I’m not sure when I first started really thinking about what it even means to be a man, what masculinity is. I think it’s something that begins in a very intangible, subtle way almost from birth – it’s in the culture around you, almost imperceptible because it’s so “normal”. Straight, cis-gendered men definitely notice it the least.
Using your strength to nourish and strengthen others in turn.
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The challenge for a lot of dudes is to learn to care for and care about a world that does not seem to give the slightest fuck about you. I intend to spend decades of my life helping dudes with this.
You kinda have to be a sucker for punishment because some of these dudes are so far gone that when you try to help them, their main goal will be to try and ruin you, because they don’t believe someone like you could be genuine, and so they wanna expose you as the fraud you must surely be.
So you have to be quite strategic about this, play a long game, make sure to manage your own emotions and psychology well, recognise that there are some people you can’t help right now. Focus on helping those you can, connect them to each other, strengthen the crew, support each other.
Important thing here is a “do no harm” principle – if you offer someone help and they react poorly to it, the worst thing you can do is react poorly in turn. Then you’d have made things worse than if u did nothing. So to really help others one has to let go of their own neediness.
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plaintext is not a great medium for discussing concepts like masculinity. that said, in my experience, study, conversations with hundreds of people, etc
I’ve found that there’s a general consensus ideal of what masculinity is. it’s broad enough to allow for multiple archetypes, and yet when you zoom all the way out I think there are discernable patterns talking about this is always over-reductive, over-simplistic, and yet if good-faith attempts aren’t made to discuss them, then the commons will be dominated by bad-faith approaches.
latest thing on the TL is “boyfriend dick“, and it’s a pretty classic Scissor that splits people into differing camps depending on what parts of the post you focus on. Some see OP as having a fragile ego, being too sensitive. Others see OP’s gf as cruel.
I’ve seen friends who I trust/love/respect say things like, “well, he shouldn’t have asked if he didn’t want to know.” which is… an odd read in the abstract, but a read that makes sense if you read it with certain pre-existing beliefs about gender relations, which we all have.
and that in turn reinforces (suspiciously convenient, huh) my personal belief that gender is not a private, personal thing, but rather, it’s about your place in a collective social environment. It doesn’t matter what I think, it matters what everyone else thinks. I have no intent to impose my views on gender on anybody else. there are many valid ways to interpret and conceive of gender.
My sense is, according to the current consensus, based on people’s revealed preferences, the expectation is that good men must be emotionally resilient. You must be able to take insults and attacks without complaining. Without “being a lil b*tch” about it. It’s not easy!
Here I get to an understanding of why phrases like “boys don’t cry” and “man up” etc exist in the first place, if we assume good-faith and good intent. The core idea, which may have been corrupted in transmission over time by incompetent and/or bad actors, is to *prepare* boys for the world, for the expectations and assumptions other people will have of them.
<Cave of Adullam video – great example of how to support masculine expression in a nourishing way – attentive, encouraging, coach supports and challenges the boy and increases the boy’s power>
People often default to simplistic dichotomies: the idea being that you either cry or you don’t. you either seek to suppress your emotions, or you express them whenever, however. it’s obvious to me that neither of these yin/yang extremes are sustainable or effective.
Here some people ask things like, “is it really any different for girls and women? don’t they also need to be strong and resilient?” yes, just as boys can benefit from learning skills associated with femininity. (and I highly recommend that guys read women writers, for eg)
but
the thing to understand, which I think people know at some subconscious/internal level, but may not have thought to explicitly articulate, is that boys and girls, men and women are judged differently. Social strategies that work for women do not work as well for men & vice versa.
Is this “fair”? I don’t know. Probably not. I’m a tall dark-skinned man, which means I never have to worry about my personal safety walking anywhere. But I do have to worry about being perceived as a threat, eg by law enforcement. For my wife it’s the other way around.
I do think it’s accurate to say that, in popular consciousness, while in recent years we’ve made a lot of important progress (and still not enough!) in understanding the challenges that women & girls face, we do seem to have kinda dismissed dude’s struggles as relatively trivial.
But being a man is hard in its own way. which is part of why, if you’ll allow me to say this (again, tone is so difficult to convey via text), there are allegedly so few “real men”. because it’s *hard* to become one. we have a shortage of teachers.
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(2018)
My wife pointed out to me recently that there are so few spaces for men to gather and talk about their feelings. We could create them at any time if we wanted to. Women aren’t stopping us. But male-only spaces often quickly become overrun by dominance games.
So in practice what lots of guys do, instead of confronting each other about their bullshit (because other men can be cruel, violent and domineering – men know this very well) is try and leech emotional support from women in female spaces.
By leech support I mean like asking female rape victims “what about men”. Instead of asking their male friends. Because they know their male friends will laugh them off, while women have been socialized to not say “fuck off m8” (& also fear male retribution, just as men do).
It’s easier to hate gays than to be Christ-like. It’s easier to mock minorities and SJWs than to go after real institutionalized power. And it’s easier to attack women than to stand up to men.
Here’s a fantastic example of men supporting men – the ManKind Project, featured in Follow This on Netflix. How rare and precious this is, and how sorely lacking in the world. It’s up to us men to provide this to each other.
This is real connection, this is honesty & earnestness, vulnerability & openness. It is not weakness. The guy crying is visibly fit and strong, physically. but even if he weren’t, this sort of radical honesty is, in my opinion, the foundation of love and strength.
If you think lesser of these men for reaching out to each other for support, for being surrogate fathers & brothers to each other, for helping each other safely discharge their anguish + speak openly about their fears… ask yourself why that is, and where you learned to think that. Women aren’t stopping us.
Here are a couple of evergreen quotes from Bill Burr and bell hooks.