Maybe Toxic Masculinity is the Answer
I watched the D-Day commemoration from France this week, and couldn’t hide my emotions as Emmanuel Macron pinned Legion of Honor medals on American veterans, all of them around 100 years old, most lifted from wheelchairs so they could stand before the French President, as Macron spoke each of their names with reverence and respect. These were, no, these are, men. Feeble in physique, doubtless slower of mind, but truly, unquestionably, men.
I just left a job where I didn’t fit. I’ve had a career in retail so I’ve worked with a very diverse crowd of people my entire life. We always found common purpose, starting with the job to do, then to relationships, culture, each other. And I made friends. But this time it was different. The group I worked with were militantly progressive and I, from day one, without uttering a word, was treated on a spectrum that ran from indifference to hostility.
Of course over a few weeks, forced together for hours a day, tired of the stress of judgment, we came to know each other and find islands of common ground. When I left, and I’m sure they were glad I left, a few confided in me that they were sorry to see me go. It was obvious that they had never really interacted so closely with an older, cisgender, white man, a guy who messed-up their pronouns, a representative of the group on whom they blame all of society’s ills. They were all living caricatures of the cliché of people who insist you accept their lifestyle while they hate you for yours.
I have a teenage daughter, but I worry about the boys. We make them talk too much about how they’re feeling.
40% of children have had contact with a mental health professional. Therapy is everywhere, and children are asked to focus on their problems and emote about their failures as if there is some flaw in them. As if they need a therapist to help. As if they can’t work out their problems on their own. As if failure isn’t normal.
When they hurt, boys need to get up and rub some dirt in it, not wait to be removed from class for 50 minutes for their session with a psychologist. Is what I say offensive? What is offensive is that, with all of this emphasis on mental health, therapy, and well-being, last year more young men killed themselves than middle-aged men.
Fewer young men are in the work force. Fewer young men are going to college. Fewer young men are joining the military. Fewer young men are starting families. Fewer young men are leaving home to venture into a life on their own. But many, many more have a mental health diagnosis. Many more have had their problems medicalized, their coping skills minimized as they are encouraged by the mental health industry and a progressive-leaning coterie of cultural archetypes to define themselves as victims and blame society, or specific others, like for many of them, themselves, for the false notion that the world is aligned against them and they cannot get ahead.
Their masculinity, their competitive, demanding, muscle-bound insistence on shaping the world to fit their own desires has been pathologized. And boys are being compelled to apologize for it. And boys are dying for it.
Those veterans in Normandy come from another age with another fight boys were dying for. It was the best in them, it was the man in them, that drove them on to create the world that now a confused yet cunning minority deviant to the ideals those men hold dear demand they apologize for. So let me help. Let me apologize for them:
I apologize for liberal democracy, universal human rights, increasing material wealth, the industrial revolution, the Beatles, the rule of law, property rights, and respect for the individual. As those veterans stormed Omaha Beach they knew that from strength to intelligence they were not equal. In rank they were not equal. But they were equal in cause and effort and they came together, willingly sacrificed all, and won the day for the things many now resent them for.
It's not masculinity that’s toxic. Masculinity is normal. Perhaps we need more of it and fewer young men dying in an ignoble war against human nature.
Hi George, I’m always a fan - and bummed by your recent workplace experience with intolerant people. I would like to add my perspective (as a “cisgender” older white male who has enjoyed all the privileges that come with this accident of birth): the “toxic” in toxic masculinity does not refer simply to the expectation that males conceal their emotions and act tough. It also includes aspects of dominance and the expectation a man can get or take whatever he wants, simply because he’s male (eg: “boys will be boys” as an excuse for teen date rape).
On your larger point about the value of therapy: it’s not the profession’s fault that parents raise their kids as if their feeling are the most important thing in the world. I don’t know about your experience with therapy, but mine have been great - the focus has never been to feel better, but rather to learn to recognize and deal with difficult feeling that we’re blocking me from being a whole, healthy and responsible person. Fear, chief among them. Men who are afraid of life, afraid of women’s power, and hide behind stereotypes of masculinity, actually could benefit a lot from developing the courage to face their true feelings. And overcoming them. That’s where there’s growth.
"Toxic Masculinity" is a lie.
Men are being set up to fail, and it's obviously working.
I am supposed to be so cosmopolitan, so broadminded that I won't stand up for myself or advocate for my own children. As if doing so is some sort of expression of hate and not my duty as a man.
Masculinity is supposed to be noble, strong, kind, magnanimous.
It's those who lack those qualities branding them as toxic, and they're succeeding.