For the Love of Men

by Liz Plank

  You would think that this kind of disregard for the health of coal miners would have the men in the industry up in arms, but in fact the opposite is true. Idealized masculinity conventionally creates a narrative embedded in coal mining as a culture that makes it feeble to question the industry’s treatment of workers. Because it’s an industry based on the rugged miners or “tough guys,” in the words of Donald Trump, any concern for health or the environment is seen as a sign of weakness. This means that when men do raise their voices about the need for better environmental or health protection they risk public humiliation or stigma. Dustin White, an eleventh-generation Appalachian born and raised in West Virginia whose own father was a coal miner and died of cancer, gets this kind of backlash when he speaks out about the need for change in the coal-mining industry. As the project coordinator for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, he often speaks on the topic at conferences, and the reception he gets from coal miners is often hostile. When he took the stage at the National Academies of Sciences, he was heckled by one of the workers, who shouted, “Where’s your dress?”

  Shockingly, it wasn’t even the first time this exact line had been thrown at him. He told me that he perceived this as an attempt to discredit his masculinity, something that defines the identity of coal mining as a whole and that’s exploited by coal companies to keep workers silent about struggles or concerns. But this wasn’t always the image of the miner; it was a narrative artificially created by the industry to increase recruiting after years of oppressing their workers, leading to the biggest labor revolution in US history. It culminated during the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain in Logan County, West Virginia (which remains the biggest labor insurrection in US history), when coal miners wore red scarves (hence the origin of the term “redneck”) and many were shot down by “gun thugs” hired by the coal-mining companies to squash their own workers. That’s when the industry began an overt attempt to use masculinity as a recruitment strategy for jobs that many men no longer wanted to put their life at risk for. Dustin remembers when he was a young elementary-school student the industry sponsored activities and field trips to get young boys interested in the profession. “Companies changed the narrative and started saying that coal miners were powering the nation and that if you wanted to be like your dad and grandad, if you were a boy at thirteen or fourteen years old, you should go into coal mining to provide for your family because it’s the manly thing to do,” Dustin said. “Over time they developed this mentality that the miner is this big tough guy. So when it came to environmental issues, before [the companies] hired gun thugs, and now their actual employees were the ones who became intimidating.” This marketing strategy worked wonders for the coal industry. Dustin said that any demand for reform of the industry is now viewed as an attack on it, almost unpatriotic, yet men are told to toughen up whenever health consequences come at them. “As men we are told to be emotionally detached, but I am literally watching people I love die.” Although these jobs are already dangerous, the reliance on toxic masculinity as a code of conduct makes them an even greater risk for men and is exploited by corporations to avoid accountability. Because of the strength of the gendered marketing strategy, men continue to fight on behalf of the companies poisoning them. He says that although workers don’t speak publicly against the industry, when he gets them one-on-one they admit that they feel hopeless because for many it’s the only path to economic prosperity, and although they’re worried about health, they feel helpless. “All of these men are basically broken,” Dustin said.

  For Dustin, this issue came to a head when he had to witness his father spending the last few weeks of his life without access to water because of the 2014 West Virginia Water Crisis, which was caused by a chemical used to clean coal being dumped into the Elk River, a source of clean water for three hundred thousand West Virginians. “Watching my father go through that was the culmination of everything I was fighting for.” Left without any clean water, Dustin melted snow and boiled water from the creek to keep his father alive. “The Red Cross came only once. I told them my father is dying of cancer and they only gave me one case [of water].” The harrowing way his father had to spend the last few days of his life keeps Dustin awake at night. “The irony of the whole situation here is that this man who came back from Vietnam and had to go into the coal mine because that was the manly thing to do to provide for his family, he didn’t have access to clean water because of the industry.”

  But there is reason to have at least a glimmer of hope for the men currently employed in these male-dominated industries like coal mining. There’s emerging data that shows we can make these industries less deadly for men if we tackle the culture of weaponized masculinity within them. New, creative programs are starting to show that when entrenched traditional masculinity ideals are challenged, health outcomes can improve. Oil rigging, for instance, another industry that is heavily male dominated, has dealt with issues similar to those of coal mining, with high levels of accidents and health risks. But when two oil rig companies decided to implement a program centered on giving men emotional vulnerability training, overall accidents went down a whopping 84 percent over a fifteen-year period. The workers, who were essentially offered group therapy and given space to open up about personal problems, stress and anxieties, not only became more productive (they handled more barrels per day) but also became more reliable and efficient. The researchers who observed these changes found that simply challenging the ideals of masculinity through allowing men to be more open with each other and ask more questions made the men engage in less risk on the job.

  When men are freed from the box of what a man can or cannot do on the job, their lives dramatically improve.

  WOMEN CAN’T BE WHAT THEY CAN’T SEE. MEN CAN’T EITHER.

