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How Toxic Is Masculinity?

By Zoë Heller

Ten years ago, Hanna Rosin’s book, “ The End of Men ,” argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that it was time to start worrying about the coming obsolescence of men. American women were getting more undergraduate and graduate degrees than American men, and were better placed to flourish in a “feminized” job market that prized communication and flexibility. For the first time in American history, they were outnumbering men in the workplace. “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” Rosin wrote.

The events of the past decade—the rise of Trump, the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—have had a sobering effect on this sort of triumphalism. The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical. Cheerful slogans about the femaleness of the future have receded; the word “patriarchy,” formerly the preserve of women’s-studies professors, has entered the common culture. Last year, in an article about women’s exodus from their jobs during the pandemic, Rosin recanted her previous thesis and apologized for its “tragic naïveté.” “It’s now painfully obvious that the mass entry of women into the workforce was rigged from the beginning,” she wrote. “American work culture has always conspired to keep professional women out and working-class women shackled.”

Men, especially conservative men, continue to wring their hands over the male condition, of course. (Tucker Carlson appropriated the title of Rosin’s book for a documentary, advertised this past spring, about plummeting sperm counts.) But feminist patience for “twilight of the penis” stories has run out. “All that time they spend snivelling about how hard it is to be a poor persecuted man nowadays is just a way of adroitly shirking their responsibility to make themselves a little less the pure products of patriarchy,” Pauline Harmange wrote in her 2020 screed, “I Hate Men.” More recently, the British journalist Laurie Penny, in her “ Sexual Revolution ” (Bloomsbury), notes the systemic underpinnings of such snivels: “The assumption that oozes from every open pore of straight patriarchal culture is that women are expected to tolerate pain, fear and frustration—but male pain, by contrast, is intolerable.” Penny is careful to distinguish hatred of masculinity from hatred of men, but she nonetheless defines the fundamental political struggle of our time as a contest between feminism and white heterosexual male supremacy. In “ Daddy Issues ” (Verso), Katherine Angel calls for #MeToo-era feminists to turn their attention to long-overlooked paternal delinquencies. If the patriarchy is to be defeated, she argues, women’s reluctance to criticize their male parents must be interrogated and overcome. Even the “modern, civilized father” must be “kept on the hook,” she recommends, and daughters must reckon with their “desire for retribution, revenge and punishment.”

The combative tone taken by these writers is hardly a surprise. One might argue that a movement currently scrambling to defend some vestige of women’s reproductive rights can be forgiven for not being especially solicitous of men’s sperm counts. One might argue that it isn’t feminism’s job to worry about how men are doing—any more than it’s the job of hens to fret about the condition of foxes. But two recent books claim otherwise. “ A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice ” (Allen Lane), by the French historian Ivan Jablonka, and “ What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents ” (Allen Lane), by Nina Power, a British columnist with a background in philosophy, both contend that the drift toward zero-sum war-of-the-sexes language is a bad thing for feminism. Although their diagnoses of the problem are almost diametrically opposed, both authors make the case for a more generous and humane feminist discourse, capable of recognizing the suffering of men as well as of women. Hens, they acknowledge, have legitimate cause for resentment, but foxes have feelings, too.

Jablonka’s dense, copiously researched book, which became a surprise best-seller in France when it was published there, in 2019, takes an ambitious, key-to-all-mythologies approach to its subject. Jablonka, who is a professor at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, begins in the Upper Paleolithic, examining its mysterious, corpulent “Venus” figurines, and moves suavely across the millennia all the way to the successive waves of modern feminism. He has an eye for striking, often grim, details—under the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, a daughter might be killed as punishment for a murder committed by her father—and relishes drawing parallels across eras. From ancient times to the present day, it seems, the central totems of masculinity—weapons, locomotive vehicles, and meat (particularly rare meat)—have remained remarkably consistent. Likewise, from the fall of Rome to the Weimar Republic, men have consistently attributed political disaster and cultural decline to the corrupting influence of feminine values.

