by Liz Plank
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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For my dad, who would
have much preferred this
book be about math
Author’s Note
Between most chapters is a short essay about a man with interwoven identities that captures and reveals the urgency of a conversation about mindful masculinity. Thomas Page McBee, a journalist and author, who understood the challenges of being a “real man” when he transitioned. Victor Pineda, an immigrant with a disability, who challenges the myth of the so-called self-sufficient man. Wade Davis, one of the few openly gay members of the NFL, who grew up believing that being queer and a man were mutually exclusive. Glen Canning, a father who became an outspoken advocate for men to stop violence against women after his daughter took her own life. Maurice Owens, an advocate for boys of color, who followed an unlikely path to the White House. D’Arcee Charington Neal, a gay black man with a disability, who has a unique understanding of how cookie-cutter masculinity prevents the full expression of men’s humanity. And Nicolas Juarez, a Mexican-American with Tzotzil ancestry, who has firsthand experience of how little indigenous men profit from a system built on outdated notions of masculinity that are aligned with white supremacy. This book cannot capture all of the complexities of the male experience, but these amuse-bouches are a start.
Why don’t we say “boys will be boys” when a man wins the Nobel Peace Prize?
—MICHAEL KIMMEL
Introduction
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’s a bold statement. If you’ve never thought about it, it may even seem overblown. But before you put this book down, take a moment to put a gender lens on men. In ten years of both academic and media reporting on gender theory, I’ve long focused on the numerous consequences of the patriarchy for women, because there’s no shortage of them. But when I started talking to men about their own gender, I was dumbfounded. It changed my entire outlook on feminism. I started to wonder why the lies that we tell about masculinity aren’t on the first page of every newspaper every single day of the year.
Psychologists have sounded the alarm. For the first time in its history, the American Psychological Association (APA) has created a set of explicit guidelines for practitioners treating men and boys. Their report warns therapists about the dangers of what they call “traditional masculinity ideology” negatively impacting men’s mental health as well as physical health and well-being. Although the APA has often produced guidelines for therapists dealing with vulnerable populations like women, minorities or LGBTQ people, they’ve identified that the falsehoods we’ve all absorbed about men are putting their own health at risk.
And this is not just an American problem. It’s an international crisis. In China, recently a new term has emerged, 直男癌, which translated from Mandarin means “straight man cancer.”
In Iceland it’s eitruð karlmennska, which means “toxic” or “poisonous masculinity.” Hindi people in India refer to it as Mardaangi. In Québec, where I’m from, we call the guy who defines himself through domination of men and women “un macho.” His polar opposite, the man who is in touch with his feelings, is referred to pejoratively as l’homme rose, which translates to “the pink man.”
No matter what continent I visited and conducted interviews with men on, from Scandinavia to North America to Sub-Saharan Africa, I heard the same things over and over again. Toxic masculinity is an epidemic that knows no borders. No society has yet found the cure for it.
It presents itself in subtle ways, such as the way we raise boys differently from girls. It starts when we equate emotion with weakness and direct boys to display strength no matter what. It shows up in the way we expect and encourage girls to show their true emotions while we demand that boys hide them from us. 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.
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.” We don’t blink twice when the NRA releases a free target-shooting video game (one month after the Newtown massacre, no less) and marks it as suitable for boys ages 4 and up. We indoctrinate boys and it starts early.
As Mr. Rogers said during a Senate hearing on PBS funding in 1969, “feelings are mentionable and manageable.” But you wouldn’t know that from the kind of programs targeted to boys today. In fact, Rogers was very critical of the violence both verbal and physical so often contained in the most mainstream shows shown to kids. “I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger—much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire,” Mr. Rogers said. 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. The violent images we feed boys have power. Just ask MIT scientists who were successfully able to create the world’s first psychopathic robot through one simple act: showing it “the darkest corners of Reddit.” They even named it after Norman Bates, the main character in Psycho. Violent men aren’t born; they’re created.
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. Boys are taught not to ask questions because asking for help would suggest a lack of leadership, instead of being an acute sign of it. Their behavior is highly monitored, their gender constantly surveilled for any sign of misstep or mistake. Boys become fluent in emotional self-censorship. They become anesthetized to feelings to avoid getting caught having any. The love is stripped away from them. As bell hooks argues in The Will to Change, boys learn that “it is better to be feared than to be loved.”
