by Liz Plank
In other words, when we let our gendered biases about boys dictate conversation about their needs, we fail to see what they actually need to succeed. Often our solutions to the problems of men are tainted with our own faulty assumptions about what boys and men are like. Those assumptions may make us feel comfortable and offer quick fixes for big problems, but there is no evidence they lead to sustainable change.
Boys also learn that “real men” don’t ask for directions. Any woman who’s ever driven with a man knows the agony of driving in circles rather than asking for directions. But the consequences of this lone-wolf masculine ideal have repercussions beyond shouting matches between women and men in the car and being late to brunch.
It means that men are less likely to communicate with their doctor or health professional. It explains why men’s skin cancer deaths have increased while women’s haven’t. Men wear less sunscreen, are less likely5 to wear a seat belt, visit the doctor less often and receive less preventative care. And when they do visit the hospital, they leave earlier than women. These are not biological differences—how often you think you need to go to the doctor is purely rooted in learned behavior. And men have inferred that asking for advice is not for them. Mix an inability to cope with emotions with a reluctance to seek help and you have the perfect—and lethal—mix for a mental health crisis. The way we raise boys and men is a recipe for disaster. And a disaster it has become.
Not all emotionally stunted men go on to do bad things, but the men who go on to commit crimes often have difficulty coping with emotions and a reluctance to ask for help. After all, it makes sense: men don’t have the tools to deal with something they’re not supposed to feel in the first place. For instance, men who become perpetrators of domestic violence often exhibit emotional ineptitudes. One study on men who were being treated for domestic violence found that “men who reported experiencing affect that was difficult for them to manage are more likely to abuse their partners and also tend to believe that men should not share their emotions or ask for help.”
Leaving the way we are raising boys and men unexamined has created a mental health crisis and female partners have become the first line of defense. As therapist Terry Real puts it, millions of men are living with “covert depression,” which he warns is a “silent epidemic in men.” Most of the behaviors that we most associate with men like anger issues, alcohol or drug use and abusive behavior are often attempts to escape mental illness. Men feel compelled to hide depression from their partners or their own families because it clashes with expectations of ideal masculinity of self-reliance and strength. “Many men would rather place themselves at risk than acknowledge distress, either physical or emotional,” Real writes.
Toxic masculinity turns men into a threat to women. Men’s violence against women is a worldwide epidemic. No country, community or society has found a way to stamp it out. For many women across the world, the men in their lives are the biggest threat to them. Male partners are the second leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States. Every single day three men will end up killing their girlfriend, wife or ex. Nearly half of all women who end up murdered are killed by a current or former romantic partner—98 percent of those partners are male. Homicide, primarily carried out by men, is one of the top leading causes of death for women under 45. In the first nine months of 2018, there were three mass shootings in Texas, all motivated by and targeting a woman who rejected the shooter’s advances. One researcher who examined fifteen school shootings between 1995 and 2001 found that romantic rejection was one of the most common features in gun-related incidents. As Michael Kimmel has noted, “righteous retaliation is a deeply held, almost sacred, tenet of masculinity: if you are aggrieved, you are entitled to retribution. American men don’t just get mad, we get even.”
That aggrieved entitlement stemming from the falsehoods we circulate about masculinity showed up in all its awful colors in the chilling manifesto left behind by Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old student who killed seven people during a mass-shooting rampage at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The video he posted online a mere few hours before the massacre, where he vows to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see,” describes his intention to murder women as a form of retribution for his inability to attract them. “I don’t know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime,” he said, before erupting into a satanic kind of laughter. “I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true Alpha Male.”
If Rodger were in a movie, his performance would be too on the nose. His motivation for the killing of innocent people is what happens when dangerous definitions of masculinity are left unchallenged. Instead of being castigated, he has been hailed as a hero, glamorized by hundreds of men’s rights groups and online forums. One of those devout followers praised Rodger in a Facebook post hours before ramming his van into a crowd of people for over a mile in Toronto, killing ten people and injuring fifteen. He described himself as an “incel,” short for involuntary celibate, a term men’s rights activists use to describe men whom women don’t want to have sex with. Although these are considered fringe men’s movements, the beliefs that underpin their ideologies aren’t that uncommon among regular men. For instance, a Glamour survey found that although 77 percent of men believe consent is always necessary during sex, a whopping 59 percent of them simultaneously believed that husbands are entitled to sex with their wives. After all, it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that it became illegal to rape your wife.
