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

by Liz Plank

Although the news often focuses on the threats of terrorism, natural disasters and nuclear war, there is no greater threat to humankind than our current definitions of masculinity.

It reveals itself in the way 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.

Violent men aren’t born; they’re created.

Although very little gets universal consensus among academics, they are effectively unanimous that systemically suppressing one’s emotions is one of the most damaging experiences for a human being to endure.

Mix an inability to cope with emotions with a reluctance to seek help and you have the perfect—and lethal—mix for a mental health crisis.

Most of the behaviors that we most associate with men like anger issues, alcohol or drug use and abusive behavior are often attempts to escape mental illness. 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.

“righteous retaliation is a deeply held, almost sacred, tenet of masculinity: if you are aggrieved, you are entitled to retribution. American men don’t just get mad, we get even.”

almost every single mass shooting in American history was perpetrated by a white man or men. Everyone experiences hardship, but only one demographic has been indoctrinated to medicate with revenge.

Although politicians spend a lot of time trying to spin the gun control debate around racial lines by speaking about so-called black-on-black violence, the more glaring demographic pattern in homicide is male-on-male crime.

despite mass shootings and murders capturing more media and national attention, the highest incidence of gun deaths is as a result of suicide—86 percent of the people who kill themselves with a gun are men.

young men are the demographic the least likely7 to seek mental health help while also being the group who would benefit the most from intervention, given they are also most likely to die by suicide.

Research from Dr. John M. Gottman, one of the world’s foremost experts on relationships, has found that a man being emotionally intelligent is one of the greatest predictors of a successful romantic relationship. Gottman finds that while it’s a crucial skill, it’s not always taught to boys. One of the biggest ways it shows up in his research is men resisting their wife’s influence by not attending to her feelings and desires. When a man resists his partner’s influence, Gottman says there’s an 81 percent chance the marriage will not survive.

Beauty and the Beast is a perfect example. The Beast kidnaps and terrorizes Belle, his romantic love interest, as a way to build an emotional connection with her. And the story teaches us that this is not only acceptable, but hey, it works! It’s hard to think of the plot of a single Disney movie the millennial generation grew up with that doesn’t have a seriously questionable subtext normalizing men as predators.

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.

Dating women was also hard as a man. He kept being told he was too vulnerable by women he was romantically involved with. “That was a way of saying I wasn’t masculine enough.”

Because Thomas was new to masculinity and because these messages were not hammered into him from an early age, he could see them for what they were: a box. “This gave me a real education in masculinity,”

Although sex and gender are often used interchangeably, they’re not exactly the same. While sex is determined by our bodies, gender is a social construction.

This phenomenon is supported by what sociologists call “precarious manhood.” What this theory boils down to is that masculinity needs to be constantly proved, while womanhood is more static, or fixed. Women have more permission to drift away from traditional feminine norms; men can’t do that with as much flexibility.

Masculinity is procured through ritualized and often-public social behaviors. This is fairly consistent throughout history and across most cultures all around the world.

As Esther Perel put it during our social experiment, “We are born women; we become men.” She explained, “There is no word for ‘emasculating’ for women, or ‘sissy’ for women. Men’s masculinity is predicated on the rejection of the feminine in all societies.”

the biggest impact of testosterone is not that it made men more physically aggressive but instead that it motivated men to be more competitive and eager to achieve higher social status.

The researchers’ conclusion: testosterone doesn’t make you fight; you release it when you feel like you need to fight. In many ways, it’s the social environment that dictates biology, not the other way around.

Patriarchy is not the natural order of things. It’s not that we can’t help it; in fact, it’s the opposite: we helped create it, which means that change is not only possible, it’s probable.

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.

implicit in the language is that if one conquers, the other is therefore defeated. What a sad way to view the most natural and intimate act human beings share.

The truth is having sex with a woman is a lot like driving a car: it’s important to pay close attention to sounds, bumps and signals. But repeatedly, I kept hearing from women that the men they were intimate with weren’t tapping into those signals because they were focused on their own performance.

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

shame is both central and rarely an admitted factor in the homelessness crisis, particularly when it comes to men.

Shame’s ability to warp the universal truths about gender is as powerful as our refusal to address those myths. If we were to discuss and challenge the myths that dictate men’s lives, perhaps men would realize that the shame they’re carrying was never theirs to begin with.

