For the Love of Men

by Liz Plank

  Because it’s at the root of so many institutional problems, altering the way we raise men and boys could literally change the world. Although the concept of world peace feels so impossible that it only comes out of the mouths of beauty pageant contestants, researchers who have examined wide and extensive global data sets have found that one factor seems to act as a shield for violence and warfare: gender equality.

  Gender equality is often presented as a side effect of world order, but it’s rarely presented as the cure to political instability—despite mounting data that it is inversely correlated with it. When we ignore gender, whether it’s in the exclusion of women’s voices or the way that masculinity constructions can increase conflict, we limit the opportunity for lasting peace. Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad F. Emmett, the authors of Sex and World Peace, argue that “neither a meaningful decrease in societal violence nor a sustainable peace amongst nations is possible in human society without an increase in gender equality.” The authors, through their research, posit that rates of men’s violence against women are a better predictor of peace in a country than the level of sophistication of the country’s democratic development.

  Even when nations recognize the importance of programs tailored toward gender equality, very few are focused on men. Although programs that focus on positive masculinity are rare, one group in Chicago, Becoming a Man, helps at-risk male youth develop mindful masculinity, challenges gender stereotypes and is focused on boys’ emotional development. Amazingly, it has brought down arrests and increased young men’s graduation rates. Imagine the dent implementing programs like that could make in the reduction of mental health problems or suicide and divorce. When we offer more freedom to men about who they really want to become, the possibilities are endless.

  It fascinates me that politicians don’t talk about masculinity every single day. Given how intimately toxic definitions of masculinity are connected to the most pressing issues facing our world, it’s curious it has never received a mention in a major political speech and that it rarely shows up in the lexicons of government leaders and policy makers. Although State of the Union speeches have mentioned the importance of tearing down gender barriers and norms when it comes to women and girls, men and boys don’t get that message. Many world leaders erroneously assign barbaric characteristics to entire ethnic groups and religions as a result of repeated tragedies such as terrorism. It’s worth asking, if we started calling toxic masculinity a religion, would politicians start paying attention to it? If we started seeing idealized masculinity as a public health crisis that could be avoided, how differently would policy makers approach it? After all, it’s a disease that doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter where you’re from. It’s an illness that doesn’t care how much money you make. It affects all ethnic groups and races.

  I want to make it clear that talking about masculinity is not a distraction from the problems of women—rather, it’s the most effective way to properly address them. The biggest lie is that the fight to address male suffering is separate or at odds with the battle to liberate women. We all experience gender. We are all limited by oppressive gender stereotypes. We must transcend the myth of the gender war. We’re all on the same team.

  Here’s how reclaiming masculinity could serve all of us.

  I love being a man but not what being a man means.

  —THOMAS PAGE MCBEE

  AMUSE-BOUCHE:

  Thomas’s Story

  “None of the narratives of being a man worked for me,” Thomas Page McBee said. “Am I a real man? Am I a good man?” Thomas started asking himself questions about what it meant to be a man because he was new to it. He’s trans and, after injecting testosterone for about twenty months, quickly became recognized as an expert on masculinity, publishing several articles and two books about it. In his latest book, Amateur, he writes about being the first trans man to perform at Madison Square Garden and having what he called a “beginner’s mind” to masculinity. “Having experienced such rapid socialization, I am so aware of the most basic mediating qualities that we have, like gender. These things really affect everything about how we’re treated.” He came to terms with what being a man meant and became rapidly aware it was not exactly sunshine and lollipops. “I love being a man but not what being a man means,” Thomas said to me. He suddenly was seen as part of a group he didn’t always wholeheartedly endorse. “I felt apprehensive about men in our culture,” he explained.

  As he started experiencing the new perks of being a man, he simultaneously questioned them. “One massive change was the way any time I would speak everyone would be quiet. No one was interrupting me. It was wonderful and a privilege but also weird,” he confessed. He also talked about how much easier it was to negotiate a raise or navigate power dynamics at work as a man. “Until I was a man, I had no idea how good men had it at work,” Thomas explained. Armed with this newly found male privilege, Thomas suddenly felt a responsibility to effect change, especially given his managerial position overseeing a team at Quartz, a new media company. Since his team was primarily made up of women, he consulted with a professor to figure out ways to ensure that everyone felt like they had a space to feel seen and heard. The professor told him to start every meeting by giving an opportunity for every person to speak because that would make it more likely for people to more freely express themselves throughout the rest of the meeting. It was a small change, but Thomas noticed a huge difference.

