Men Performing Masculinity
Happy Men's Mental Health Awareness Month!
TW: Mentions of suicide, alcoholism, and gun violence. Please read with care and protect your peace where needed.
Note: There is a voiceover without background music at the end of this essay. Thanks for the shout
! ❤️
The flexibility of phrases has always fascinated me. One phrase in particular has found its way into my life in two competing ways, so vastly different that I feel absolutely confounded trying to process the impossibilities of existence within patriarchy through the lens of this phrase—and, well, everything else.
“Inner Demons.”
My cousin Billy was one of those men that the patriarchy never accepted. He was a conventionally good looking surfer guy—white and hetero, so this is not to say he didn’t have immense privilege—but outside of those things he was a man that exuded love and light. He wasn’t a 401k guy, or the corporate ladder guy. He was the guy that stopped everyone in their tracks to get lost in the fireflies or listen to the birdsong. The guy to catch the wave when the weather was warm who always remembered to text and call his mother. The guy who sent voice memos telling his male friends how much he loved them, who would sit and listen without a word if that’s what was needed. Continually rejected by patriarchal-male acceptance coupled with the stigma of not accomplishing the patriarchy’s game-of-life achievements, he drank to avoid—as so many do—and lost his fight with his “inner demons”.
In my cousin’s case, his “inner demons” brought out the best in his humanness, he was soft in a world that gendered such behavior as feminine, yet he never lost his empathy and willingness to extend love to anyone that needed it. He saw what the world did to people firsthand, through his own lived experiences, yet he consciously chose to love and remain imperfect. Patriarchy taught him to keep the difficult feelings down, to compartmentalize, to suppress—this would be a skill he learned to master yet never accept, and those of us that were fortunate enough to know him benefited simply by witnessing his unwillingness to perform. But now he is gone.
The phrase popped into my peripherals once again in regards to Diddy’s perpetuation of abuse and harmful behavior, but this time it was the man himself utilizing the language—a stark contrast from eulogized sentiments offered as an empathetic explanation. Diddy’s apology framed his inner demons as rock bottom; offered as a justification for wrongs committed whilst dismissing inflicted trauma due to unhealed parts of the self. Aside from lacking empathy, Diddy’s response lacked nuance. All humans are harmed under white supremacist capitalistic patriarchy, the traumas we’ve experienced do not justify nor dismiss the traumas we inflict upon others. That is not accountability, however, that is patriarchy.
If you look at Diddy’s behavior through the lens of the seven norms of current masculinity as outlined by Robert Levant1 (listed in the note above), it is easier to understand how such behavior could have been allowed—rewarded, even—for so long: he was performing patriarchy at a masterclass level. To call out such behavior would be to signal a deviation from patriarchal expectations, an act that has historically been met with public ridicule and condemnation2. Masculinity as performed within the seven norms becomes a part of a man’s identity that is defined solely through how others perceive him, wholly external to the self. The compartmentalization required to exist in the margins of what you are not is inhumane, yet that is what patriarchy requires of boys who grow into men.
The very existence of words such as emasculation exemplify the external nature of masculinity—something that can be taken away both by internal feelings and external actions. A notion which was reinforced in my comment section (to the above note) when a man replied, “when femininity is the norm (in school, at home) one way to define oneself (as masculine) is by what you are not.” The complete negation of the well documented androcentrism of our world aside, the notion that masculinity exists in the void of everything else is incredibly harmful, as is perpetuating it. Externally defined masculinity hinders self-actualization and promotes strict adherence to social standards. And while boys and men are busy defining themselves by what they are not—an impossible and ever changing task—social standards are being shaped by media outlets that uplift violent, exploitative ‘manhood,’ continually reinforcing the dominator model while promoting hierarchical relationships. Men seek belonging, but in this patriarchal reality we’ve created, they can’t even belong to themselves.
In this social and political system men are not just told they are superior to other genders, but superior to one another. A hierarchical existence determined on how well masculinity is performed and perceived—endlessly reinforced in media and social circles alike. White supremacist patriarchy furthers this hierarchical nature of manhood, promoting the ideas that white is default while all else declared barbarous, often restricting access points to masculinity for men within marginalized groups. Layering capitalism onto this established hierarchy then provides the context necessary to understand our own greedy consumption and dehumanization; we have built a system that requires us to be our own oppressors while constantly participating in the oppression of others. In patriarchy, men are positioned as leaders, as heads-of-households, as world builders, yet in all of their greatness and glory, they have built a world where none are left unharmed.
