by Liz Plank
It’s a common argument made by conservatives—that women’s empowerment comes at the cost of men’s happiness in relationships with them. The same logic underpins those who worry that women’s increase in income capacity emasculated their male partners. I always find this argument particularly droll because I have yet to meet a man who doesn’t like more money. Ali Wong points this out in one of my favorite stand-up routines, where she describes a sudden and rapid increase in income after her first Netflix special came out. “My mom is very concerned that [my husband] is going to leave me out of intimidation.” Her response is pitch perfect. “I had to explain to her that the only kind of man that would leave a woman who makes more money is the kind of man that doesn’t like free money.”
Women being able to play the role of the provider releases men from shouldering all that pressure alone. More money is only a problem for men in a society where their identity has only been defined by what they do rather than who they are.
But Venker is so nervous, she goes so far as to argue that progress in gender roles is not just bad for men; it’s bad for women, too. In one piece she wrote for Fox News titled “Society is creating a new crop of alpha women who are unable to love,” she says divorce would be less common if women were more subservient. It led to an atrocious Fox News breaking-news alert on thousands of people’s phones that read “men just want a woman who is nice.” When the notification went out, it unleashed a slew of confusion amongst many internet users, wondering if they had traveled back in time. “That’s what men like,” Venker argued in another piece. “Women who are easy to love.” This kind of fearmongering around women emasculating men highlights a persisting discomfort with women gaining more power in their relationships with men and the absence of a role for men outside of being the provider. Instead of seeing equality as a way to expand roles for both women and men and an upgrade from previous more fixed and traditional arrangements, it’s framed as a threat to the “natural” order. In her own words, Venker believes there is “something special about men being men and women being women.” She doesn’t welcome ameliorations in relationships; she wants a preservation of an old, restrictive and, frankly, outdated world order.
The biggest flaw in Venker’s logic is that she thinks fluid gender roles are prescriptive rather than expansive. Calling into question the ideals that idealized masculinity has instilled is not about telling men to act more like women or women to act more like men; it’s about letting everyone be whoever they want. It’s about letting personal preferences, not collective ones, guide women and men’s relationships with each other.
Besides, the idea that women have too much empowerment is an oxymoron. Unlike what the nieces of staunchly anti-feminist figures would have you believe, there is enough freedom and liberty to go around for everyone. Freedom is in fact like breadsticks at the Olive Garden; it’s unlimited. Contrary to popular belief, every time a woman earns her basic rights and freedoms, a man does not lose his manhood. When one human gets out of the cage, it’s a great day for humans and a bad day for cages. White people weren’t oppressed by the civil rights movement, and sales of hamburgers didn’t decrease when cheeseburgers came along. People weren’t like, “Screw this; cancel hamburgers because I can put cheese on this bad boy”; they were like, “Wow, this development is an improvement for all hamburgers.” Freedom is like pancakes at IHOP: you can’t run out.
And last, Venker’s argument is not just offensive; it’s factually incorrect. Men who see their female partner as their equal are the ones who go on to have the longest and happiest marriages. When relationship scholar Dr. Gottman performed a longitudinal study on 130 straight couples, he found that men who were the most likely to embrace their “wife’s influence” were the most likely to be satisfied and stay with her. This key characteristic in men most heavily dictates the success of a relationship. While recognizing their partner’s influence is associated with male happiness in a marriage, unhelpful ideals of masculinity teach men to deny it. In fact, submitting to a woman’s demands is a common way that we humiliate men for being emasculated or, in more crass but overused terms, “pussy whipped.” It’s another example of how being a “real man” comes to literally sabotage an otherwise good man’s relationship.
Although the lies about masculinity are often learned and passed on from other men, Suzanne Venker and Tomi Lahren embody the way women have internalized them and are often guilty of reinforcing them, too. And it’s not just coming from conservative women. Brené Brown discusses women’s discomfort with male vulnerability in her audiobook Men, Women & Worthiness: The Experience of Shame and the Power of Being Enough. She says that while women often ask the men in their lives to open up, women can’t always handle it. Brown tells the story of a man who came up to her after one of her lectures, eager to encourage her to speak about men’s experience of shame and vulnerability. “My wife and daughters … they’d rather see me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall off,” he told her. “You say you want us to be vulnerable and real, but c’mon. You can’t stand it. It makes you sick to see us like that.”
When I asked men how traditional masculinity presented itself, more than one man said they felt this pressure from the women in their lives. Jeff Shackelford was one of them. “I seemed to be drawn into a more masculine persona by the women I dated,” he said. They had their expectations of how men acted or how ‘tough’ they thought men were supposed to be. This led me to trying to fill a role, so to speak.”
Matt Cusimano said that coming out as pansexual showed him the ways in which masculinity is policed by all genders. When he dated queer men (more on this later) he found that building and developing intimacy was harder with men than women. However, the women he dated felt threatened by his sexual orientation being open to men as well. “Broadly speaking, I’d say my most repressed emotions have been tied into my queerness,” he said. “Women have often said that my queerness is somehow not masculine, unsexy and perhaps threatening to their goals of secure and stable monogamy.” Because we all associate masculinity with a repudiation of the feminine, when that disavowal is not perceived as complete, we start to question a man’s entire identity.