  But soon the shiny perks were overshadowed by the downsides of living as a man in our culture. Only one year after transitioning, Thomas tragically lost his mother, and what followed he could have never predicted. He confided there was one thing he didn’t know he needed until it was robbed from him: human touch. Going through grief as a man was a jarring and isolating experience. He recounted how people didn’t reach out to him physically as much as they used to and that suddenly he became self-conscious of what it would look like to be openly sad. He described feeling the difference between anger and sadness and that while the former was acceptable, the latter wasn’t. Suddenly he felt a level of isolation he had never felt before. “I knew what that care was, I had it before.… What I learned was that I needed that,” Thomas said. Although it was normal to see a woman cry in public from time to time in New York City, he felt acutely aware that he wasn’t supposed to. “I got the message, explicitly and implicitly, from culture and from my relationships with the people around me, that men weren’t ‘supposed to’ be sad, or show any emotion really except anger.” This despite living in one of the most progressive cities in the United States.

  He also talked about the pain that came with people around him subtly “encouraging [him] to be more strong.” Instead of letting him mourn, they called on him to perform toughness while grieving. It revealed the specific attributes of male friendship for him. Older men in his family, trying to be helpful, would ask for updates about handling the logistics of the death of his mother, such as her will, rather than ask questions about his emotional state. One friend who had known him before his transition asked him “Are you okay?” and Thomas realized no one else had really asked him that question before, or at least asked him and really wanted the real answer. “I felt pressure to be strong and stoic, despite being a feminist who knew better,” Thomas said. “It was unconscious, and generally the people in my life—I think in an attempt to affirm my masculinity—were kind to me, but didn’t really push the point if I said I was ‘fine.’” Thomas realized that people didn’t want to disrespect him; in fact, they were acting this way out of respect for conventional gender norms. That’s what happens in a gender system that is so ubiquitous: everyone plays their part without questioning if it’s even a role they would have picked in the first place.

  One of the other difficult realizations for Thomas was that he was perceived as a predator simply for being male. “Within public spaces, I felt like a threat to women and threatened women just by walking down the
street,” he said as he recalled noticing women changing sides of the street to avoid him. 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.” He recalled feeling watched and observed for his performance of manhood. “A lot of policing. I felt policed.”

  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,” Thomas said. But how do men realize they are living in a box if that’s all they’ve ever seen? Thomas could see it because he knew what life was like before the walls came up. So I asked him how other men, who may not know how much they perform masculinity, could do this. His answer: “Asking a lot of stupid questions about what being a man means.” When I asked him why more men didn’t follow that path, he confirmed that the very act of interrogating the expectations of masculinity violated it. “The whole idea of masculinity is not failing at it.” He described it as a “shame loop” where the feeling of having failed begets overcompensation rather than deeper questioning.

  Thomas talks about his journey as developing an intimate relationship with his gender, something so many men fail to do since they’re not taught they have a gender to begin with. “The more you understand where it came from, the more equipped you are to disrupt it. It helps you understand it’s cultural, not inherent. You can be free from gender, too.”

  PART I

  The Lies

  We Tell

  About Men

  I don’t like to analyze myself,

  because I might not like what I see.

  —DONALD TRUMP

  I’d go to the end of the world for my husband; of course, if he’d just stop and ask for directions, I wouldn’t have to.

  —MARTHA BOLTON

  THE PROBLEM THAT HAD NO NAME

  The average male will drive an unnecessary nine hundred miles over the course of his life. Upon realizing they are lost, only 6 percent of men say they check a map or ask for help. These numbers, seeded from a British insurance company, support something we’ve all witnessed firsthand: men are entitled to a lot of stuff, but asking for directions is not one of them.

  Although science doesn’t offer a verdict about whether women are more likely to get lost than men, it does show that one gender is less likely to admit to it. In fact, many men don’t ask for directions because confessing they are lost is interpreted as an admission of fault. This explains why they will often double down rather than pull over. “I know the way,” he will grumble while she is in the passenger seat rolling her eyes into oblivion. According to Tristan Gooley, an expert in navigation, men prefer to stick to a system they know, even if it’s faulty, rather than admit it’s wrong and be open to alternatives. “I think women have less comfort with and faith in a system,” he told BBC Four. “Men like systems, so they stay within the system even if it isn’t working all the way.” And even when men go outside of their comfort zone, it bites them in the butt. For instance, research shows that male managers get penalized for asking for directions. They are seen as lesser leaders, probably because we’re so used to seeing men exude confidence (sometimes over competence). In other words, even if men want to ask for directions, they are punished when they do.

  The more I read about men’s relationship to directions and maps, the more it explained the absence of a substantive and open conversation about masculinity. While women are encouraged to ask questions, men are expected to pretend like they know everything even when they don’t, even when it comes to large and existential questions about their gender and their lives. As I traveled across the world, from Iceland to Zambia, I asked men the same question over and over again: What’s hard about being a man? Every single time I asked that question it was like I had just asked them if unicorns can swim.

