The Man They Wanted Me to Be Quotes

“In the digital age, the troll is essentially a caricature and embodiment of all the worst traits associated with masculinity. They’re culturally and intellectually shallow. Angry. Violent. Aggressive. And, after years of wading through graphic images, postmodern stew, racist propaganda, and disgusting and misogynistic pornography, they have grown into nihilists with no other purpose besides punishing the world while laughing to prove they’re stronger than their humanity.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“That afternoon planted the seed of crisis. Even just a fleeting moment of approval from my father was enough to set me in a direction that would irrevocably change my life. I’d been searching for years for shortcuts to acceptance. Fitting in as a man was an impossible task, a Sisyphean effort that could never be conquered. As a boy the masculine world seemed alien and incomprehensible with its jumble of contradictory expectations. Every one of the men around me had seemed in conflict with themselves and the world. In high school, none of the available personas offered any comfort. I’d resolved, by the time I turned eighteen, to live outside of the paradigm, had decided masculinity, with all its warts and foibles, was something I could simply opt out of.

What I didn’t know then, and what I’m only coming to understand nearly twenty years later, is that because patriarchal masculinity is built into the structure of society, there is no such thing as opting out. It lies dormant in every man, regardless of his acceptance or denial. It permeates everything, reverberating throughout our language and tainting our power structure; it plagues our every action and thought. Because it is presented as reality from our nascent beginnings, it continually colors our perception regardless of how we might fight against its influence.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“By chipping away at the cognitive dissonance that is patriarchal masculinity, men can see for themselves what they’ve probably always known. This construct is artificial and dangerous. It fits like an ill-tailored shirt and we can see the damage it does and the hurt it inflicts when we look into the eyes of the people we love. The suspicion is there; traditional masculinity is so fragile that it’s always on the verge of imploding. This is why the patriarchy is so ever-present and contains so many rules and consequences. Why else do men overcompensate so wildly and so desperately? It’s because they’re always just moments away from watching the paradigm crumble to pieces.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“These men, and the boys following in their footsteps, were socialized in childhood to exhibit the ideal masculine traits, including stoicism, aggressiveness, extreme self-confidence, and an unending competitiveness. Those who do not conform are punished by their fathers in the form of physical and emotional abuse, and then further socialized by the boys in their school and community who have been enduring their own abuse at home. If that isn’t enough, our culture then reflects those expectations in its television shows, movies, music, and especially in advertising, where products like construction-site-quality trucks, power tools, beer, gendered deodorant, and even yogurt promise to bestow masculinity for the right price.

The masculinity that’s being sold, that’s being installed via systemic abuse, is fragile because, again, it is unattainable. Humans are not intended to suppress their emotions indefinitely, to always be confident and unflinching. Traditional masculinity, as we know it, is an unnatural state, and, as a consequence, men are constantly at war with themselves and the world around them.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Men like my father, and men like him who attend Trump rallies, join misogynistic subcultures, populate some of the most hateful groups in the world, and are prisoners of toxic masculinity, an artificial construct whose expectancies are unattainable, thus making them exceedingly fragile and injurious to others, not to mention themselves. The illusion convinces them from an early age that men deserve to be privileged and entitled, that women and men who don’t conform to traditional standards are second-class persons, are weak and thus detestable. This creates a tyrannical patriarchal system that tilts the world further in favor of men, and, as a side effect, accounts for a great deal of crimes, including harassment, physical and emotional abuse, rape, and even murder.

These men, and the boys following in their footsteps, were socialized in childhood to exhibit the ideal masculine traits, including stoicism, aggressiveness, extreme self-confidence, and an unending competitiveness. Those who do not conform are punished by their fathers in the form of physical and emotional abuse, and then further socialized by the boys in their school and community who have been enduring their own abuse at home. If that isn’t enough, our culture then reflects those expectations in its television shows, movies, music, and especially in advertising, where products like construction-site-quality trucks, power tools, beer, gendered deodorant, and even yogurt promise to bestow masculinity for the right price.