Matt isn’t imagining things. It isn’t uncommon for women to harbor an irrational fear that their male partner is gay. In fact, when Seth Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed Google searches for his book, Everybody Lies, he found that the number one question women ask about their husbands is whether he is gay. It reflects a fear among women that we don’t see with men who are in relationships with women. There are eight times more Google searches from women asking if their husband is gay than those asking if their husband is an alcoholic, although the latter is much more likely to be the case. Women are ten times more likely to ask Google if their husband is gay than whether their husband has depression.
Even when men said they had made the effort to unlearn toxic ideals of masculinity in their lives, they complained about it hurting their potential for relationships. Many men told me about staying away from meeting women in public because they knew other men had made that that kind of environment harder for them because women were less likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. In the same thread, Tim Hourigan said the omnipresence of destructive idealized versions of masculinity makes his life as a man more difficult when meeting women in bars or starting up a conversation with a stranger, even if it’s not with the intention of flirting. “[It] makes it more likely I’ll be seen as a threat, because of the behavior of my peers,” he explained.
Men explained that they felt like they were walking around on eggshells because toxic ideals of masculinity had created a hypersensitivity that had come to poison their interactions with women. They were being prejudged before they even opened their mouth. Alex Bell wrote that he needed to make up for the crummy actions of other men:
It impacts me by feeling I need to compensate for the effects of toxic masculinity in my own behavior and interaction with women. It means that I try a
nd go out of my way to ensure that my comments or behavior won’t be taken as flirtation or sexual come-ons. I even hesitate to initiate innocent invites to activities or events in fear that my invite might be misinterpreted.
This becomes a pernicious trap for men in the dating world because any attempt to deviate away from it is viewed as a transgression punishable through homophobic gender policing. If a man shows any resistance to traditional notions of masculinity, especially in his intimate relationships with women, it’s used as proof that he isn’t actually attracted to them. It can be used as evidence that he is somehow a fraud. “Everything is gay; if you dance you’re gay; if you sit a certain way you too are gay; if you pronounce your words correctly, congrats, gay,” Diosan Borrego said. “Especially Latinos.” This kind of policing relies on the age-old marginalization of queerness and its inherent devaluation in our culture.
While homophobia can often be felt by men who aren’t gay through gender policing, for men who are part of the LGBTQ community, it has more severe implications. Every queer man I spoke to said that “toxic masculinity” had made his dating life immensely more painful and difficult. My friend Carlos Maza said it was a problem most men in gay relationships deal with but don’t talk about. “It largely defines gay men’s dating lives,” he said. “It limits the way that we ask for what we need in relationships. It limits the way we express hurt and desire. It of course shapes the types of sex and physical intimacy we idealize. It looks slightly different but basically all the ways toxic masculinity fucks with straight men: imagine if both partners were doing it to each other.”
In other words, toxic masculinity doesn’t go away in men’s gay relationships. In fact, it can be magnified. The overt discrimination against effeminate men on online dating websites came up continuously. Every single guy I interviewed told me about the “masc for masc” phenomenon on many men’s dating profiles. “Masc” is a shorthand and colloquial term for masculine, which in this context is synonymous with a way of presenting yourself as virile and unfeminine. “Being masc is the ultimate in both the heterosexual and gay world,” my friend Pete told me. “The same hierarchy gets internalized in gay men. It’s a recipe for disaster as gays are not so ‘masc’ in the traditional context.”
Damaging stereotypes about Asian men being more “feminine” or less brawny mean that they face additional marginalization or mockery within the gay community. “We’re conditioned to think that the masculine, muscled all-American white man is the ultimate image of manhood,” my friend Tri Vo explained to me. As an Asian-American gay man, he’s seen how corrosive and limiting these ideals can be. “When a guy looks for a partner while his head is filled with all this toxic masculinity and stereotypes, it’s likely he won’t consider men of color to be at the top of his list ¯_(ツ)_/¯,” he said over text. Even gay dating apps have become a breeding ground for racism. In fact, at the time this book is being written, a class action lawsuit from Asian-American men who claim that the app Grindr allows racism to fester on its platform is ongoing. The case was spearheaded by Sinakhone Keodara, who got fed up after encountering several profiles with racist undertones like “not interested in Asians” or “not attracted to Asians.” Unfortunately, encountering profiles with racist undertones or overtones was not an experience unique to Asian-American men; in fact, the African-American queer men I interviewed had also encountered anti-black racism. Although gay dating apps can be the first real safe space for many queer men, less traditionally masculine men and men of color can experience overt discrimination.