Jablonka’s thesis about how patriarchy arose is a fairly standard one. Paleolithic societies already had a sexual division of labor—Spanish cave paintings from as early as 10,000 B.C. show male archers hunting and women gathering honey—but it was relatively benign. In the Neolithic era, with the advent of agriculture and the move away from nomadic existence, birth rates increased and women became confined to the domestic sphere, while men started to own land. From then on, each new development, be it metal weapons, the rise of the state, or even the birth of writing, further entrenched the power of men and the subjugation of women.

Until now, that is. “Patriarchy has declined,” according to Jablonka, but men remain caught in “pathologies of the masculine,” trying to live up to a symbolic role that doesn’t reflect their reduced dominance. The result is an “almost tragic” level of alienation, he writes, and feminists, instead of mocking or dismissing male anguish—thereby leaving men vulnerable to the revanchist fantasies of Tucker Carlson and his ilk—should recognize this moment as a crucial recruitment opportunity. Now is the time to convince men that their “obligatory model of virility” has immiserated them far more than it has empowered them. “The masculinity of domination pays, but it comes at a high cost: an insecure ego, puerile vanity, disinterest in reading and the life of the mind, atrophied inner life, the narrowing of social opportunities . . . and to top it all, a diminished life expectancy.”

Feminism has been slow to empathize and collaborate with men, Jablonka claims, because too many in the movement remain wedded to a “Manichean world view” of male oppressors and female victims. Some feminists are unreconstructed leftist types, who reject any evidence of women’s progress as “mystification designed to hide the persistence of male domination.” Others are duped by a “pro-women romanticism” into believing that women are innately nicer and more progressive than men. Jablonka rejects this sort of essentialist thinking, which he says provides a spurious biological rationale for traditional gender roles. If women are naturally kinder and more nurturing than men, and if men are “intrinsically imbued with a culture of rape,” why bother trying to change the status quo? Testosterone and other androgens may “have something to do with” a male propensity for aggression, he concedes, but “human beings are hostage neither to their biology nor their gender.” Men’s history of brutish behavior is the product of patriarchal culture, and only by insisting on “the fundamental identity” between men and women can feminism realize its proper aim—a “redistribution of gender,” in which “new masculinities” abound and the selection of any given way of being a man becomes “a lifestyle choice.”

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To claim that masculinity is a patriarchal “construct,” however, is not so much an explanation as the postponement of an explanation. Who or what created the patriarchy? Evolutionary biologists maintain that our earliest male ancestors had an evolutionary incentive to maximize the spread of their genes by violently competing for, and monopolizing access to, women. Jablonka is eager to avoid such biological imperatives, but in doing so he reaches for a kind of just-so story that renders much of the history he has laid out beside the point. Patriarchy, he speculates, was motivated by simple resentment of women’s wombs. “Deprived of the power that women have, men reserved all the others for themselves,” he writes. “This was the revenge of the males: their biological inferiority led to their social hegemony.”

Thus it is that successive patriarchal élites have spent the past several millennia shoring up their illegitimate rule, by defining manliness as a set of superior qualities denied to women. Not that Jablonka thinks there is only one, eternal masculine style; rather, all models of masculinity since antiquity have been mechanisms for asserting and imposing patriarchal power. The extroversion and swagger of the toreador look very different from the gallantry of the Victorian gentleman, which is, in turn, quite distinct from the laconic glamour of the cowboy, but they are all equally culpable expressions of the masculine-superiority complex.

Jablonka’s desire to trace all the world’s hierarchies, injustices, and conflicts back to one prehistoric fit of reproductive jealousy leads to a good deal of muddle as things proceed. One of his more bizarre—and ahistorical—claims is that the masculine hegemony has deemed four masculine types inferior: “the Jew,” “the loser,” “the Black,” and “the homosexual.” It is, of course, impossible to explain the historical oppression of poor people, Black people, gays, and Jews entirely in terms of gender politics, and, in trying to do so, Jablonka has to make any number of ludicrous assertions, including that white men enslaved Black men in part because they considered them “feminine” and “non-virile.” The book’s cocky bid for comprehensiveness proves to be its undoing.

