by Liz Plank
Wade is one of the biggest feminists I know, and his journey into becoming an ally for women arose as a natural path. “Being gay connected me specifically to what I had read about women’s experience. It means you are hypervigilant. Similarly, for women, safety is not always there.” The marginalization he experienced as a result of his skin color was additive. “Being a black man familiarized me with what it means to be oppressed.” He explained that coming to terms with his gender wasn’t as obvious as his other identities. “The male thing was the last space for me to interrogate. I was existing thinking that being a man was separate and I didn’t think about what it meant to exist as a man.” He talks about the lack of interrogation around masculinity as a form of self-inflicted avoidance. “There’s a subtle depression. As men we don’t know how much of ourselves we are repressing.” Wade recounts being flabbergasted the first time he traveled to India and saw men publicly showing affection to each other in Mumbai by hugging or holding hands, especially given that India has some of the strictest laws when it comes to penalizing homosexuality. You would think countries that punish gayness with death wouldn’t be more progressive on public displays of affection between men, but somehow it felt like a strange homoerotic fantasyland. One of Wade’s friends who was native to India explained that because homosexuality was so overtly policed, affection between men wasn’t. Because it was believed no gay man would dare do something in public that indicated his homosexuality, public affection between men was largely accepted. Because being gay is not considered an option, these men were free to be close to each other out in the open. “In America where gay marriage is law, men don’t want to show affection to each other,” Wade explained. “The idea of being thought of as gay, to many, is worse than being gay.”
Homophobia at its core is a banishment of the feminine. “The root of homophobia is sexism,” Wade said. He explained that straight men are uncomfortable with gay men because they believe gay men are performing acts that only women should. “You’re giving another man a blow job; that’s what women do,” Wade said. “Heterosexual men go straight to the sex act. Which is why they hate women also. You will never meet a man who is homophobic and also not sexist. If you hate women, you’re bound to hate anything that acts like one.” That’s why Wade believes it is so important for gay men to be feminists. There is so much commonality in that struggle and interconnectedness.
Wade said that marginalized groups working toward a common goal is the only way to combat the rise of groups like the alt-right. “These men feel unsafe because everything they’ve been taught to believe is cracking: heterosexuality is cracking, [a] white world run by white men is cracking and everything they’ve grown up to believe that was black and white is cracking,” he said. “Put a tiger in the room and watch people do anything to survive, even if it’s against their own interest. We have dropped a tiger inside of white men.”
True friendship is seen through the heart, not through the eyes.
—NIETZSCHE
8 Bromance
If you want to get men to talk about masculinity, ask them about urinals.
I learned this pretty quickly after striking up the topic with groups of men and realized that while women use the bathroom as an opportunity to bond and catch up, for men it’s a strategic game of chess. Men described a whole host of rules about the process of urinating, the most fascinating of which was the importance of the buffer urinal between men, regardless of their relationship. I was told that when there was no space for the urinal buffer, a man would take the stall. If the stall wasn’t available, they would forgo the urinal buffer or sometimes form a line. Where they peed was critical, but where they looked was also consequential. Any eye contact was a huge faux pas. Pulling out your phone was, too, although it depended on who I asked. The rules surrounding conversation were also important to respect. For some men, it was unconscionable to maintain a conversation once both were engaged in the act; for others, it depended on the level of proximity. If it was a friend, sure. If it was a coworker, absolute silence. When I asked men if they would pee next to a friend if they entered the bathroom together, I didn’t expect the diversity and intensity of opinions and responses. For some men it was absolutely forbidden, while for others it was a no-brainer that they should be next to each other. The most fascinating part was that no one had explicitely taught them these rules, but transgressing them came at great cost. They didn’t know where these social directives came from, but they knew the consequences of not respecting them. The fact that going to the bathroom could be such a minefield for men reveals something interesting about how intimacy is handled and negotiated between men. Upon discovering just how guarded men had to be around each other in public bathrooms, I started to wonder about all the other parts of their lives that required the same kind of vigilence.
As it turns out, this mandatory empty space that men are expected to hold between each other is not only present in washrooms; it’s also visible in men’s friendships. Although there is a disproportionate focus on the toxicity of female friendship in pop culture and movies like Mean Girls, when researchers have studied male friendship they’ve noticed a strange phenomenon. While women tend to build activities around their friends, men approach friendship in a more transactional way, building friendships around activities. Whether it’s watching sports, playing sports or socializing as part of a club, men are focused on the doing more than the being, especially when compared to the way women do friendship. Men are even more likely to focus friendship around joint activities and are more likely to speak about those activities when they are interacting with each other. While women prioritize smaller groups or one-on-one interactions with their friends, men tend to engage in larger all-male groups, which obviously makes intimate bonding less likely.