Just how central and damaging idealized masculinity can be to men’s intimate relationships showed up in a conversation I had with Shalini Mirpuri, a couples therapist in Gainesville, Florida, about the most recurring problem area for men who enter couples therapy with their female partner. “I always find myself repeating ‘try to listen instead of trying to be right.’” She explained that men tend to try to rationally solve an argument, rather than pay attention to the emotions of their partner. If they were to shift to how she was feeling, rather than who was right, they would solve problems much faster. Interestingly, for men in gay couples the most recurring problems were relating to internalized homophobia and stereotypes regarding masculinity, which were mirrored in the conversations I had with queer men. When I asked Mirpuri about couples counseling for lesbians, her answer fascinated me. She said theirs were the easiest kind of relationships to tackle because of the absence of power dynamics she has seen with straight couples. She said the problems were down to personality issues, rather than the typical struggle for control in the relationships she encountered with straight and gay couples. Of course, this is not to say that power dynamics are never present in lesbian relationships; there are many ways these relationships can be toxic, abusive or violent. But the absence of toxic masculinity seemed to have an appeasing effect on relationships, or perhaps the presence of it seemed to be associated with conflict.
As a queer woman who has dated both women and men, I can anecdotally say that same-sex relationships can be much easier because there are no predetermined rules or roles. The first time I went on a date with a woman, I was floored. It was the first time I actually felt like I could be myself on a first date. There was no insecurity jungle gym to navigate. Queer relationships tend to be more fluid because each person is free to be who they are or want to be in the relationship based on their preference rather than predetermined roles defined by society. In a way, they are a social experiment for what relationships could look like where gender is not the most immediate organizing factor, as it often is. When you imagine what it would be like if we assigned roles in relationships based on arbitrary characteristics like hair color or earlobe shape, you see how ridiculous it is that we do it with gender. How weird would it be if we determined that the person with the darkest hair in the relationship should always get the check or that the person with the most detached earlobe always gets out of the elevator first? It’s just as senseless to assume that a characteristic like your gender should determine your role in relationships. Of course not all couples fall into traditional gender roles, but even the existence of that predetermined structure requires an acknowledgment of the structure you are deviating from. It’s worth thinking about what deprogramming ourselves could mean for heterosexual relationships.
This utopic absence of predetermined structures is how scientists explain the curious happiness gap between cohabiting gay and straight couples. Although you would expect that couples who don’t have to spend a day in court to fight for their right to order a cake for their wedding would be better off, the reverse is often true. Despite experiencing ongoing discrimination, persecution and stigma, gay couples in the United States report higher relationship satisfaction and lower levels of conflict than straight couples. One study from The University of Queensland that looked at more than 25,300 people in the UK and 9,200 in Australia found that gay participants felt happier and more positive about both their partner and the relationship, leading researchers to conclude it was because “relative to heterosexual relationships, same-sex relationships tend to have more equitable domestic work arrangements, less defined gender roles, and a greater sense of social connectedness to a community.” Their joy is contagious and trickles down to the rest of their family unit. The kids of gay couples are happier than those of straight couples despite the fact that they often experience or bullying because of their family arrangement.
We might not all have the luxury of being born gay, but all of us have the power to use them as inspiration. By letting go of preordained gender roles, responsibilities and power dynamics, men and women could dramatically improve their relationships.
But of course saying “just let go of toxic masculinity” to a man is like saying “just relax” to a person having a panic attack. Men will only break free from the masculinity trap when they have a safe alternative, but for the time being they’re growing up receiving the message that they are being surveilled and that any dev
iation from the ideals created by rigid masculinity will be grounds for embarrassment and rejection from men as well as women. The change is first and foremost individual, but it also has to be collective. No one is free from gender norms, and the messages that men receive about their gender is setting them up to fail, particularly in their intimate relationships.
Emotional vulnerability is not a sign of being weak; it’s one of the essential and key strengths of any healthy relationship. But if men are getting the message that showing emotion is bad, so-called feminine or weak and that it means they’ll be less valuable in the dating world and they’ll publicly be shamed for being “soft,” the results can be catastrophic for their intimate relationships. The paradox is that demanding that men be tough actually makes them weaker emotionally. Expecting men to be emotionally intelligent in their relationships is like expecting people to know how to do a butterfly backstroke when they’ve been instructed to never get wet. If you get the message that being in touch with your emotions means being weak, you’ll repress any feelings that come up, often unconsciously, which only magnifies them. Ending the great suppression could be one of the greatest gifts to people of all genders. Men could access their full humanity so that the people they love don’t have to do it for them. As my sister often says, if we all took responsibility for our own feelings, the world would be a much brighter place.
Boys learn quickly that it is unsafe to be an outsider.
—WADE DAVIS
AMUSE-BOUCHE:
Wade’s Story
Wade Davis grew up playing a game where a football was tossed up in the air and the person who caught it was “the queer.” He didn’t know he would later become an NFL player. He also didn’t know he would later come out as gay. “Boys learn quickly that it is unsafe to be an outsider,” he confided to me. As the first Diversity and Inclusion consultant for the NFL and one of the very first openly out players, he knows firsthand how hard it can be for men in sports to be different when conformity is currency. That’s how he explains why so many men end up falling in line with a stereotype they may not even like. “The reward for stereotypical and even toxic masculinity is acceptance in the dominant group,” he explained to me.