Toxic definitions of masculinity show up in the way that mass shootings are a uniquely white male disease. Although we focus on their mental health problems, what ties mass shooters together isn’t mental health illness (one study of two hundred shooters found that only half of them had clear evidence of mental health issues prior to the act); it’s narcissism, a sense that they’ve been wronged and a sense that they are the victim of injustice. Ironically, it’s not refugees who can’t find settlement, LGBTQ people who can’t get health insurance or African-Americans whose communities are terrorized by police who feel a sense of injustice so great they feel the need to kill others—almost every single mass shooting in American history was perpetrated by a white man or men. Everyone experiences hardship, but only one demographic has been indoctrinated to medicate with revenge.
Although these shootings become fodder for debates around gun control and bullying, rarely does the conversation turn to why they’re almost always done by men. Newscasters might not notice, but gun manufacturers certainly have. Their marketing is often explicitely designed to prey on young men’s insecurities. For instance, gun manufacturer Bushmaster put out an ad that equated gun ownership with renewing one’s “man card” only a few days after Adam Lanza used one of their semiautomatic rifles to shoot his mother in the face and go on to murder twenty innocent young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. For a period of time, the company’s website even contained a feature that allowed men to send each other notices that their man card had been revoked to facilitate peer pressure between men to buy more guns. The suggestion is that your masculinity can be taken away at any time (by other men) and that carrying a violent weapon that kills people is a surefire way to get it back. In a case won by some of the families of the Sandy Hook shooting, their lawyer argued that the gun manufacturer “may have never known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years.”
Toxic masculinity also turns men into the greatest threat to themselves. Men aren’t just more likely to carry guns; they’re also more likely to die from guns. In every single country around the world, male homicide rates are higher than the female homicide rate, and overall, men make up 79 percent6 of homicide deaths. When men end up being tragically murdered, they are most often killed by another man. Although politicians spend a lot of time trying to spin the gun control debate around racial lines by speaking about
so-called black-on-black violence, the more glaring demographic pattern in homicide is male-on-male crime. If we were to tackle the problem of men harming other men, we’d make a dent in crime rates across every continent.
But despite mass shootings and murders capturing more media and national attention, the highest incidence of gun deaths is as a result of suicide—86 percent of the people who kill themselves with a gun are men. American men are quite literally stockpiling guns. They are three times more likely to own guns than women and are six times more likely to kill themselves with it. Wyoming, the state of the iconic masculinized image of the lone cowboy, has one of the highest male suicide rates in the country, and incidentally one of the highest rates of gun ownership. Despite these worrying statistics about men’s willingness to take their own lives, we are reluctant to see men as being able to suffer. There’s a presupposition that maleness and dominance are undistinguishable, leaving no room for any other narrative of being a man. It’s so antithetical to view men as victims that the FBI never even included them in their definition of rape until only very recently. The result is that young men are the demographic the least likely7 to seek mental health help while also being the group who would benefit the most from intervention, given they are also most likely to die by suicide. Men who subscribe to traditional masculinity ideals tend to have worse health outcomes than the men who don’t. Men who believe in macho ideals of masculinity are less inclined to seek mental health help. They’re also less likely to use condoms, and view impregnating a woman as a strong marker of a man’s masculine capabilities. Young men who don’t see themselves as able to fulfill the male economic provider role are the ones who put the biggest emphasis8 on sexual prowess and toughness. The correlation is clear, and yet we do nothing.
Toxic definitions of masculinity also make it harder for men to develop and maintain simple relationships. If you aren’t trained to understand your own emotions, it’s fairly predictable that you’ll have difficulty understanding the emotions of others. Because men are encouraged to play games that center on competition rather than relationships, emotional intelligence is a muscle that never gets developed. Research from Dr. John M. Gottman, one of the world’s foremost experts on relationships, has found that a man being emotionally intelligent is one of the greatest predictors of a successful romantic relationship. Gottman finds that while it’s a crucial skill, it’s not always taught to boys. One of the biggest ways it shows up in his research is men resisting their wife’s influence by not attending to her feelings and desires. When a man resists his partner’s influence, Gottman says there’s an 81 percent chance the marriage will not survive.
It’s not just men’s relationships with women that lag behind; it’s their relationships with one another, too. Men have fewer friends and less in-depth friendships and become increasingly isolated with age. Loneliness is a disproportionately male problem. In the UK alone, there are 2.5 million men who report having zero close friends. The increase in aging isolated men has become such a crisis that governments in the UK and Denmark have launched emergency task forces to tackle the crisis. Aging men are more likely to be lonely than their female counterparts and less likely to have regular contact with their friends or family. Since men are instructed that intimacy is a sign of weakness, they don’t develop strong friendships that can sustain them. Loneliness is one of the main predictors for middle-aged white men, the most at-risk demographic for taking one’s life.