Given the code of male friendship, it’s no surprise then that straight white adult men are the demographic with the least amount of friends. Add divorce and aging, and the pool of friends shrinks even more dramatically. This has caused a quiet crisis where men are left yearning for intimacy but unable to ask for it. It’s what I call the male intimacy paradox: while men report wanting more vulnerability from their friends, they aren’t asking for it. Half of men report that they don’t speak about their personal problems and report craving closer connection with those male friends. And this is regardless of class, sexual orientation, race and even relationship status. The barriers to same-sex intimate friendship are fueling an epidemic of male isolation.
When I spoke to my male friends about how they felt about the friendships in their lives, it opened up a Pandora’s box. “[Toxic masculinity] limits my friendships because it keeps things superficial,” Chris Connolly told me. “It creates a dynamic where it’s impossible to be tender, confused, scared, aggrieved, lost … In other words, impossible to be fully alive. The sad truth is that it’s actually deeply, deeply alienating.” He explained that overcoming idealized masculinity is rooted in this idea that men pretend like they have it all figured out when they are around each other. “I’m learning to express myself more fully around the softer and messier emotions that are often seen as taboo for men. This includes learning to confront and accept the ways in which I myself embody toxic masculinity despite my best intentions,” he explained. “So the biggest barrier I face in connecting with other men is the fear of vulnerability lurking beneath this ‘got it, thanks’ stance that I’m referring to.” Chris said that this pressure to never ask for help or admit weakness had trained him to develop a shell when he’s around his own gender:
When it comes to being around other men, I can physically feel the fear pushing away that vulnerability. I change my posture and stance to be more rigid, guarded, almost militaristic. My tone of voice changes; the muscles around my mouth change. All of these are deeply learned behaviors that guard against the possibility of vulnerability—the possibility of not having a clue what the fuck I’m doing, or of being scared, or of being wrong or of having acted like an asshole.
Even if we as men reject toxicity, we are so scared to be found out that we end up burying it deeper.
This defensive behavior Chris is talking about is not innate; it’s learned. We see this behavior really crystallize in adulthood, but this is not how boys start out. In fact, the way boys and girls approach friendship is very similar, until they become teenagers, when platonic same-sex relationships take a turn for boys. Niobe Way has spent years studying this phenomenon. In her book Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, she features heartbreaking interviews about boys experiencing a deep loss when they enter adulthood as men: a loss of intimacy and connection with other men. I heard similar stories when I brought it up with men. “I definitely experienced a rude awakening in high school,” my friend Ed Kennedy told me. “When I came to high school I was repeatedly rebuffed by men, both from acquaintances and friendships.… I remember so clearly getting shut down and not understanding at all.”
When I researched the strange intricacies of male friendship, it was pretty clear how this happens: if idealized masculinity instructs men to never be vulnerable and to avoid intimacy with other men and to never admit needing anything from anyone, it makes sense that deep friendship would become difficult to develop and sustain. In fact, everything that boys are taught creates an environment that would make male-on-male friendship almost impossible. That’s why I often heard men repeat the same thing over and over again: that most of their friends are guys but that their closest relationships were with women. “Even with [the men] I am close with, it’s still frustrating to not have the openness I have in my female friendships for things like conflict resolution, emotional depth and support,” Ed told me. “The vast majority of my male friendships tend to stay at the acquaintance level.” He said that when he tried to dig further in his friendships he was often stonewalled. “When there is deeper emotional talk, it just tends to put the guy in coach mode and be like ‘Hey, buddy, I know it’s tough, but we keep our personal problems off the field.’” This explains why, for the vast majority of men that I’ve spoken with for this book, their closest confidant is a woman, often their romantic partner, if they are straight.
While women face each other and feel comfortable with physical proximity, men have to remain cautious, which then makes emotional connection harder. If you want to know how our culture feels about two men having emotional intimacy, look no further than the term we use to speak of it: a “bromance.” Male friendship is so fraught that we as a culture have invented a special term to characterize the extraordinary phenomenon of two men having dinner together.
Men have the ability, the need and the desire to form deep and intimate friendships just as much as women. A quick look at history shows us that men were not always so guarded when it came to creating bonds with other men. Let’s just say that male friendship in America wasn’t always so self-conscious. If you look through nineteenth-century photos of men, you’ll notice right away that male friendship has undergone a massive transformation. It used to be common for men to seek a photographer’s services to capture them holding hands, sitting on each other’s laps and being physically intimate. Because it is so rare to see men enjoying that level of physical proximity, you’d assume the men in the photos are romantic couples rather than friends. The physical proximity men displayed in the photo studio reflected the comfort they had with the emotional intimacy in their everyday interactions. It wasn’t uncommon for powerful and highly regarded men to show great proximity with other men. Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, was known for using affectionate language in his letters to other men. Abraham Lincoln famously (and yet platonically) slept in the same bed as his best friend, Joshua Speed. It would be impossible to see anyone show no visible sign of shock upon hearing the news that Donald Trump regularly shares his bed with another man.
