by Liz Plank
I kept expecting the boys to doze off, get bored or fidgety or just dump me to go play on the field, but they remained engaged and demonstrated a playful attitude despite some of the questions being tough to answer for a lot of adults, let alone a bunch of kids. We played another game where we asked the boys to perform a set of tasks traditionally performed by women such as cooking, sweeping or taking care of a baby. Again, I could see them do the exact same dance as with the first exercise. They looked at me with a sense of embarrassment as their faces shouted I can’t believe you’re making us do this!, but once the first one got up and started enacting the task somewhat, rolling his eyes as his friends giggled a bit, the next one would get up a little more enthusiastically.
During both activities I could see the boys trying to read one another, which made sense given that men take cues from other men about how to act; in fact, we all do. Just like feminist Ryan Gosling memes invite men in America and Canada to be warmer to feminist ideas, these boys were quietly scanning one another’s reactions, trying to tease out exactly how the others felt about doing something that boys don’t usually do. I could sense that what was guiding the boys’ behavior was less their own willingness to engage in the gender-bending activities and more how acceptable they felt it was to the group. Their faces seemed neutral, but their eyes were screaming Is this okay? and I’ll do this but only if you are? It revealed just how simultaneously arbitrary yet powerful gender norms can be.
The leverage that gender as a system has over us is only as substantial as our willingness to honor it. Its omnipresence is completely diffused through a group’s decision to ignore it. In that moment, the boys were able to set their own rules free of judgment and enjoy the freedom that came with it. Once one boy let loose, it gave permission for everyone else to do it, too. It set the tone for the entire activity and for how freely the others engaged in it. It was always a bit hard to find the first volunteer, but once the arms started going up, the pace increased, the awkwardness dissipated and it was hard to get them to stop. It seemed like once one of the boys would break the first hard ice patch of gender, it created a path for everyone else to forge forward a little less carefully and a little bit more freely.
Within a matter of seconds, I got a glimpse of the instantaneous release that comes with being given permission to transgress the code of rigid masculinity. I saw the boys transform before my eyes, going from them shuffling their feet when they were asked to perform the traditional feminine tasks to literally fighting over who went next. They went from being uncomfortable to full-on giddy. The embarrassment in their eyes slowly turned into sheer excitement. In that moment I realized how meaningfully and quickly men could be different if we gave boys a license to be themselves. It was literally like they were breaking free of a shell they didn’t realize they had been carrying. Although we see this shift as a huge lift that requires a lot of time, education and policy, the workshop showed that altering gendered expectations can be well received. I’m not saying it’s always easy. We had created the parameters of a social experiment where we encouraged their transgression of social norms and gave positive reinforcement when the boys executed our instructions. Society doesn’t have the parameters of a fun game, and it’s still not a safe space where those kinds of risks can be taken. If we were only able to shape more environments like this, maybe boys could develop their true selves. I wondered what it would look like to give everyone a little bit more space to play with gender and more space to exist outside of it.
As I looked in the boys’ eyes all I saw was potential, which is, after all, the way we all start out. Every single man I had heard about the day before and hated so much had started out this way, too. I wanted to believe the boys I’d met that day would turn out to be kind and loving to one another and to women, but it seemed like in order to be good men, they would need to fight an uphill battle. It felt like they were born having to fight a kind of soul-crushing invisible hand pushing them in the wrong direction. What took boys off the beaten path of innocence?
After the workshop was over, I went looking for answers by speaking to men about their passage into manhood. I went around town asking a question that made no man particularly comfortable: “When did you know you were a man?” I was struck by the variety of the responses I received from men about what it means to be a man. Although most people speak Bantu, which originates from the Bemba ethnic group, there are seventy different tribes or ethnicities and dozens of different dialects and languages, so narrowing down the experience of manhood in Zambia is complicated. But similarly to when I would ask this question of American men, I wasn’t struck by the differences; I was struck by the similarities.
Every single man I spoke to had a different point of entry into manhood, but most of them had experienced some kind of ritual right around or after puberty. It varied based on their parents’ tribe, where they were from and what kind of community they grew up in, but what astounded me was that all of them had to do with one thing: pain. Almost all of the rituals that were meant to turn boys into men required hurting others or hurting themselves. One middle-aged man I spoke to had experienced an initiation ceremony, fairly common with certain communities in the Bemba tribe in Zambia, where a boy is brought into a remote part of the woods with a few men from the community. The boy is left to survive there for several days (sometimes weeks, depending on the tribe), often alone. On the last day he is circumcised. This can be done without warning or any anesthesia when the boy is as old as 18, fully aware and conscious during the entire procedure. This man had gone through it. When I asked if his father had been through the same ceremony, he shook his head no. He looked off into the distance and replied stoically, “He had to kill a lion.”
Of course, manhood rituals are not unique to Zambia; in fact, as Esther Perel had explained to me during our social experiment in Washington Square Park, they are common throughout the world. Even in industrialized countries, men take part in very specific rituals. For example, in the United States, where the age of drinking is 21, young men are often encouraged to mark that day by heavily intoxicating themselves. Before a man gets married, he is often expected to partake in a celebration with other men where naked women dance and perform for them. Although these rituals may seem mundane to those who do them, it’s just because they’re ingrained in our culture that they feel so normal.