  It was met with a pause, a smile, and then followed by another long pause followed by the words: “I’ve never actually thought of that.” When I asked women that same question about their gender—in other words, when I asked women what was hard about being a woman—it was like I had asked them to name every single thing they loved about puppies. I got nearly the same response from every woman I spoke to: “How much time do you have?” Judging from the conversations I would strike up with (half-)willing strangers, women had spent a lot of time thinking about how their gender impacts their lives, but men visibly hadn’t. While that conversation had been blossoming with women for decades, for men, accepting directions was proof that the system was broken, which goes against the natural impulses of what being a man means: not to admit confusion or ask questions. It had me wondering: If men can’t ask for directions to the closest gas station, then how the hell are they supposed to ask for directions about being a man?

  The more I thought about how rarely men ask for directions, the more I realized that what I had written off as arrogance could actually be rooted in something much bigger, with much more far-reaching consequences than just getting lost on the highway. It made me reflect on all the other ways that not asking questions revealed an inability to show intellectual vulnerability and how it spilled over into the struggle to demonstrate relational tenderness or emotional flaws. It also made me think about a whole host of myths that we entertain about men that could affect their lives in small or large ways.

  As far as I’m concerned, being any gender is a drag.

  —PATTI SMITH

  AMUSE-BOUCHE:

  But First, a Quick Crash Course in Gender

  Before I debunk some of the most common lies we believe about men and explore how their persistence in our culture impacts men’s lives, let’s get on the same page about what exactly gender is and why it matters. I promise it will be fun. Gender is one of the most universal ways that we currently organize as human beings. Its omnipresence and influence over our lives is so intrinsic that it can almost feel invisible, but it’s actually enormous. Just think about the first question a person gets when they’re pregnant: Is it a boy or girl? Before we’re even out of our mother’s womb, gender is already dictating the way people relate to us and understand us. Our entire society relies on us falling neatly into being male or female. It’s one of the first ways we classify human beings; it’s how we divide bathrooms and changing rooms; it’s required on our passports and driver’s license and we need it to get citizenship and health insurance.

  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. Just like we were assigned a name, we were also assigned a gender at birth and socialized according to what our culture has predetermined is acceptable and appropriate for that gender. 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. Sociologists Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman call the internalization of gendered norms and roles a routine called “doing gender.” Their paper that coined the expression was published in 1987 and it remains one of the most-cited papers about gender of all time. It compares our daily lives to a stage where we are all actors simply reading scripts that we’ve been assigned. Of course, just because we are socialized a certain way doesn’t mean we can’t deviate from the roles that we were encouraged to take on, but we’re all still part of a system that rewards us for how well we perform these lines and alternatively punishes us for writing our own. The most repeated myth about gender, which has wide-ranging impacts for all of us, is that it’s fixed, binary and purely rooted in biology. It’s actually not! When someone’s gender identity and their sex align, they’re cisgender. When gender identity and sex don’t connect, that person can identify in a number of ways, one of which is as transgender. They may or may not seek to transition.

  Although there’s a greater appreciation for gender being a spectrum, that progress is often derailed by pe
ople arguing that our gender identities should be simply defined by our sex. Unfortunately for those people, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that sex is not binary either. And make no mistake, this view isn’t just championed by activists; it’s coming from biologists, who are beginning to categorize sex as a spectrum rather than a binary. While there’s an assumption that the presence or absence of a penis determines one’s sex, when we look at nature the answer isn’t always that black and white. To put it simply, science doesn’t confirm that there are only two sexes. Although “nature” is often used as a tool in the defense of a binary, the irony is that it validates the theory that sex is a spectrum containing a multitude of categories. For starters, one out of one hundred babies simply doesn’t neatly fall into either category. Often referred to as “intersex,” these bodies are neither male nor female based on their anatomy, hormone levels or chromosomes. Many may never even notice their hormonal or genetic variances until later in life. One of the most well-known examples is Caster Semenya, the Olympic world champion in the 800-meter race. After she won the gold medal at the 2009 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Championships, she became the subject of controversy because her body produces high levels of testosterone. She was forced to undergo invasive sex verification to compete in the 2012 London Olympics, where she won a silver medal, but her right to compete with female athletes, despite her being one, continues to be debated. Her case is just one of the many that exemplify how complicated (and obstrusive) defining sex really is.

  Although all of our institutions are organized around the premise that gender and sex are a binary, it’s a fallacy. Throughout this book, I refer to men and masculinity as interchangeable, but I strongly believe in a world that goes beyond gender. But we must first name the system if we are to break free from it. In this book I am not advocating or supporting a gender binary but am, rather, interested in assessing the damage that occurs in the process of raising men and boys in a society that imposes it.