Lonely men are ignored while violent men are glamorized. Almost all of the top-ten highest-grossing films of 2017 had a white male protagonist who uses violence as a means of self-expression. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Beauty and the Beast, The Fate of the Furious—all of these movies have one thing in common. When do you become a hero? When you kill the bad guy. What does that tell us about what we value in men?
In so many of the most popular movies of late, almost all of the main characters who engage in violent behavior are, in fact, “good guys.” Beauty and the Beast is a perfect example. The Beast kidnaps and terrorizes Belle, his romantic love interest, as a way to build an emotional connection with her. And the story teaches us that this is not only acceptable, but hey, it works! It’s hard to think of the plot of a single Disney movie the millennial generation grew up with that doesn’t have a seriously questionable subtext normalizing men as predators. We often talk about how the princess trope teaches girls that they need to be docile, unambitious, unidimensional, rescued or controlled by men.
But what did those same movies teach young boys? We act surprised when grown men don’t understand consent when the most iconic and popular stories send very mixed messages about it. Whether it’s Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, the takeaway is that you don’t need permission. Consent is assumed, not affirmed. In fact, not getting consent doesn’t make you the villain; it makes you the hero. The guy who does it doesn’t assault the girl; that’s how he saves her.
This begs the question: If boys are taught that violence is the path to seduction and even redemption in movies, why are we surprised when they engage in it in real life?
Our culture also glamorizes white male violence in the way it is handled by the media. Although the vast majority of acts of domestic terrorism since 9/11 have been committed by white men, the media’s narrative is often one of shock at a troubled person whose life just took a wrong turn. Of course if these men weren’t white, their treatment would be different. We grade male violence on a curve—men of color receive far greater punishment, scrutiny and collective attention, while violence perpetrated by white men is far more invisible and still considered unexpected. The violence of white men can even be perceived as justified, especially when it’s against people of color. We see it in the case of the white police officer who killed Philando Castile for reaching into his glove compartment, or in George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin, a black teenager coming back from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles.
We see it in the way genocidal white colonialism is systematically glamorized in school curricula—a romantic version of mass murder of indigenous people encoded in the millions of history books our children read. We see it in the way state-sponsored violence and wars against other countries filled with black and brown people are left unquestioned and that any critique is delegitimized as unpatriotic. We see it in the careful selection of the people we allow or don’t allow in our country and in the fact that one of the most powerful men in the world calls these places “shitholes.”
There is empathy for the violent white man, a desperate attempt to “understand” him or figure out where he went wrong, as if white men hadn’t been responsible for the vast majority of the violence that occurred in the United States, from the slaughtering of entire populations of native peoples, to the enslavement of African-Americans, to segregation, the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, to the detainment of Asian-Americans and in new modern-day permutations with white-supremacy groups.
The gap left by the absence of a conversation or identity around positive masculinity has been filled by hate groups who offer men a missing sense of belonging and sense of identity. It’s no coincidence that experts have warned about a dangerous new uptick in the proliferation of extremist and white-supremacy groups not just here in the United States but all over the world. These groups have preyed on isolated young men who have been made vulnerable by a culture that indoctrinates them to believe that connection can be achieved through violence. Because it’s so hard for us to see men as victims, their vulnerability is often invisible.
The most important question is: Where is the version of a feminist movement, but for men?
If you stop to think about it, you realize how astounding it is that we all innately understand the fact that men are responsible for the vast majority of violent acts across the world as inevitable. But what if we wrote a different script for men? How could we better prevent our world’s darkest problems if we addressed the link between men’s isolation and their dispropor
tionate radicalization? If we viewed their violent outbursts as a weakness, rather than a strength, perhaps we’d properly pathologize rather than normalize the astronomical amount of male violence across the world.
Our toxic definition of masculinity presents itself in not-so-subtle ways. It presents itself in the election of an alleged sexual abuser to the highest office of the US government. History books will not skip the part where a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women by grabbing their genitals and who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct by nineteen women was elected and became the leader of the free world. It is now a part of American history that a man who has repeatedly made incestuous references about having sex with one daughter, fantasized about the future breasts of his other daughter when she was a newborn and barged into the changing rooms of teenage girls at the pageants he held was elected president by the American people.
Toxic definitions of masculinity even pose a threat to the livelihood of our planet. Scientists have started warning about a recycling gender gap. The data shows that men are less likely to practice behaviors that are eco-friendly, like recycling, than women and are more likely to engage in behaviors that hurt the environment, like littering. In fact, research shows that both men and women associate those eco-conscious behaviors with femininity and a repudiation of masculinity. So in other words, it’s not that men don’t care about the environment; they’re just taught to care about threats to their masculinity more. How different would the world look if men had the freedom to care about their planet as much as women do?