I got a sense of how important self-reliance was to manhood in Zambia when I sat down with a well-respected elder and environmental activist well known in Livingstone, Uncle Benny, as he was called around town. He was 73 years old and had grown up in a small village in Zambia called Mansa. I was introduced to him by his son, 21-year-old Solomon, who was also born and raised in Zambia and worked as one of the program coordinators for the Girl Impact program. Although Uncle Benny was a smart leader in the community, he also had a je ne sais quoi, a sort of swagger that you immediately couldn’t help but fall under the spell of. When I asked him about the process of becoming a man, he said that it’s what some would describe as “abuse.” He said he found those rituals necessary, although he confided he would never make his sons endure them today. “If you saw me carrying logs of firewood or carrying an animal from the bush, they would call it abuse, but for me it’s not abuse,” he said. “We did a lot of rough things, and I thought my grandfather was very, very cruel at the time, but it’s only now that I’m grown-up that I see he was teaching me to be self-reliant.” It was clear that Uncle Benny could be grateful for what he had been put through without necessarily wanting his own children to go through it.
“I enjoyed mine because it was a different time. [You] can’t do that now.” Although the rituals varied from one generation to the other, the values remained the same. When I asked him what he wanted to instill in his son Solomon, he said the means were different, but the ends were the same. “He learned that it’s important to be self-reliant and not depend so much on his parents all the time.… That’s why he’s able to [live] outside of my h
ouse.” When I asked Uncle Benny if he was as determined to transmit self-reliance to his daughters as his sons, he paused. “I think it’s more for the men than girls,” he responded. “The girls…” he said. “Families keep them for a longer time, let them learn this and that and do class and that kind of thing and so on.” There was less of a pressure to teach girls independence than boys. The urgency to teach the boys to be self-sufficient wasn’t surprising, given the dire consequences that were reserved for men who weren’t able to be. Although there’s nothing wrong with teaching someone to be self-reliant, there can be negative consequences when it’s imposed rather than encouraged. I found that out when I asked Uncle Benny what happened when a man wasn’t able to provide. According to him, there was simply no room for error. Not being able to provide was a personal tragedy. “Then you become a failure in one way or another. You are failing to provide. You must provide whether you like it or not. Unless your wife works, or you have children that can provide, otherwise you have to work really hard to provide. That’s what we are meant to be,” he said. “As men, of course.” In that moment I wondered what kind of pressure providing placed on men and whether it encouraged them to leave when they felt like they couldn’t fulfill that role or couldn’t live up to the self-reliance ideals imposed on them. It didn’t make men’s abandonment of their families less enraging, but perhaps it could help explain it.
Although speaking with Uncle Benny illuminated how hard it is to fulfill certain ideals of masculinity, speaking with his son also revealed how quickly norms about masculinity can change. One of the ways it showed up was when we talked about gender roles. You could tell that for Uncle Benny, cooking and sweeping were not tasks he could see himself doing. “My tradition is about girls doing a certain job. That is what our tradition says. That’s what we do and we love it that way.” At the same time, he wasn’t alarmed by his son shifting gender roles in the home; in fact, it was the opposite. He seemed fairly cool with it. “Today it is a little bit different,” he said. “Now Solomon can pick up a pot and cook. The girls can also do a couple of things because life now is a bit different.” When I asked him if he minded that Solomon did something traditionally reserved for women, he was quite indifferent. “Yeah, he cooks what he wants. He does. He eats quite a bit.” Uncle Benny laughed. He had no problem with his son obeying a different set of rules.
But the differences between father and son were as stark as the similarities. For instance, unprompted, both of them brought up the importance of pursuing equality in their romantic relationships with women. “She has a lot of control in the house for the good reasons,” Uncle Benny said in reference to his wife, Selena. “We are equal partners. I have been very lucky.… She is very straightforward. If there is something wrong, she’ll always tell you. Even if it’s in the middle of the night, she wakes you up and says, ‘I didn’t like that you did it that way.’ I know at the bottom of my heart what she says is correct.” Uncle Benny didn’t brag about respecting his wife, nor did he credit himself for recognizing her influence in their marriage. He simply proudly spoke about revering his wife and respecting her judgment and her trusting his. When I asked him what the secret was to a long-lasting marriage, he credited it to an equal partnership. “We’ve been together for forty years. I think we’re just blessed.”
Although both Solomon and Uncle Benny seemed to know how to bend the rules of masculinity, Solomon seemed to take more pleasure in it. Although he never explicitly criticized traditional masculinity, you could hear some rebellion in his voice. When I asked him what it meant to be a man, he started listing things as if they were military orders to be taken seriously. “Cut your hair short,” he said. “Be the breadwinner; be in control of things,” he continued. “Don’t wear pink.” As he said that, I noticed the hat he was wearing was salmon-colored.1 “Sometimes I wear pink because pink is a statement,” he said. “The little I can do, I will do. I’ll wear pink. I don’t care.” When I asked him if he could ever consider being a stay-at-home dad, he was reluctant, but he said he could consider it if it had to happen. “I love cooking and I love staying at home,” he said, smiling. But then he got more serious and explained that an equal partnership would be his preferred arrangement. “I wouldn’t love to just stay at home and do the cooking. I love to work, so I would rather share,” he said. “One day it’s me; one day it’s you.”