Frederick Douglass said that his friendships with other men helped him survive slavery. “I must say, that I never loved, esteemed, or confided in men, more than I did in these,” he said about the men who were enslaved and would socialize after long, grueling and painful days. “They were as true as steel, and no band of brothers could have been more loving.”
Male love was also foundational in the American colonial and Revolution periods. Richard Godbeer, a professor of history at the University of Miami, wrote a whole book detailing the sensitive and tender ways men related to each other during these pivotal moments in American history. In his book The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic, he says men would refer to each other with affectionate pet names like “dearly beloved” and “lovely boy” without restraint. “Pre-modern American men embraced a range of possibilities for relating to the other men that included intensely physical yet non-sexual relationships,” Godbeer writes. This approach didn’t just define men’s relationships; it also impacted and guided entire value systems that placed a greater emphasis on fraternal collaboration and family over a more centralized patriarchal authority model.
This historical snapshot of our views and comfort with male intimacy offers an interesting commentary on the evolution of friendship and how that can be influenced by social pressures. But it begs the question: If men used to be this comfortable being this loving with each other, what exactly happened to male friendship in America?
Homophobia happened.
Although the term “homosexuality” was coined in the late nineteenth century, it recently went from being a behavior to an identity that was associated with a mental disorder. This transformation was abrupt and had wide-ranging consequences on men. Showing affection toward another man became a feared label rather than an innocent action and men adjusted themselves accordingly, especially because such behavior could come with criminal charges and repercussions with the introduction of sodomy and decency laws. Godbeer notes in his book that the way we currently approach both friendship and sexual orientation, although we assume it is just rooted in nature, would be confusing to the patriots or anyone living in the colonial period:
The modern assumption that most people are attracted—sexually and romantically—to either women or men would have surprised early Americans.… Male friends often referred to the pleasure that they took in touching and holding one another; they delighted in the proximity of each other’s bodies … Sexualized love was just one in a rich repertoire of possibilities open to premodern men as they explored their feelings for male friends.
Justifiably, when homosexuality was penalized, men began to want to protect themselves from that threat. But times have changed. Thanks to the tireless work of LGBTQ activists, homosexuality is no longer a crime; it has been removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and, despite continued systemic discrimination, even some of the most hard-line conservatives now openly support same-sex unions. So in other words, although homophobia is less politically sanctioned, it has left vestiges that impact current male behavior and habits. The male affection shortage in America is almost like a kind of post-traumatic homophobia. Society has begun to move on, but the male code hasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, homophobia is alive and well, but despite a majority of men being tolerant of homosexuality, the skeleton of homophobia is still the pillar of mainstream masculinity culture, because the rules haven’t been rewritten. Masculinity is mirroring old and archaic views that have been themselves debunked. Adhering to old laws of masculinity in modern male friendship is like saying no to a free upgrade. Why wouldn’t you?
The consequences of not addressing post-traumatic homophobia are dire. And, this is not just an American problem. It has created a full-blown loneliness crisis that’s become so severe that governments in Denmark and the UK have started to intervene. British research shows there are 2.5 million men who have zero close friends in the UK. That’s roughly 7 percent of the male population. A report from Australia found that one in four men can’t name a single person outside of their family whom they can rely on and that 37 percent feel like they
aren’t getting the emotional support or connection they need. Data also shows that the more a man subscribes to ideas of self-reliance, the less satisfied he is in his friendships. Men who didn’t have strong relationships with their fathers and men who are unemployed or face disability or illness are particularly at risk of emotional disconnectedness. When I traveled to Iceland, several men described it to me as a public health crisis that was being heavily debated in the public sphere. And this goes further than just friendship; we see more isolation when it comes to social ties to family, too. British research shows that almost one in four men have one monthly contact with their children (regardless of their age) or less.
When I brought up friendship to men, it was often something they hadn’t always given a lot of thought to, until significant moments in their life. While I observed that for many of my engaged female friends, a common problem when planning their wedding was narrowing the number of bridesmaids, men I spoke with had the opposite issue: they had trouble finding a best man. Although some men end up having numerous friends at their side, it’s oddly telling that in the oldest heteronormative tradition, women had multiple female friends at their side, while men are expected to have just one, and that even that seems hard to find. Many of the men I spoke with recounted a similar experience of having to write an “awkward email” to an old college buddy they had lost touch with to see if he would be free for the wedding.