  Our ideas about who we can become as career professionals start in childhood. After all, one of the first questions we ask children is “What do you want to be when you grow up?” When I speak to adult audiences I usually start my talk by asking who has kids. After those people raise their hands, I tell them to keep their hands up if they have ever told their daughter that she can do anything that a boy can do. Most people proudly keep their hands raised. When I ask who has told their son that he can do anything that a girl can do, the room goes silent because almost every single hand goes down. I often ask myself how come we’ve progressed to a point where we don’t think girls should be limited by gender, but boys can be.

  I hope by now I’ve made it abundantly clear that the disappearance of traditional working-class male jobs has meant that we need to rethink what a woman’s and man’s job looks like. But in a world where men are shunned for adopting any semblance of a feminine characteristic, it is easy to see why men haven’t rushed to take jobs in female-dominated industries. Just search the word “nurse” online and see what pops up. There’s barely a shadow of a man’s image. It’s easy to see why they wouldn’t be lining up to apply. We often say women “can’t be what they can’t see,” but we often don’t apply that same saying to boys and men. If a young man is thinking of becoming a nurse, a simple Google search might be enough to discourage him from pursuing that dream.

  That’s if he’s even allowing himself to entertain that career goal in the first place. If a man is a millennial in the workplace (who will make up 75 percent of the workforce in 2025), he grew up in the golden era of gender-segregated toys. Toy stores had two colors, pink and blue, and very rarely did parents venture outside of the expected toys for their children’s gender. The toys we give children determine who they think they can be. The toys we refuse to give can have an even greater impact on their self-actualization. We cannot divorce the limited roles we offer boys from the limited roles men see for themselves. If the vast majority of nurse kits are bright pink and their ads only feature girls, what does that signal to boys who may be interested in this profession?

  Although many people believe that toys have always been divided and categorized by gender, that’s
far from being the case. We assume it’s normal because it’s the reality we live in right now, but targeting kids with specific toys based on their gender identity is a fairly new phenomenon. Although there was some differentiation between boy and girl games before the 1950s, that differentiation came to a halt after World War II. In fact, research by Elizabeth Sweet shows that by 1975 nearly 70 percent of toys showed no gender marking. But something happened when, in the mid-1980s and 1990s, toy stores went back to a visible division between boy and girl aisles, assigning almost each kind of toy to a specific gender. These drastic marketing changes in toy stores mirrored the dramatic shift in the industry, with large corporations targeting specific genders for their products. For example, Lego, makers of one of the most gender-neutral toys, started creating girl-specific Legos with female characters with large eyelashes and more revealing clothes. A few years later in the early 2000s, Disney created the Disney Princesses franchise, marketing products around Cinderella, the Little Mermaid and other female characters like Tinker Bell. This marked the first time Disney marketed products that weren’t related to a film release. It quickly turned into a $3 billion industry by 2013 with over twenty-five thousand products by 2006, becoming Disney’s fastest-growing collection in the brand’s history.

  This has had a real impact on the development of boys and girls, worrying psychologists, including Lori Day, who told The Boston Globe that “boys and girls stop playing together at a much younger age than was developmentally typical until this recent gender segmentation.” The practice of assigning certain toys to boys or girls persists despite research showing that girls and boys don’t inherently show preferences for toys that follow gendered lines. Although it’s unclear why we assign pink to girls and blue to boys, research by Sui Ping Yeung and Wang Ivy Wong on Chinese preschoolers found that ascribing certain toys to certain genders increases children’s preference for colors that researchers assign with their gender. And they also found that making a toy the color traditionally associated with their gender had no impact on the boys’ performance with a tangram puzzle but that calling a toy “for boys” enhanced their performance at it. So in other words, what largely defines their preferences for certain toys is heavily rooted in what they are told is appropriate for their gender.

  It bears repeating that gender is largely a social construction. We assign gender significance through social norms and rules, but the differentiation between boys and girls is something we prioritize as a society when in fact there are more behavioral and cognitive differences among boys then there are between girls and boys. These differences matter only insofar as adults give importance to them. In fact, until children reach preschool age, they believe that gender can change and is not immutable. One well-known study showed children three photos of the same baby. In the first photo the baby was naked, in the second he was dressed in an outfit that reflected his gender and in the last he was dressed in a way that reflected the opposite gender. Most of the children aged 3–5 believed that the gender of the baby can change depending on what he or she wears. If a girl dressed like a boy, she was a boy. If a boy dressed like a girl, then he was a girl. However, once they reach 5–6 years old, gender becomes fixed, as it is for most adults. Children start subscribing to the idea that gender is rigid and largely inflexible. But they certainly don’t start out believing that. Essentially, by the time they reach age 5, children have completely absorbed the thoughts and views of the adults around them. Children start believing that certain things are just for boys or just for girls and even their preferences start to reflect this newly absorbed adult-imposed gender regime. Furthermore, research shows that children choose toys based on what they think is the right toy for their gender, so the way that a toy is marketed and perceived and the feedback they get from their parents and peers when they play with that toy is incredibly impactful. But what if children could just choose? What if we saw every child as an individual rather than a gender? Maybe if we left kids to their own devices we would find there are more differences in toy preference across one gender than there is between the genders. And besides, imagine if we divided toys on the basis of other markers of identities, such as race or religion. It would be outrageous for toy stores to have a Muslim or Christian aisle to divide up acceptable toys for children of each religion. Why is it acceptable to do it with gender?