This harm is both bolstered and insulated by patriarchal propaganda. In a recent essay titled It’s No Wonder Why So Many Men Avoid Books Written by Women,
dove into the statistics behind who and what men and women are reading. The data not only exposes the western world’s androcentrism, but confirms men's bias towards seeking out that male-centric paradigm, often rendering them unawares and unsympathetic to women’s lived experiences. Katie writes:A study by Nielsen Book Research commissioned by Mary Ann Sieghart for her book The Authority Gap found that readership for the ten bestselling male authors is roughly evenly split by gender, with 55% male and 45% female readers. However, just 19% of the ten bestselling female authors’ readers are male, compared to 81% female.
The pattern in non-fiction is similar: women are 65% more likely to read a non-fiction book by the opposite gender than men.
Additionally, when men do read, they typically only reach for books with male protagonists, which is partly because there are far more books featuring them. One study examining 104,000 works of fiction dating from 1780 to 2007 uncovered that women were actually better represented in… Victorian novels than in modern ones. It also found that books by men rarely give women much character space, whereas in books by women, the division is close to equal.
This intentional exclusion of women’s voices—both currently and historically—is the exact avoidance of femininity that Levant highlights within the above seven norms. Too long have we relegated women’s experiences to the margins, propositioning them as something niche rather than the experience of half the human population. Half of the human population in which patriarchy has told men not to relate to.
“When women wrote, they touched upon experiences rarely touched upon by men, and they spoke in different ways about these experiences. They wrote about childbirth, about housework, about relationships with men, about friendships with other women. They wrote about themselves as girls and as mature women, as wives, mothers, widows, lovers, workers, thinkers, and rebels. They also wrote about themselves as writers and about the discrimination against them and the pain and courage with which they faced it.”3 This discrimination, a thing deemed inevitable under patriarchy, ensured men sought out men’s voices to better understand the world in which they found themselves in. As the nuclear family started to develop under Christian patriarchy and the printing press allowed a wider access to both writing and reading, patriarchal propaganda cemented the notion that this discrimination, this hierarchical order, was something natural, and not the product of 5,000 years of socialized othering.
However, the belief that this is the natural order of things, a tenant of Men’s Rights groups, is not only harming the men deemed inferior by white supremacy, but those sitting at the very apex of privilege and power within patriarchy.
In 2022, 68% of suicides in the United States were white men. In the same year, 55% of all suicides were achieved using a firearm. According to PEW research cross-referenced with a Harvard study, 40% of American men report being gun owners, while only 1% of gun usage is reported as self-defense. The same Harvard study reports that a gun in the home is more likely to be utilized for intimate partner intimidation than in self-defense. And between 1966-2022, 96% of mass shootings were committed by men, 54% of those mass shootings were carried out by white men. White men, sitting at the peak of privilege, are more likely to turn the gun that they own on themselves, the person closest to them, or a crowd of people before ever utilizing it in self defense. Patriarchy allows these men to continually profit off of harm and oppression, but it is also harming and oppressing them. If Men’s Rights groups were serious about the health and wellness of men, they would do well to start with lobbying for a federal ban on firearms.4
In
’s heartbreakingly insightful essay titled The Epidemic of Male Loneliness, she explores contributing factors influencing the drastic spike in both the isolation men are overwhelmingly feeling and male suicide rates. Melinda writes:“In the non-profit organization Equimundo’s 2023 State of American Men survey, two-thirds of men aged 18 to 23 said they felt that “no one really knows me.”
Recent surveys find that both men and women today are suffering an epidemic of loneliness, but that the decline for men has been much steeper. Fifteen percent of men today say they have no close friendships, a fivefold increase since 1990. This helps to explain why suicide is so common among men.”
No one really knows me.
Defining themselves within the void of femininity—by what they are not—has created generations of unknowable men. Men disconnected from their inner-selves, their emotions, their peers, their peace. But within this heartbreaking disconnection, we see the proof of patriarchy. Keeping men isolated and in a state of reaction allows their anger and rage to be weaponized for domination: within governmental systems, for war, to become willing participants in constant dehumanization, in upholding abusive behaviors, etc.5 Reinforced through thousands of years of thought, literature, and media: humans within patriarchy are raised to see men and the rage expressed by them as default and natural, whereas a woman is simply not-man6. And through this dehumanization of the feminine under patriarchy, masculinity too has become devalued, existing as a social standard rather than a human expression.
