A way forward for men

Men have it rough in modern society.  Men who are not masculine “enough” (i.e. all men) face oppression and violence from other men, but men who express their masculinity carelessly are rightly accused of violence and oppression.  Men perceive a message that their masculinity is dangerous and unwanted on the one hand, and insufficient and weak on the other, and feel attacked from both sides.  The feeling of being attacked is made more acute by the policing of male emotion, the impermissibility of intimate connections between men, and the lack of supportive safe spaces for men in our society.   It is not surprising that a counter-movement has formed, telling men that their maleness is acceptable, and that they have a right to exist in this society — I’m speaking of the “manosphere”, Men’s Rights Activists, RedPill, etc.   At its core, this movement rejects feminism and insists that men have a right to traditional forms of male empowerment.  I think this is a problem, because I believe that traditional forms of male empowerment are in fact the root source of not only women’s oppression, but also men’s oppression.  In other words, the currently ascendent solution to men’s oppression is leading all of us further into the dark, including those men it is meant to help.  This is why I am writing today; I want to find another way forward.

This is a very personal blog.  It is about my journey through the darkness, coming to grips with my masculinity, coming to understand the ways I’ve been oppressed throughout my life, and, critically, how I’ve oppressed others.  Through my writing I seek to claim a space for an empowered, positive masculinity that stands in solidarity with all people, and rejects all forms of gender-based oppression.  I claim no authority aside from my own lived experience, my beliefs are nascent and continually evolving, and I’m rather ignorant of the history of scholarship in this area and only beginning to educate myself.  With that said, I have spent a huge part of the last several years going straight through my own internal darkness and pain, and I believe there is value in sharing my process and my experience publicly.

Feminism has a marketing problem when it comes to men.  The things I have discovered and am going to write about are not new or unknown.  One of the major themes I came to understand and will be writing about is how societal expectations of masculinity hurt men, but this has been a principle thesis of feminism for decades.  I think the name “feminism” is unfortunate, because a lot of men read it as “women should dominate men”, or “men are not important or not valid”, when really it means something like “gender roles are artificial and hurt everyone”, at least as I understand it.  Clearly feminism has failed to connect meaningfully with men who feel oppressed, because the dominant voice of self-identified oppressed men vocally rejects feminism.  A gap exists.  As part of a strategy towards closing this gap, I believe we need to directly confront men’s issues through the lens of gender-based oppression (i.e. feminism, but maybe we don’t have to call it that) and make some space for the voices and lived experiences of men.

Masculinity, as it exists today, is profoundly punishing towards men.  I define masculinity as “a set of behaviours that a man is expected to do”, with a similar converse definition for femininity, and under this definition it is immediately clear that all of us are being held up to a standard and judged and invalidated.  No man can be a perfect embodiment of masculinity, and thus all men internalize messaging that they are somehow inferior.  Because masculinity is primarily about power and strength, any man who feels powerless, or less empowered than the people who are stepping on him, loses his validity as a man and thus as a human.  But all men have been stepped on.  All men begin their lives as children and I believe the experience of being pushed around by bigger kids is close to universal.  I believe nearly all men have been beaten up or verbally or emotionally abused and taught that they invited this by showing weakness, and likewise I believe nearly all men have been threatened with abuse or violence, or felt implicitly the threat even if it was never direct, if they did not conform to certain masculine behavioural norms.  At least one in six men are sexually abused before they turn 18.  How many internalize the message that they need to show power and strength to avoid annihilation?  How many will have the message reinforced on the playground, in school hallways, on the streets, in their personal relationships, at the workplace, in prison?  Men are given precious few tools to cope with feelings of powerlessness, loss, and victimhood that threaten the core of the masculine identity that they are burdened with.  In fact, the validity of men’s emotions is actively suppressed and the expression of emotions heavily policed.  Men are not allowed to cry or show sadness.  But sadness is nothing more than information that one has been hurt.  To deny the sadness, one must deny the hurt, and therefore deny the self, and with no outlet for the self, one must shut off.   I think a staggering number of men are hurting terribly and are completely emotionally stuck.

When a person has their power taken away from them through abuse or oppression, they can be tempted to reclaim personal power by wielding it over others.  Unfortunately, our society sanctions and glorifies the wielding of power by men over women.  Men, according to the dominant cultural narratives, are measured by the quantity and attractiveness of their female sexual partners.  In response to perceived oppression and in pursuit of validation, men objectify, pursue, and consume women, and in the process deny women’s personhood and spread pain and darkness into the world.  Again I suspect this to be nearly universal: most heterosexual men have objectified women and tied their validity to female attention, and many heterosexual men have used women physically in search of validation.  And the objectification and oppression of women is so unanimous among powerful voices that it is sometimes hard to even find counterexamples; it’s the air we breathe.   Despite our progress as a culture in identifying and combating sexism, the world is not safe for women; it is not even close to safe.  And so long as men are told and continue to believe that attention from women grants them personhood or status or otherwise un-oppresses them, and/or that a lack of attention from women is equivalent to oppression, men will continue to rape, assault, aggress, abuse, and oppress women.

(This goes both ways, of course.  Women inflict violence upon men, as well.  Women rape men.  But the key difference is that men are celebrated for the power they exert over women.  It’s not only sanctioned, it’s encouraged.)