In keeping with his anti-essentialist view of the sexes, Jablonka maintains that women are, deep down, no less capable of greed and racism and warlike behavior than men, but this view is somewhat at odds with his central contention—that a world without patriarchal masculinity would be an infinitely more just and peaceable place. In an apparent attempt to square this contradiction, he expresses the vague hope that powerful women of the future will avoid some of the worst practices of powerful men of the past, and that gender justice might be “translated into the principle of an equality of positions, reducing inequalities between the various socio-economic statuses.”

According to Nina Power’s “What Do Men Want?,” such inattention to questions of class inequality is a typical weakness of modern gender politics. Her short but slightly meandering work of cultural criticism takes aim at several strands of contemporary feminist doctrine and lays out, with varying degrees of coherence, how she thinks a “graceful playfulness” between men and women might be restored. Power finds terms like “the patriarchy” and “male privilege” nebulous, and believes they obscure more than they reveal when applied to poor and working-class men. Liberal feminism, she argues, has proved all too compatible with the interests of corporate capitalism, precisely because it is more interested in how people “identify” than in who owns the means of production.

Power’s main interest, however, is not in persuading feminism to be more intersectional in its critique of men. “I increasingly think that we need to think less in terms of structures,” she writes, “and much more in terms of mutual respect.” She believes that exaggerated complaints about the toxicity of men—their mansplaining and manspreading and so forth—have become a kind of tribal habit among women. In addition to eliminating much of the pleasure and charm of everyday male-female interactions, the constant demonizing of men has led us to lose sight of what is valuable and generative in male and female difference. Where Jablonka wants to help men escape the “obligatory model of virility” that has given them a bad name, Power asks us to consider what might be worth retaining from that model. In our haste to declare masculinity a redundant artifact, she says, we have lost sight of some of its “positive dimensions”—“the protective father, the responsible man.” Although we’re often told that modern societies have outgrown the need for male muscle and aggression, we still rely on men to do the lion’s share of physically arduous and dangerous jobs, including the fighting of wars. (Even in Jablonka’s gender-fluid future, he acknowledges, men will do the heavy, dirty, “thankless” work. To insist on a literal-minded gender parity would be “absurd,” he says.) If we still expect men to do the dirty work, Power asks, shouldn’t some value be attached to male strength? Women in heterosexual relationships, she claims, respect a degree of responsibly channelled aggression in their partners. “However tough you feel, however independent you might be, when it comes down to it, you would like a man to be able to stand up for you, physically at least,” she writes. “Violence is not as far away from care as we might like to imagine.”

Power’s book, being of the “pendulum’s swung too far” variety, is rather too quick to declare all the meaningful equalities already won, all the necessary reforms of male manners accomplished. “Male behavior has shifted radically,” she writes. “What man would today flirt with a female co-worker?”—which is the kind of facetious remark that only a person who has mistaken her bien-pensant bubble for the world could make. Nevertheless, the “graceful playfulness” that she hopes can be preserved between the sexes, and even some of the more benign aspects of old-school masculinity, are probably more widely shared than is generally acknowledged. Jablonka argues rather unconvincingly that women read romantic fiction because it sweetens the pill of their subordination and helps them accept the “inevitability of masculine power.” But romantic fiction isn’t produced by the Commission for the Continuation of the Patriarchy. It sells because it speaks to a persistent female attraction to the benignly dominant male. Whether that attraction has its roots in nature or in culture, one has only to read Joan Didion describing her girlhood dreams of John Wayne, or listen to Amy Winehouse singing “You should be stronger than me,” or overhear contemporary teens mocking “soft bois” on social media to know that it is there.

