by Liz Plank
Victor explained that the limiting definitions of manhood meant other men felt uncomfortable with his disability. “I think there are layers of curiosity, and some of those questions can be uncomfortable. It’s hard to think of themselves as asking for help or think of themselves as having to negotiate their needs or desires though another person, needing another person; those are really difficult questions for a lot of men to ask themselves.” He explained that disability is just life manifesting itself and this can be scary for men who are faced with what they don’t have the imagination to think about.
When we spoke about the role models that exist for men, he said there were plenty, but that we often failed to see how they represent masculinity differently. “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.” Victor referred to the fact that some of the greatest leaders were those who embraced issues that we traditionally associate with femininity like empathy and human dignity, leaders such as Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Victor’s main problem with our current view of masculinity is that it demands an obfuscation of any sign of weakness, which by definition makes you less strong. “You have to have an understanding of your core weaknesses to celebrate your strengths,” he explained. “The strongest men are the ones that also understand their weaknesses. If you’re the captain of a rugby team, if you know your team has a vulnerability of weaknesses, you are a much better captain by recognizing that than ignoring that. You’re a better man by knowing your weaknesses rather than ignoring them.”
He cautioned against men denying parts of themselves. He explained that right now, men are either chauvinistic pigs or the equivalent of white soft bread. “I would hate to see all men taste like white rice. And I’m sure women would hate that, too.” Victor’s advice for men was simple. Let the world see all of you.
PART II
I Love Men
It does give you a good feeling to know that there’s something that you can do to help you become the master of the mad that you feel, and not have to hurt yourself or anybody else.
—MR. ROGERS
7 The Great Suppression
It had no name, but it was everywhere. I would hear about the crisis affecting men and women’s intimate relationships wherever I turned. I heard it in my group texts with women, in the conversations I would overhear in coffee shops, and it even flooded my Instagram feed. Women had always complained about difficulties in their romantic relationships with men, but something felt different. Suddenly it felt like women were done. They had put up with men who were emotionally inconsistent or unavailable for too long. Women were fed up and had reached their limit. They were desperate to love men, but according to them, men had become impossible to love. In other words, women were no longer willing to raise the men they wanted to date. But women’s frustrations were just one side of the story—men were frustrated, too. The women in men’s lives were asking them to be more sensitive in private, but men were still expected to hide the fact that they were even capable of feelings in public. Their girlfriends were telling them to open up, but society was still telling them to man up. They didn’t know which man to be and, honestly, I didn’t blame them.
Women’s pain was real. “Hi! Today, please meditate on how easily we accept women’s pain as collateral damage in men’s self-discovery,” read a viral tweet by writer and author Carmen Maria Machado. Her tweet came on the heels of a widely read New Yorker column by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Junot Diaz where he revealed disturbing serial mistreatment of the women he had intimate relationships with due to what he said was unresolved childhood trauma. A few days later, my phone started buzzing with different female friends sending me the same message. It was a meme of a young woman surrounded by half a dozen hungry dolphins with the label “men who need therapy” inscribed over the dolphin pack. When I shared the image on my Instagram with the caption “If your girlfriend has become your therapist, don’t date her, pay her,” it took no less than two minutes for me to receive an alarmed text message from my boyfriend at the time: “Is this for me?” It was.
It wasn’t just me. Other women, too, were complaining about the men in their lives being so emotionally stunted that they had given up dating men altogether. Women were deleting their online dating profiles, spending their free time in women-only social clubs and opting to rent or buy real estate alone rather than wait for the right partner to build a permanent home with. I heard echoes of this dissatisfaction from almost every straight young woman I spoke with. “I just started realizing I have such rich relationships with the women in my life,” my sister said. “Why would I lower my standards when it comes to my relationships with men?” Other friends had fundamentally rearranged their priorities. “I’d rather spend time at work than working on some guy’s emotional growth,” one friend told me. When I came out as queer to my friends and started dating women, I could see the envy boiling inside my straight female friends. While they were doomed to what they considered a pool of undatable men, I had, well, other options. My friend Meredith even designed a T-shirt that read: “Sadly, still straight.” It seemed like women’s expectations were evolving faster than men’s abilities to fulfill them.