“Real power doesn’t come through coercion. It comes through deep understanding, compassionate leadership and having a way to express a level of morality and ethics that makes you bigger than just a man.”

women’s expectations were evolving faster than men’s abilities to fulfill them.

Men were experiencing emotional and in some cases mental health turmoil and didn’t have the language to understand, let alone talk about, it with their partners. The male code has instructed them to keep it all on the inside, and that’s exactly what they were doing.

Research by clinical psychiatrist Jeroen Jansz from the University of Amsterdam found that it’s not that men didn’t have as many emotional abilities, but rather that they didn’t practice them as often as women. He breaks down modern masculinity into four components: autonomy, achievement, aggression and stoicism, and concludes that stoicism particularly encourages a disconnection from feelings, vulnerability and pain, which increases the disconnection from emotional states for men.

Men are getting mixed signals. On the one hand, they are being told that women want to be treated as equals, that they are starting to have more spending power and status in society, which means that men attempting to do things for them is condescending, unwelcomed and outdated. On the other hand, men are being told that being a man means being a gentleman and the main way to show respect to the opposite sex is through chivalry. Because those two messages conflict, men are justifiably lost.

the moral panic about chivalry “being dead” wasn’t about women being too empowered; it was about men feeling like they were giving up an important part of their identity, perhaps the only part of their identity that they felt they had left.

Growing up in the South, he felt a pressure to perform being a gentleman, but he realized that this implied doing things for one gender rather than all genders. “I make sure to not do things solely for women, such as opening doors, offering to buy drinks, giving hugs, et cetera,” he explained. “For me, degendering my generosity was a way to honor a fundamental aspect of myself and a way of balancing how I treat people. I consciously felt a need to have it be clear in my public interactions that I didn’t just do these things for women, but that I did them for people, regardless of gender or other aspects of identity, because this is just what I do.” He wanted to remove the intrinsic transactional aspect and instead approach every relationship from a place of equality and generosity.

if a man is nervous about whether what he’s doing is patronizing or polite, just think of one simple rule: if you wouldn’t do it for a man to not do it for a woman. Modern chivalry is not about what you do; it’s about why you do it.

One study from the University of Auckland in New Zealand found that women who hold benevolent sexist views had lower marital satisfaction. When women think they need to be “protected” or “cherished” (can you spot the world leader whose favorite playbook this is from?), it increases their likelihood to view any type of conflict with their male partner as contradicting that worldview. It makes sense. If you expect your partner to treat you like a princess, any disagreement or criticism (which is normal in any healthy relationship) is perceived as uncalled for. Benevolent sexism enforces a belief system that’s just not realistic.

It imposes a rigid structure where women invest in the relationship more (put their needs second, perhaps stay at home or forgo a career) and where men are expected to deliver outside the home to make women feel “protected” when, as we all know, life is not always that simple. Men get laid off, men get injured and the benevolent sexism complex doesn’t make space for real life.

Women being able to play the role of the provider releases men from shouldering all that pressure alone. 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.

When one human gets out of the cage, it’s a great day for humans and a bad day for cages.

Men explained that they felt like they were walking around on eggshells because toxic ideals of masculinity had created a hypersensitivity that had come to poison their interactions with women. They were being prejudged before they even opened their mouth.

As a queer woman who has dated both women and men, I can anecdotally say that same-sex relationships can be much easier because there are no predetermined rules or roles. The first time I went on a date with a woman, I was floored. It was the first time I actually felt like I could be myself on a first date.

even the existence of that predetermined structure requires an acknowledgment of the structure you are deviating from. It’s worth thinking about what deprogramming ourselves could mean for heterosexual relationships.

“relative to heterosexual relationships, same-sex relationships tend to have more equitable domestic work arrangements, less defined gender roles, and a greater sense of social connectedness to a community.”

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.

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.

This has caused a quiet crisis where men are left yearning for intimacy but unable to ask for it. It’s what I call the male intimacy paradox: while men report wanting more vulnerability from their friends, they aren’t asking for it. Half of men report that they don’t speak about their personal problems and report craving closer connection with those male friends.

if idealized masculinity instructs men to never be vulnerable and to avoid intimacy with other men and to never admit needing anything from anyone, it makes sense that deep friendship would become difficult to develop and sustain.