It is critical that men take responsibility for their own validation, rather then placing the burden on women to validate them.  For the sake of the women of course, because women suffer immensely for it.  But also for the sake of the men, and I know of three reasons for this.  First, because a man who engages in transactional relationships like this has not opened his heart and is blocked from giving or receiving love, and thus has little hope of building a loving partnership or experiencing that genuine intimacy which is a vital step towards healing.  Second, because such a man is crippled by the burden of performing to the level of the masculine ideal and continually reinforces the messaging that he is inferior to that ideal, no matter how many women he is sleeping with, and thus he keeps feeding his internalized shame and self-hatred.  Third, because the process of using women dehumanizes them and hurts them, and he will eventually have to face the reality of the pain he has caused and suffer a terrible blow to his self-image and suddenly realize he has dug to the bottom of a very deep pit.  The more pain he has caused, the deeper and darker the pit and the harder the climb out, until, for some, a point of no return is passed, the darkness is too big to face, and he must forever shut himself out from the world.  This is why I find pickup sites and MRA and RedPill so troubling: they tell men to keep digging, and in doing so they reinforce a regime under which everyone loses.

I think there some useful ideas embedded in a lot of contemporary male self-help literature, such as helping men connect with their emotions, understanding toxic shame, learning to be assertive about their needs, and generally reclaiming some sense of agency over their lives.  But in my admittedly brief scan of what’s out there, I’m failing to find two major threads that have been at the core of my own (ongoing) recovery, and which I plan to write about in the future.  The first is an understanding and vocabulary of emotional trauma and abuse — that which causes the shut-down in the first place.  To move forward and start feeling okay, one must re-open the gates, and re-live all the past pain until it is properly felt, processed, and integrated.  One must cry for all the wounds that were sustained and then suppressed.  To do so men need help, they need safe spaces and emotional support, and most importantly they need to hear that their sadness is important and valid, and they need to keep hearing that again and again until it becomes loud enough to drown out everyone else who is saying it’s not.  I don’t hear enough of this in the world right now and this needs to change.  Attention men, your sadness is important and valid!

The second missing thread is an understanding of how societal-imposed masculinity hurts men and makes them feel powerless, even as they wield power over others.  Men must come to grips with their dual identities of oppressor and oppressed.  The way forward for me is to recognize the power that I have, which is granted to me by society by virtue of my maleness, and to discover the blind spots in which I wield this power and hurt others without being conscious of it.  And, to discover the people I hurt and to own this and take responsibility for it, and take responsibility for protecting those that I have the power to hurt from now on.  This process is difficult and painful but absolutely vital.  This is where we thread the needle between masculine oppression and feminist pushback and find a space to exist without having to sacrifice our maleness.  In a way, I see this as gaining mastery over masculinity.  Masculinity is like a muscle you can flex, and you can hurt people if you don’t know your own strength, and the way to learn your strength is to study the effect masculinity has on others, both in general, and in your own life.  The Men Can Stop Rape / Men of Strength campaign is a great example of an empowered masculinity that encourages men to understand the power that they have and choose to wield it consciously.  Once I began to become conscious of my masculinity and the ways in which I have hurt people and could hurt people, I started to trust that I would hurt people no longer, and I found I had nothing to fear from feminists.  At the same time, through improving my understanding of what masculinity is and identifying all the places it’s taken root inside me, I’ve been able to disconnect many of the pathways that link my performance of masculinity to my validity as a person, and thus I’m less susceptible to the feelings of powerlessness that are right at the root of the trouble.

I believe there is a way forward for men which allows them to claim an empowered, positive place in society without needing to apologize for or disavow their maleness. If my experience is any indicator, the pathway involves finding a way to connect with emotions, going straight into the dark, feeling all of the bottled up pain, unravelling the root emotional traumas and understanding their lasting effects, identifying the internalized masculine ideal and disconnecting it from the centre of self-worth, accepting one’s empowered position despite feeling disempowered, and taking responsibility for protecting the people you have the power to hurt.  It is an uphill struggle.  As a society we make it difficult for men to heal.  But we can start by recognizing the ways that men are oppressed by masculinity, challenging some of the fundamental ideals about what men are and are not, and making some space for all this bottled up pain to come out.

I have reason to believe this is a useful way forward, because it’s positively transformed my life.  I used to be deeply mired in pain and feelings of inadequacy, I suffered from terrible anxiety, and I struggled to connect with others, especially women.  My emotions were closed, the walls were up, and the light was gone from my eyes for decades.  I nearly broke under the weight of expectations of who I thought I was supposed to be and in the bleakest times I nearly gave up on the whole idea of living.  And I struggled to find the pathway to genuine intimacy with my partner, who is a survivor of sexual violence and who sometimes felt frightened and unsafe around me in intimate spaces until I gained some mastery over my expression of masculinity.  But I’ve achieved so much in the last few years.  I feel I have the intrinsic right to exist, and thus I can largely relax and lead a peaceful and fulfilling life that I get to define for myself.  I’ve opened my heart and felt genuine love and connection, and pain, and sadness, and joy — the full range.  My partner and I have cultivated a deep and sacred intimate space beyond what I dreamed was possible.  I feel alive for the first time and that my life belongs to me.   I am allowed to have desires and dreams for my life. I am building closer relationships with friends and family.  For the first time I feel like I can spread light into the world — that I am not a failure of a human — that I have something to give.  It’s hard to overstate how much of a difference this is from how I used to be.  The dismantling and analysis of masculinity that I have begun to describe here has been fundamental, right at the core of my healing process and of my transformation.  I offer it in a spirit of hopefulness.