In All About Love bell hooks argues that “capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy [the] larger unit of extended kin.” She writes “replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and made abuses of power more possible.” Within these layered systems of oppression, the traditional nuclear family emerged as the breeding grounds for hierarchical relationships and systems of dominance. The patriarchy thrives on our allegiance to this hierarchy as it reminds us that it can always be worse—somebody always has it worse. Weaponizing that fear against us, these hierarchies keep us in line with patriarchal behaviors and gender roles, suspending us in a loop of reaction, never relation. Additionally amplified in a heteronormative society which constantly affirms men’s nonrelational attitude towards sexuality, status seeking, and aggression. This oppression of our humanity—both internal and external—is also where we find our interconnectedness, for we are all harmed within patriarchy.
However, hierarchal relationships are not where radically empathetic authentic connections are built, and because of this, we are seeing in real-time men’s inability to adapt to the ever-increasing relational world around them. In the reality we’ve built for ourselves, relational skills are often deemed feminine and with patriarchy ensuring men define themselves by what isn’t feminine—arbitrary, ever-evolving human traits—too many men have become unknowable, even to themselves.
beautifully explored this idea within her Father’s Day tribute piece titled Goodbye, Daughters. Tara writes of her father:These days we’d say he struggled with depression. Back then, well, nobody said much of anything. He wasn’t unkind or angry, but he was unavailable, locked down, stoic. He was from a generation that didn’t talk about feelings and the people who knew him when he was younger and different were either gone or no longer in his life. There was nobody left to call him back to himself.
There was nobody left to call him back to himself.
To live in harmony with one another, we would first need to live in harmony with ourselves. Outer peace will never be achieved if inside we are all fighting continuous battles against the grain of our truest selves—but that is the point! Within this insidious brand of patriarchy we’ve inherited, young boys are confronted with the crushing reality that so much of themselves must be limited. Too much of what they feel and who they are may be socially deemed feminine, thus boyhood in patriarchy means to be divorced from ones own humanity. In patriarchy, boys are stripped of their autonomy at a young age—is it any wonder they are so willing to take it away from others?—and enslaved to their sexual organs. Once again, an idea reinforced in my comment section by an individual claiming to champion Men’s Rights: “Although this may be considered an unflattering characterization…we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more.” How very isolating it must be to exist within the disconnection.
This Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, let us intentionally amplify the men putting in the work to create space for positive, healthy masculinity. The men changing the narrative, creating the media examples that were too often withheld from them. bell hooks cautioned that “to always wear a mask as a way of asserting masculine presence is to always live the lie, to be perpetually deprived of an authentic sense of identity and well-being.” To the men in collaboration with me over these next few months—
, , —thank you. Thank you for allowing us to unmask your personal experience of performing masculinity within patriarchy and allowing us to grow through your paradigms.
TLDR, kinda; Over the next few months, in (roughly) bi-weekly intervals, I will be publishing a conversation I invited each of these men to have with themselves, exemplifying the much needed human trait of vulnerability. I ask that you read these pieces through the lens we’ve discussed today and meet them with empathy and grace. Let us grow in love and communion.7
Essay voiceover without background music:
Cultivating Positive Paradigms/Masculinity through Media:
hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. 2004
I think of printer William Caxton criticizing Anthony Woodville for his leniency towards women’s virtue, as written about (a little) here:
https://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1978/3/78.03.09/3
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/
https://rockinst.org/gun-violence/mass-shooting-factsheet/
https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. 2004
https://philpapers.org/rec/IRIEDL
If I mispronounced any names, please do let me know and I will update the voiceover with corrections. Thank you.
Thank you so much for this, so well said. I was weeping in an unmanly way at "there was nobody left to call him back to himself;" I know this feeling all too well. The other thing that patriarchy does is explain men's pain/confusion/longing by blaming women, or a woman, in one way or another, and that also leads to violence. I'm looking forward to the conversations.
I'm so honored to be asked to contribute to this series.