Women weren’t only deserting the dating world over this; they were also leaving the men they had married. One friend left her husband because he would tune out and watch television every night, refusing to even go on a date or go to couples therapy with her. Another walked away because he had hidden a drug problem from her and, once she found out, refused to get help. Another woman told me about a controlling husband who blamed her for trying to leave after he got physical with her. “If I had cancer you wouldn’t leave me, so you shouldn’t leave me if I do this,” he told her one night after she tried to end the relationship. “I looked up all these therapists. I did all the work. I made sure they took the insurance and said I would go with him,” she told me. When she did and he was given anti-anxiety medication, he refused to take it because he was offended it had even been prescribed. This was more than emotional problems; these women were left dealing with their husbands’ unresolved mental health issues. Many women didn't feel married; they felt like rehab centers.
“Depression in men often doesn’t look like depression in women,” journalist Julie Scelfo told me. She began studying the issue a decade earlier. “It manifests itself in other ways like anger, drug use or alcoholism.” In 2007, she wrote a lengthy cover story for Newsweek on men and depression, and it turned out to be the most-read story of the year. “I remember the editors were surprised because it was the early days of the shift to online reading and they hadn’t expected the story to be that popular.” It didn’t get a lot of clicks right after it was published, but people kept reading it through the year and they weren’t just reading the story; they were writing to Julie about it. She found herself inundated with emails and letters, but the vast majority of them were not from men—they were from women. Julie was floored that so many women had been moved to get in touch and that nearly all of them described their frustration and loneliness in similar terms. “He doesn’t want to do anything,” one letter said. “I feel like I have to choose between my life and my marriage vows,” another wrote. “If I leave him and go have my own life I feel like I’m a bad wife. But if I stay, I die inside.” Julie was astonished, yet, in some ways, unsurprised. She began thinking of this vast corps of unhappily married women as “married widows.”
One conclusion Julie had reached from her research is that men are dealing with a mental illness but are unaware of it. She had been intrigued by a study undertaken by Michael Addis at Clark University in Massachusetts in response to the fact that men were reluctant to admit they were depressed. Instead of advertising support groups for those “suffering from depression,” researchers told her they hung up signs describing a meeting designed to help with “the stresses
of living.” The result? Men from all walks of life showed up in droves. “Men don’t admit they are depressed,” Julie said. “But stress doesn’t have the same negative connotations.” In other words, for many women, their relationship problems were actually undiagnosed mental illness.
Many women said that when they tried to bring this up with men, they would either get angry or shut down. “The only time I could get him to have a real conversation was after he had had a few drinks,” one woman told me. All of these different women’s stories sounded eerily familiar. In fact, I kept hearing the same thing over and over again. 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.
I call this crisis the great suppression. Men grew up disowning their emotions. It’s a kind of emotional estrangement so pernicious and so embedded in the way we raise them it’s almost invisible until it’s too late. No wonder men weren’t able to manage their feelings: as boys, they had been taught they didn’t have any. Emotional expression and management was a crucial skill that simply hadn’t been properly instilled in men. In fact, boys who show it get reprimanded. Boys don’t cry. Be strong. Don’t let him know it hurt you. If you like her, pull her pigtails. Of course when you don’t share your feelings, they don’t simply go away; they just come out in different ways. The way some men tend to bottle up their feelings has been observed by researchers. It’s called emotional restrictivity, and it’s something that is learned, not innate to their biology. 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. Jansz’s research shows that this blocked emotional state has disproportionate impacts on men’s health. And now that their female partners were no longer willing to do men’s emotional labor for them, it was costing them their relationships, too.
What women were asking for from men was pretty simple: emotional labor. A study from the University of Virginia examined five thousand heterosexual couples and found that the most satisfied women had partners who had one thing in common: emotional engagement. Researchers found that a woman’s happiness in a marriage is correlated with how much “emotional work” her husband performs. Feeling understood and connected to her husband was the strongest predictor for a woman’s level of marital satisfaction. But for many women, that just wasn’t happening in their relationships or marriage. And while many of their mothers had put up with their partner’s unwillingness to address their emotional turmoil and take responsibility for their mental health, this generation of women was beginning to wonder why they should. Women were walking away from emotionally abusive and deficient relationships because, for the first time in time in history, they could. Women are more educated and more employed than at any other time in history. Single women without children have the smallest wage gap with men (although women of color still make far less than white women). An increasing number of women have more money and decision-making power, and it was only a matter of time before this trickled down to their romantic relationships. The more independent women become, the less likely they are to tolerate relationships that don’t meet their needs.