Under the current circumstances we’ve set as a culture, it’s an uphill battle for boys to find and reveal their true selves, and if they do it’s perceived and noted as a flaw. Whether it’s showing sadness or vulnerability, a core part of the human experience, it’s corrected with a simple statement underpinning the poisonous ideology we raise them into: boys don’t cry. And when they act in horrifying ways, when they hurt, beat or assault others in a way that goes against the human spirit, what do we say? Boys will be boys. We are puzzled when boys act terribly, failing to realize that this is precisely the bar we set for them. We have such low expectations of boys that we made up a term for it. What message do these two most commonly used expressions about boys signal to them?
We act as if boys being terrible is in
evitable, then act surprised when they fulfill these expectations.
The consequences of this indoctrination have perplexed child psychology experts: while girls go on to become more emotionally mature and literate with age and time, boys become emotionally stunted. 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. It turns out that while parents encourage girls to fully express themselves, boys don’t receive the same treatment. Much of this is largely unconscious and parents of all genders contribute to this. The phenomenon continues into adulthood, where in every age bracket men suppress their emotions far more than women do. 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. What the scientific community has labeled as dangerous and unhealthy is the current model for the way we raise boys. As researchers Tara M. Chaplin and Amelia Aldao, from the Yale School of Medicine and Ohio State University, respectively, put it, “an accumulating body of evidence suggests that when a person is either limited in the range of emotions expressed, or encouraged to express particular emotions to the exclusion of others, there is a greater likelihood of compromised socio-emotional functioning and of risk for developing psychopathology.”
Reductive versions of masculinity are instilled in young boys like a computer chip at an early age. Mounting research on the effects of traditional masculinity indicates that it does irreparable damage to boys and men across every socioeconomic and identity group. A rigid adherence to idealized masculinity is directly correlated1 with lower well-being for men. Research2 has shown that men who have a fear of showing emotions also happen to display the most violent behavior. Men who identify most strongly with conventional masculinity show greater interpersonal problems3 in their relationships than men who don’t. They’re also more likely to sexually harass women.4
When half the population gets trained to block emotions, they lose the ability for compassion. This was best explained to me by David Hogg. He became one of the most well-known gun control activists after surviving a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “A really good way for me to describe it is that I didn’t feel empathy until the day of the shooting,” he told me when we met in Houston. “I didn’t even know what it was like to feel someone else’s pain because I didn’t know what that felt like. I had constantly throughout my life told myself that it wasn’t okay to feel emotion and that I had to go out there and be this ‘lone wolf’ individual. But when I heard my sister crying after the shooting because she had lost four friends that day, I didn’t know why I couldn’t stand to be in the house and it was because her crying made me so uncomfortable because I was feeling her pain. But it took a mass shooting for me to realize that. So I can’t imagine what it makes so many other men across America.”
And because it has been left unchecked and omnipresent, this archaic ideology has been absorbed and encoded into every institution. We have state-sponsored gender roles where policy dictates what men and boys can do, practically erasing the opportunity to know their true tendencies, proclivities or desires. For instance, when President, then candidate, Donald Trump proudly presented a drastic new proposal for family leave, the policy made no mention of fathers. In fact, it excluded men entirely. It guaranteed a measly six weeks of partial pay for new mothers and failed to even mention time off for new fathers (or gay fathers, for that matter). After this drew criticism, they expanded it, but the fact that the policy makers on Trump’s team didn’t even think of including men in parental leave and that there wasn’t a backlash to it shows who we naturally tend to think of as parents: not men. It also sends a powerful message to fathers: your place is at work, not in the home. That’s limiting for women. It’s also limiting for men. The flip side is that when states stop encoding defunct masculinity into their policy making, men naturally start spending more time with their children and working inside the home. We’ve seen public policy offer men more freedom and flexibility in choosing their role in places like Denmark, Sweden and Quebec, setting off a huge transformation in behaviors.
Toxic definitions of masculinity don’t just show up in policy—they reveal themselves in our education system and in the growing disinterest boys and young men have in it. Men are the minority in colleges. The gender gap that once advantaged men has reversed completely. 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.
