I ask myself this a lot, frankly. The tropes, archetypes, narratives, and socially informed values of what masculine is and isn’t are, well, everywhere. Masculine identifying individuals face a consistent liminal interaction with the world. Masculinity grants privilege and safety in many ways and in many ways upholds harm, to others and to self. I’m going to touch on a few ways I view masculinity and some exploration ideas/books if you’re curious about this topic. I do think therapy plays a big role in this exploration and I feel strongly that it is equally important that masculine folks have community spaces to discuss, experience, and create accountability for each other.
What is Masculinity?
The definition of masculinity is simply just norms, characteristics, or values associated with men or boys. When you think of masculinity, what comes to mind? Perhaps emotional stoicism, power, aggression, strength, independence, confidence, action or solution oriented, etc… These traits become a set of performance standards of what it means to be masculine. Hyper-performance of these traits is often deemed as toxic and a more moderated performance version is viewed as healthy or positive.
Now, this may not get everyone super excited or even may invoke some eye rolls or scoffs, but I view masculinity as having a need to move away from a binary of healthy/positive to toxic social performance to an interactive process of self-inquiry and community involvement. If we can unpack our own masculinity we can reach a more authentic and whole expression of self.
So there are, in my opinion, a few challenges in understanding and unpacking masculinity in a more nuanced manner.
1. Masculinity offers privilege and social capital while also harming other identities and harming masculine folks.
2. The idea of healthy/positive masculinity is built on the same standards that led us to toxic masculinity.
3. Masculinity discourse creates defensiveness. I’ll try to break these down.
Masculinity Offers Privilege and Social Capital:
The deviation from these norms isn’t okay or is met with lack of acceptance or shaming words/behaviors from others.Think about being a young boy. What do you think he might experience? I can speak to being socialized as boy, you’re told you shouldn’t cry, you’re told you’re not doing enough, you’re told that being dominant (in sports, in relationships) is a good thing–either directly or its modeled to you–, and you’re expected and allowed to get away with more than your femme counterparts. You learn all the ways to succeed are through hyper- performance and in a lot of cases you never have to question safety or security. Unfortunately, you also typically learn to hide from or not express your emotional world.
Upholding norms gives you social clout, acceptance, positive praise, and can create loneliness, feeling like you can’t let parts of yourself out, being worried that if you admit to having a difficulty you’ll be termed as feminine, unmanly, weak… Now the immediate short term harm of this is much smaller than the violence and social privilege men have as a whole but on the individual level this is where the impacts are most felt. The traits that are praised in the wider social context lead to isolation, avoidance, and a litany of mental health challenges. The privilege that is maintained by dominance, often violence, and strict hyper-performance ideals more often than not begins to chip away at the belief in self to show up differently, feeling inadequate, and losing touch with empathy and compassion for others and for self. This all leads a lot of masculine people into a space of loneliness and emotional hurt, which paradoxically makes them try to cling more tightly to the norms because they should fix this feeling. But this feeling isn’t one that gets fixed through more of the same, it gets taken care of in a more sustainable way when we acknowledge that it hurts us, that we are in fact in pain and need care.
Healthy/Positive Masculinity is Built on the Same Standards that led us to Toxic Masculinity
If healthy/positive masculinity is just the opposite of toxic masculinity, I fear that we end up back in a performance based acceptance of self and social acceptance. The idea that nice guys finish last is an example of this to me. Here’s what I mean, let’s say you become really emotionally open and vulnerable but you end up trying to use this for social clout or maintaining privilege, you’re doing it for the performance. Now, granted it is a much nicer performance but it doesn’t require going to the root of the issue, that hegemonic (i.e. dominant/aggressive or limited to traditional roles) masculinity, no matter how nice it is performed, will still prioritize cis-men over everyone else.
I fully believe that masculinity can be and is a wonderful thing but that and that creating individual definitions of masculinity as a piece of one’s identity is important to develop a for oneself can be liberating from hegemonic norms to a consensual model of masculinity. What I mean here is that, masculine individuals can learn to allow their whole self by inviting self to present to self and through requesting permission to share self with others. Woah woah woah, Ethan, you said self like a million times, well, because I think that’s where it starts!
This is a process that requires a lot of accountability to the privilege you have, the pain you feel, a learner’s mindset to make change, and permission to self to be accepting of self, the parts you like and the parts you don’t like. Therapy can be a great start to explore this and begin to embody it. Social norms limit and dictate who you are and who you get to be or become. By going back to the same starting point to create a “different masculinity” we inevitably come back around the same challenges and issues just in a sneaker way…
Masculinity Discourse Creates Defensiveness
Masculinity discourse creates a lot of defensiveness because frankly, those who privilege from it often don’t want to lose that privilege, don’t want to have to see where and how they have caused harm, don’t believe they have privilege in the first place, or think that they should be privileged. It gets messy, often folks in very vulnerable positions feel insecure and grab onto rhetoric or ideas that offer comfort or relief from the insecurity that inevitability maintains itself because the root has not been tended to. When masculinity is conditioned to see other points of view as a threat, we see emotional, physical, and social violence used to attempt to squash that threat.
Defensiveness is a normal defense mechanism for feeling vulnerable but too often we do not see accountability to behaviors from defensiveness, in fact often we see them celebrated. True strength to me, is holding the weight of the feeling and navigating it with honesty and accountability to self and others. Which is hard and scary work. To begin to move through this, masculine folks need to be seeking out and inviting care and accountability to each other. I need it, our young folks need it, our old folks need it… We need to center spaces for each other to build a new understanding of what it can mean to be masculine in the world.
What’s Next?
If any of this resonates with you, I’d invite you to consider a couple of things. The first being, it’s okay to just now begin the process of exploring self and how you want to show up in the world. That’s a scary process and it’s invaluable. It is also a process that involves learning to be okay with being uncomfortable, there is a reason we stick to the familiar… Familiarity is comfortable. Second, foster some good community that is willing to have this type of discourse, we don’t heal in vacuums or in isolation. Through developing intentional space with self and with others, masculinity can begin to look different in ways that are really exciting. I’d invite you to check out therapy, ask your friends if you can talk about this topic with them.
Lastly, I’d encourage you to check out this reading list:
● The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love – bell hooks
● Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood – Frederick Joseph
● Who’s Afraid of Gender?
● Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School – CJ Pascoe
● Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and Toxic Masculinity – Clementine Ford
● Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man – Thomas Page McBee
I work with a lot masculine folks trying to figure out what masculinity means to them, and I think it can mean a lot of different things to different people. If you base your masculinity on curious and consenting exploring of self, the way you show up in the world around you and in relationships, I think you’re doing work that will lead you to places that felt impossible to reach before. If you want a therapeutic sounding board on this journey, don’t hesitate to reach out.