While women are demanding that men be more emotionally fluent, men are still receiving a very different message about what their role in the dating world is. In my many years of sipping frighteningly overpriced vodka sodas in the company of questionable yet carefully selected members of the straight male community, I’ve noticed several interesting trends, not the least fascinating of which is our collective insistence on one gender paying for the other gender as an ultimate sign of respect. I’m not exactly sure when we all agreed that men who are on dates with women should get the bill, but I know for a fact it wasn’t when women were allowed to have opinions or credit cards, which feels simultaneously several and not enough years ago. It’s curious that while we’ve let go of many norms and even laws regarding relations between women and men, this one has held on for dear life. Overconfidence in our own imaginary gendered rules has meant that although every heterosexual man knows that he is supposed to pay on a first date, only a fraction know they’re supposed to ask the women they date follow-up questions.
When I talk to men about what they have been taught about dating women, it’s as if they had been prepped for a business transaction rather than an emotional one. Of course some women really care about arbitrary financial rituals like buying dinner or drinks, but women who will go on another date with a guy exclusively because of how much he spills on dinner are becoming an endangered species. They still exist, but they are being slowly replaced by the proliferation of a new kind of woman who has her own savings account and a banker named Todd. She doesn’t want a sugar daddy, she wants good company; but herein lies the problem: men have been taught hard-and-fast rules about how to be the former but, curiously, not on how be the latter. While we obsess over whether men should pay for dinner or pull out chairs for women, we muddle the real issue, which is that the new friction between men and women on dates exists outside of these rituals, not within them. When we talk about modern dating, the debate is not whether men should pick up the check or not but rather the more challenging question, which is: If women can also now pay for their own food, what do men do?
In other words, if your job is no longer to pay for the date, what’s your job on the date?
The truth is dating is hard. It’s hard for women, it’s hard for men and it has become increasingly and unnecessarily painful for all of us because of shifting gender norms, which have come to modify the rules about dating. But it’s not like we’ve all settled on a whole new set of rules. 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.
This pressure on men became clear to me when I sat down with conservative commentator Tomi Lahren and two of her friends on a sticky, hot day at a bar in Dallas, when I interviewed her for my podcast. We disagreed on everything from institutional racism, immigration to climate change and men were no exception. Specifically, I wanted to ask her about a video she made that was titled “Is It Just Me, or Have Men Gotten Really Soft?” In it she worries about the “helplessness of today’s young men” and how undatable it makes them. “It seems few can change a lightbulb, let alone fix a flat tire or change oil, and that makes for pretty slim pickings for the females out there looking for a match.” The video received millions of views, resonating with a lot of people (and of course angering some, too). A few weeks after our encounter, she also tweeted: “As I watch millennial men struggle to lift their bags into the overhead bin I am reminded how f’d we are if there’s a draft.” When I asked her to explain her position on modern masculinity, it was pretty clear that she didn’t welcome a conversation about alternative masculinities; in fact, she was personally insulted by it:
I think being twenty-four and dating or watching my friends date, it’s very obvious; watching TV, it’s very obvious. I think we’ve gotten to a point where masculinity has become a negative thing, it’s become an offensive thing to be a man. It’s one thing to be tolerant of those that are metrosexual or maybe a little more feminine, it’s one thing to be tolerant of them; it’s another to glorify them.
When I pushed back at her use of the word “tolerant” to describe her attitude toward men who display more traditionally feminine characteristics, she explained, “We’ve gotten to the point now where masculinity has now become something that is offensive to people, and I’m offended by that. I know that masculine men are offended by that as well.”
Her friend John, a towering six-foot-something buff guy in his late twenties with a buzz cut, wearing a tight-fitting shirt that showed off his muscular stature, nodded enthusiastically. You could tell this topic fired him up. He felt strongly that when we had conversations about new ways of being a man, it meant his way of life was under attack:
I was raised that you always hold the door, you pull a chair, you treat her with [respect]. When some of those neo-feminists come out and say, “Oh, you think I can’t do it myself?” It’s like no. I know good and well you can do it yourself. I just want to do it for you because I love you […] Some of these people out there are just so adamant for the sake of it being classified as equality that we shouldn’t do that. Then you have the birth of the new-age man …
When I stopped him to define what he meant by a “new-age man,” it got fiery:
If we want to boil it down to fashion, we could go that route: skinny jeans, very metrosexual, very effeminate. It’s cool if you want to do that; if that’s your thing, do your thing; be happy with it. But don’t you dare turn around and demonize my class of people that want to be like the old-school type of men. Not criticizing or belittling women, but just being the old-school alpha male that “if you come near my woman or you insult her, I’m going to knock your teeth down your throat.”