The masculinity that’s being sold, that’s being installed via systemic abuse, is fragile because, again, it is unattainable. Humans are not intended to suppress their emotions indefinitely, to always be confident and unflinching. Traditional masculinity, as we know it, is an unnatural state, and, as a consequence, men are constantly at war with themselves and the world around them.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Even more tragically, change has always been in their (white men’s) best interest. The occupations they cling to so desperately-the factory jobs, the mining jobs, the manual labor jobs-were awful in the first place. Men who toil in these careers are underpaid and miserable. They suffer horrific injuries, die prematurely, and are exploited by companies that hardly ever reward their labor or loyalty. But men have long fallen for the great myth of American capitalism. They strive to make it and when they fail they find solace, no matter how dismal, in their pursuit and their work.

They’ve been tricked, and to admit now that the lie isn’t real, after generations of buying into it and basing their identities on a fraudulent and faulty worldview, would be one of the greatest emasculations of all time.

So they double down nearly every single time….No ground can be given to the forces of progress here because with each case of men being held accountable for their actions the whole house of cards could come tumbling down.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“The attack in Charleston prompted a brief national debate on guns that pivoted to the Confederate flag, which Roof had been pictured with multiple times. As pressure began to mount over the symbol, there were several black churches set on fire in the South. I drove from one decimated house of worship to another and found the areas teeming with more Confederate symbols, as well as frequent scrawlings of swastikas and hate speech. There seemed, at that moment, to be something incredibly ugly and dangerous starting to seep out from under the country’s veneer.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“In these years we did the tried-and-true masculine things. We watched ball games on the TV, fished for catfish and bluegill in stripper pits in the Greene-Sullivan State Forest, shot guns, stood out in the garage, as is customary, and generally bullshitted. But what was most amazing, other than my father’s apparent transformation, was that Dad, seemingly exhausted by years and years of near-silence, began to speak openly about the burden of masculinity.

He told me the expectations he’d carried, as a father, as a son, as a man, had sabotaged his relationships and prevented him from expressing himself, or really enjoying intimacy, emotionally or intellectually, his entire life.