Although men lagging behind in education often spurs a salacious debate about whether schools are too “feminized” for boys, we fail to see that in that very question rests our own faulty assumptions about what boys need. When we subscribe to innate differences in genders we run the risk of encoding discrimination in the way we teach them, which is exactly what we are seeing across the United States and all over the world. One school in Pittsburgh integrated “stories for girls about princesses and fairies and uses tea parties, wands and tiaras as learning incentives.” Boys, however, regardless of their interest in sports, were taught with difficult physical challenges “through a modified basketball game,” where they had to match words with phrases “while running relays.” We codify gender roles in the way we teach children, with no evidence that doing so has any benefits for them.
This discriminatory sex-specific approach to teaching is a million-dollar business. The Gurian Institute, an organization whose principal mission is to tailor education based on gender, receives thousands of dollars from different school boards all over the country, propagating unsubstantiated claims about the difference between what boys and girls need. According to their website, they’ve already trained sixty thousand teachers in two thousand schools across the United States.
The founder, Michael Gurian, believes the “pursuit of power is a universal male trait” while the “pursuit of a comfortable environment is a universal female trait.” He has advocated giving boys NERF baseball bats to “hit things” to help them learn better. Dr. Leonard Sax, the founder and executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE), peddles similar advice to teachers. He instructs teachers to look girls in the eyes but avoid eye contact with boys and even avoid smiling at them. He also directs educators to abstain from asking boys about the emotions of characters and engage in “strict discipline based on asserting power over them” and justifies corporal punishment like spanking for boys while for girls he instructs teachers to “appeal to their empathy.” Gurian recommends that boys who don’t like sports should be coerced into them. Although a recent trend (mostly argued by people outside the realm of education) asserted that the gap between girls and boys is due to schools being “too girly” and that all male students need to be approached in more aggressive ways, that hasn’t been backed up by any data. In fact, Stephanie Coontz, the co-chair and director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, strongly urged against it in a 2013 briefing paper on the topic: “Making curriculum, teachers or classrooms more ‘masculine’ is not the answer […]. In fact, boys do better in school in classrooms that have more girls and that emphasize extracurricular activities such as music and art as well as holding both girls and boys to high academic standards.”
The discrepancy between boys and girls is not due to inherent differences in brain skills. As the authors of the paper, professors of sociology at Columbia University Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann, wrote, “Researchers agree that it is not because girls are smarter. In fact, while boys score slightly higher in math tests and girls score slightly higher in reading tests, overall the cognitive abilities of boys and girls are very similar. The difference in grades lies in effort and engagement. On average, girl
s are more likely than boys to report that they like school and that good grades are very important to them. Girls also spend more time studying than boys. Our research shows that boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity than with anatomy, hormones or brain structure.”
Their research shows that while girls have a core understanding of how doing well in school is tied to greater opportunities in the job market, that link is less salient for boys. This may be a persisting relic from a time when future success in the workplace for men was tied to manual labor jobs and physical ability, which made grades feel peripheral for boys. For many of them, the correlation between getting good grades and future professional as well as financial success later in life is not highlighted in the way that it is for girls.
Perpetuating the falsehood that boys’ natural rambunctiousness is antithetical with school environments might be a seductive solution that sells books and gets clicks. But if it were true, this gender gap in education would be persistent across all economic groups. It’s not. Indeed, the gender gap in education practically vanishes in schools that are blessed with resources. Economists who looked at test scores and suspension rates in Florida found that boys and girls were on equal footing in the best schools. It’s in the worst schools that boys started to lag behind the girls. We see the same trend in households. Economic policy reporter Jeff Guo found that the gap between boys and girls is almost nonexistent with well-off families.
“[E]arly-life adversity causes boys to struggle much more than girls,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “It’s not yet clear why girls are so tough, but they seem much better suited to the challenges of modern childhood.”
Guo concludes that worsening income inequality could lead to greater contrast between boys’ and girls’ performances in schools. So the gender education gap is less about recognizing that boys are inherently uninterested. To the contrary, it’s about recognizing that boys are more vulnerable than girls in poverty and low-resource environments and that they need more intimate attention, not less.