  I know what some people are already thinking: it’s just toys; relax. But although it’s tempting to deem toys insignificant, they aren’t frivolous. Research shows children primarily learn about acceptable roles and model behaviors through play, so it’s unsurprising that the toys that were marketed to them as youths shaped their life choices. The boys who grew up being given trucks and mechanical tools are being asked to apply for jobs that they were never given permission to explore. How different might the world look if instead of giving boys a truck and girls a doll, more would be given the freedom to choose?

  Although some companies are starting to make concerted efforts to make toys more gender neutral—Target removed gender-specific labeling in its department stores in 2015, for instance—gender-neutral toy marketing is still rare. The debate around gender-neutral toys in the last few years has focused largely on liberating girls from the sexist pressure to play with princesses, dolls and other pink things. This has been largely dictated by the market. Parents started questioning what the toys that were being marketed to their girls were doing to their confidence and the scope of the roles they saw themselves occupying in society. After seeing its sales dip, the makers of Barbie attempted a last-ditch effort and revamped the decades-old brand, moving away from the thin, white blond doll and putting a bigger emphasis on racial diversity, larger body types and female empowerment. Whether a more “feminist” Barbie can have a positive impact on girls is debatable, but toy companies’ increasing concern about what their products are doing to girls is nonetheless a move in a positive direction.

  A small handful of companies is applying a gendered lens to the way they market toys for girls but also for boys. The makers of American Girl products, for instance, recently announced their very first male doll. According to Mattel, the male doll was among the top requests of their clientele, but the decision caused quite a stir. After seeing the doll featured on Good Morning America, Reverend Keith Ogden, a pastor at Hill Street Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, wrote a scathing warning to his parishioners. “This is nothing more than a trick of the enemy to emasculate little boys and confuse their role to become men,” he later told The Washington Post. He told another newspaper that allowing boys to play with dolls would corrupt their childhood. “It’s not natural for a boy to act like a girl. It’s not natural for a girl to want to be a boy,” he told the Citizen Times. “You’ve got the government and people who placate this mess instead of telling little boys they can’t change their biology.” His preoccupation about boys playing with what we have deemed as “girls’ toys” is not uncommon. Although a majority of Americans believe that it’s good for girls to be exposed to toys that aren’t traditionally for girls, fewer are comfortable with that idea when the genders are reversed. This difference is especially drastic among men. A Pew survey showed that while 72 percent of men say girls should be encouraged to play with traditionally boys’ toys, only 56 percent says the same about boys playing with girls’ toys.

  But the closer you look, the more you realize that American Girl is an outsider in the toy company industry. Corporations’ newfound concern about the messages they are sending to girls has not been paired with the same concern for boys. The toys marketed to boys have just as many damaging stereotypes about their gender: they tend to be more violent, more competitive and rooted in domination rather than cooperation. In addition to that, boys are often given toys that help them develop spatial and cognitive skills, but they are less often given toys that encourage social and emotional development. Research published in the International Journal of Diversity in Education shows that dolls can teach empathy and prev
ent bias in children of all genders. Why are so few of them marketed to boys and why are so many parents reluctant to let their boys play with them?

  This uneasiness with boys playing with anything that could be attributed or associated with girls relies on a steady fundamental belief that cuts across society: that being feminine is a weakness. If what women did weren’t so devalued, men would have no problem engaging or dabbling in any of it. If there was nothing wrong with femininity, no one would be worried about men exploring it. In other words, the reason why we as a culture are scared of men acting like women is because we diminish the feminine.

  People are so uncomfortable with letting boys explore their feminine energy that when parents risk letting their boys explore outside the toxic masculinity cage, it’s perceived as bad parenting or even child abuse. For instance, when celebrity Amber Rose posted an Instagram of her 4-year-old boy getting a manicure, it prompted a severe backlash online. Concerned internet users asked if giving a boy a manicure would be damaging for the boy, rather than wondering if our social norms that make us react in this way are precisely what threatens boys’ well-being. Manicures don’t screw boys up; our reaction to them receiving manicures is what screws them up. And this isn’t even the first nail polish gender-panic incident. Back in 2011, J.Crew’s president and creative director Jenna Lyons was featured in the company’s magazine lovingly embracing her son who was sporting pink toe nail polish. The caption read: “Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink.” The Media Research Center called it “blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”