Shocked at the depth of frustration and despair my dad had suffered, I listened and realized, for the first time, that the masculinity I’d sought, the masculinity I’d been denied, had always been an impossibility. Deep down, I realized that masculinity, as I knew it, as it was presented to me, was a lie.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“With a start that I realized the paranoid fantasies I’d been hearing the men around me tell my entire life had found purchase in the zeitgeist. Just as we’d all stood around a truck full of guns years earlier, here we were, out in public, discussing international conspiracies meant to inspire racial and societal unrest. Black people were in on it. Immigrants were in on it. Academics like myself were in on it. Even white women were in on it. Everyone, that is, except white men who would either have to stop the plot before it was realized or else die in a blaze of fire defending their homes and families.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“It’s a story of men refusing to come to terms with their situation because to be a white man in America is to expect everything to already be on your terms.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“As long as we raise our boys to believe that emotions are unmasculine or that they are signs of weakness, and as long as we use violence as a means of enforcement, we’re going to continue raising men who abuse their partners and their children and who often react to economic shame by enacting violence against others.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“The uniting philosophy in these cases isn’t religious, but patriarchal. Just as McVeigh envisioned a federal government emasculating the sovereignty of men, school shooter Dimitrios Pagourtzis saw his advances being rejected by a female classmate as a nullification of his masculine sovereignty, leading him to kill ten in the Friday, May 18, 2018, high school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. Again, as men are taught that emotions are for women and the only acceptable means of communication is anger, their aggrieved entitlement is routinely finding an outlet in senseless violence.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Being raised evangelical, I was taught to look for signs of the apocalypse. On the evening news, every disaster, epidemic, war, or economic downturn was proof that the end times were hastening. Our parents and religious leaders told us that we were more than likely to see that final battle, and that the leader of the forces of Evil, the Antichrist, was probably alive and scheming somewhere in the world at that very second.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Unfortunately, rants like these are becoming all too commonplace in American discourse. The narrative of the Man Under Attack has spread far and wide throughout the country with severe consequences. Insecure men in every state and town echo the story my relative told, and though the details are often varied, the implication is universal: sinister forces are conspiring to destroy men and the world they have built.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“My path from a sensitive misfit boy to the drunken man in a cop car was a road paved with innate conditioning, preconceived notions, blatant rationalizations, a desire to be accepted, painful insecurity, and the persistent delusion that I had somehow overcome my upbringing and escaped the gravity of my patriarchal role models. I was woefully mistaken. The trauma I’d survived, the conditioning I’d been subject to, the soiled reality I’d been living and breathing throughout my upbringing, would continually plague me, perhaps for the rest of my life.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Again, this is in no way an excuse for what my stepfather, John, did. If I were to see him in real life now, I'd love nothing more than to beat the living hell out of him. In researching this book, I was reacquainted with an intense hatred I'd held for years, and wanted to find him and seek retribution for what he had done to my mother and me, but it's important to examine the factors that contributed to his behavior in an effort to address these issues in a real and meaningful way because, as long as we raise boys to believe that emotions are unmasculine, or that they are signs of weakness, and as long as we use violence as a means of enforcement, we're going to continue raising men who abuse their partners and their children, and who often react to economic shame by enacting violence against others.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Unfortunately, our situation was not all that uncommon. This country has a frightening epidemic of abuse, large and pervasive. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) reports that more than 10 million people are abused by their partners every year, that one in three women have been abused by a partner, one in five have been severely abused, that every nine seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten, and that domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of the crime in the United States.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“When we got to Owensville I found it to be like so many towns in southern Indiana. With a population of just over a thousand, it looks, in every direction and on every street, like a community that's slowly eroding. Parked on the downtown square, you find yourself wondering what keeps anyone here.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Abuse became a regular part of our lives. I remember feeling sick every single day when I'd hear John walking in the door because it was only a matter of chance whether he'd be in a good mood or ready to beat the hell out of us....And the worst thing we could do was 'act like a girl.' This high crime consisted of showing even the slightest hint of emotion. If I cried, if I complained, I could expect to be whipped or beaten. I was a sickly kid at that point, a sufferer of severe asthma who could have a life-threatening attack at a moment's notice. John hated that weakness, and he punished my mom and me for it.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Men, particularly white men, in America have enjoyed unbelievable privilege, and when that privilege is threatened their response is to often react violently and in anger. My father's breakdown led to the dissolution of my parents' relationship, but when my mother's reaction was to end the marriage, that privilege, and my father's belief that he essentially 'owned' her due to his status as a man, led to harassment. The more my mom denied him, and denied that inherent privilege, the worse it got.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“In order to view my father's actions, and certainly those of the other men in this book, through the lens of Pleck's paradigm and Levant and Pollack's strain, it's necessary first to acknowledge their problematic nature. For years my father mistreated, abused, and harassed my mother. This is a fact that I've witnessed for years and I know, without a doubt, that it's left my mother with psychological trauma. No examination is meant to excuse that behavior....but it is important, I think, to consider, for the health and benefit of women like my mother and the millions of other women who have suffered abuse, just what kind of forces influence abusive actors like my father. To get better, we need to study the problem, come to grips with it, diagnose it, and work to solve it. Nothing less than the future depends on us doing so.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“The structured and reliable existence men like my father and stepfather had come to depend on is disappearing by the day and the realization that the world is changing is exerting massive amounts of pressure on these men, all of whom are already fragile in their masculinity and aggrieved in their entitlement.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Toxic masculinity is a chronic illness, and once we’re infected we always carry it with us.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Of course, this doesn’t explain his behavior in full. Men, particularly white men, in America have enjoyed unbelievable privilege, and when that privilege is threatened their response is to often react violently and in anger.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making