One of my favorite things about Solomon is that he seemed to carry zero shame in breaking the rules of the male code, especially when it was in front of his male friends. In fact, he viewed intimacy with other men as key to their relationship. He described crying with one of his friends a few weeks prior. “Those are the moments that bring you together,” he said, wide-eyed and almost in awe. “‘Dude … we cried together.’ We were quite close already, but that’s like in the files now.” He talked about crying in front of his friend as a badge of honor and an important crystallizing step for their friendship. “Crying is awesome,” he said. “It’s healthy.”
After my interview with Uncle Benny, I went to hang out with Solomon and his friends, and they were probably the loveliest group of college-aged men I’d ever hung out with. They embodied a different kind of masculinity that was open and comfortable with difference. They embraced individuality even if it contradicted the beliefs of their parents and their parents’ parents. They were part of a global generation of young men who took pride in being nonconforming and brave enough to use their voices to shape a different world.
Through my conversations with different men and boys, I realized that we didn’t just allow the squeezing of emotion out of men; we institutionalized it. Toxic masculinity was most powerful when it was invisible, and it was most subtle when it was ritualized. Although it’s tempting to think it’s coming from a bad place, most often the opposite is true. The people telling these young boys not to cry and not to depend on others weren’t trying to hurt them; they were trying to protect them. Even though I wanted to changed it, I started to understand the motivation behind it.
I thought back to the end of the workshop with the boys. I led a ritual that had been on my bucket list for a long time: a fake funeral for gender roles. I asked the boys to choose a stereotype about men they wanted to get rid of, and we held a fake funeral for it with a ceremony, flowers and everything. I made a casket out of cardboard and one by one the boys tore up the stereotype and put it inside the casket. I thought about what a collective funeral for unhelpful definitions of masculinity would look like. I think we’d be shocked by how many men would show up and, given the choice, how much they would throw away.
After my trip to Zambia, I felt elated and excited to be part of a group of like-minded people who didn’t need to be convinced about the importance of affecting boys to empower a lasting and radical kind of social change that could benefit everybody. Although I’m certainly not an expert on Zambia and the observational research I conducted was on a very small scale, it was gratifying to come across the work of people who had much more knowledge than me that backed up what I’d observed. Even in the months after I returned, I came across a growing number of experts who are now pointing to the importance of including men in development and policy initiatives, with some going so far as pushing for a new gender equality index that would capture men’s experiences in addition to women’s all over the world. Although I have many issues with it, a new index was recently created by researchers at the University of Essex and the University of Missouri in Columbia. Their new figure, the Basic Index of Gender Inequality, takes into consideration early male deaths due to lower life expectancy, workplace accidents and hazards, as well as obligatory enrollment into the military, which tends to disproportionately impact men globally, in an index that measures well-being according to gender. Although the measure is far from perfect (case in point: it ranks Saudi Arabia as more equal for women than men, which is absurd) and the motivation of the researchers is not entirely clear, it’s pushing us to view how the patriarchy may not hurt eq
ually, but it hurts everybody. The same culture that tolerates violence against women because it assumes they are weaker also promotes violence by (and against) men because it assumes they’re naturally violent. The patriarchal beliefs that pressure men to take risky jobs with little protection are the same ones that underpin the pressure for women to be protected and kept inside the home against their will. The root of the belief, although it justifies different treatment for women and men, is the same. Measuring gender equality by only showing the way it has costs for women is inaccurate because it doesn’t capture the scope of harm for the entire population. The problem with the Basic Index of Gender Inequality is that it continues to pit women’s issues against men as if they weren’t related. Recognizing women’s pain doesn’t preclude us from recognizing men’s. Ranking our pain is unproductive because it gets us away from the fact that our afflictions are all connected.
As I looked over the interviews I had conducted, I was struck by the universality of toxic masculinity. The pressures placed on the shoulders of Zambian men and boys were certainly different from the obstacles faced by men I had interviewed in the United States, Canada or Scandinavia, but the underlying factors were strikingly similar: it seemed like no boy was born free. No matter where I turned, masculinity wasn’t something that was intuitive or intrinsic; it was carefully learned, delicately transmitted and deliberately propagandized. Idealized masculinity wasn’t just a problem in America. I saw it everywhere. It translates into every language and is communicated through cultures. It’s the oxygen we breathe. Although there is no uniform experience of manhood (or womanhood, for that matter), the shared commonalities and struggles confirmed my suspicion that the most effective way to solve some of the world’s greatest suffering is to address the male pain, because left unaddressed it was turning into the greatest threat to this planet. The factory we put boys through in order to turn them into men is global, and the urgency of exposing and disrupting it could very well be the paramount test of our time. Given the current state of the world, the only question left is: Are we ready to embark on this journey we have been called to?
