinity doesn’t allow for it. They may even feel like they wouldn’t be hired if they were to apply for those jobs. And because jobs performed by women are consistently devalued, it makes them underpaid, which ultimately makes them less appealing to men, too.

Idealized masculinity conventionally creates a narrative embedded in coal mining as a culture that makes it feeble to question the industry’s treatment of workers.

But in a world where men are shunned for adopting any semblance of a feminine characteristic, it is easy to see why men haven’t rushed to take jobs in female-dominated industries.

Toy stores had two colors, pink and blue, and very rarely did parents venture outside of the expected toys for their children’s gender. The toys we give children determine who they think they can be. The toys we refuse to give can have an even greater impact on their self-actualization.

A few years later in the early 2000s, Disney created the Disney Princesses franchise, marketing products around Cinderella, the Little Mermaid and other female characters like Tinker Bell. This marked the first time Disney marketed products that weren’t related to a film release. It quickly turned into a $3 billion industry by 2013 with over twenty-five thousand products by 2006, becoming Disney’s fastest-growing collection in the brand’s history.

A Pew survey showed that while 72 percent of men say girls should be encouraged to play with traditionally boys’ toys, only 56 percent say the same about boys playing with girls’ toys.

According to the CDC, young men are three times more likely to drown than young women, and 80 percent of fatalities from drowning are male.

a need for power, success and self-reliance sets up men for failure because it generates a vicious cycle of pain. Feelings of inadequacy are fueled by unrealistic ideals about masculinity and then those very same beliefs discourage them from asking for help. The more a man identifies with traditional masculinity beliefs, the more vulnerable he is.

If women are educated and can work, it lessens the financial responsibility that rests on the shoulders of men. The less gender equality you have, the more you have a traditional society where men are expected to shoulder unequal responsibility.

“Instead of trying to control the world around us, we need to do a better job of controlling the storm inside us.”