Some years ago, the conservative Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield, in his book “Manliness,” defined protection as a defining task of masculinity. “A man protects those whom he has taken in his care against dangers they cannot face or handle without him,” he wrote. For Jablonka, such a role is inextricable from patriarchy: “Polite gestures of protection partake of a benevolent sexism that complements hostile sexism.” Power suggests that the charming, sexy aspects of masculinity—violent, sure, but still “compatible with the flourishing of others”—can be brought out only as needed, allowing men and women to live on terms of scrupulous equality the rest of the time. Is this plausible? Can women enjoy the warm embrace of he-men without having to endure bossiness and swagger? Harvey Mansfield didn’t think so. “Honor is an asserted claim to protect someone, and the claim to protect is a claim to rule,” he wrote. “How can I protect you properly if I can’t tell you what to do?” ♦

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An Essay About Men: Considering the Inner Worlds of Those Who Are Taught to Deny Them

Holly haworth on robert bly, toxic masculinity, and the hole at the center of our world.

I recently re-watched some of the Mad Men series. On one early episode, Betty says to dinner companions, “Don doesn’t like to talk about himself. I know better than to ask.” She doesn’t really know better, though, because she is a silly woman who wants to know her husband intimately, and that night she asks Don a question about his childhood. “Jesus, Betty,” he responds, his face contorting to show his utter confoundment at this kind of prying. “What difference does it make?” Instead of talking to her, then, he kisses her, and they have sex. It’s classic. The scene cuts to Don sleeping soundly while Betty sits up in bed smoking a cigarette, distressed. She stubs her cigarette, lies down next to him, places her hand gently on his back, and whispers to that eternal enigma of a man who stands for so many men, “Who’s in there?” The scene goes dark.

So often when trying to see into the inner worlds of men, the scene goes dark.

I had been grieving this darkness, moving through it as a hunger, subterranean and underlying an emptiness in my life that only seems to grow. And so it is for billions of women. Where are the men who know that talking or not talking about their lives, their memories and wounds, childhoods and what has shaped them, makes all the difference?

In fact, I was watching Mad Men so that I could look at this phenomenon from a distance—maybe, even, so that I could witness another woman suffering from it, as a balm to my own afflictions and some kind of larger cultural affirmation of what I was going through. For too many months, I had been navigating yet another horrendously painful relationship with an emotionally unavailable man, giving it my all in the hopes that I could get him to open up, and in so doing, that I could win a love that was supportive, that thrived on communication and connection—because what else might love thrive on? And what might our lives thrive on but love?

Already I sound sentimental and feminine. Such is the entrenchment of gender conditioning. Men get mad and women get sad. Men are terse and women overly emotional.

There were numerous instances—when he became saturnine and pulled away for days on end, leaving me feeling abandoned—that I asked the man whose love I was trying to earn a simple question, “Is everything okay?” He would get twitchy and say things like, “Is that a loaded question?” or “I feel like you want me to say something and I don’t know what you want to hear” or “I feel like you’re fishing for something.”

Sigh. I suppose I was fishing for something, casting out and reeling in, casting out and reeling in, daylong, with no bites. A man who could sit down and talk. Who would tell me what was bothering him.

While the hordes of psychological self-help accounts on Instagram have taught us about emotional unavailability, and about attachment theory as it applies to adult relationships, not many are discussing how divided along gender lines the attachment styles are (something that almost anyone can observe), with men in general having dismissive attachment while women suffer anxious attachment. Is everything okay? How are you feeling? Is anything wrong? … Avoidance churns anxiousness. A lack of words makes us fish for them.

Even as my romantic relationship crumbled, it would be more accurate to say that the man I was involved with was silently crumbling. He gave me small crumbs of his love (the official term is “breadcrumbing”) and meanwhile drank and played video games—the sorts of things we just accept as “guy” behavior, the addictions that thrive on buried emotions.

My father turned 70 last year. As he went through the upheaval of homelessness, unemployment, and illness during what might have been a more honorable passage into elderhood, he told me, when I called to ask how he was doing, what he always had, that “Everything is good.” He left when I was a baby and never seemed to be able to face me, or fatherhood, or much of anything, but all has always been good and well. Through four failed marriages, everything was fine, wonderful, even, and the consistency of that line was only matched by the consistency of his drinking.

A friend of mine called to say that his own father, now 80, who lives in a palatial home on the coast and has no financial hardship, is fraught with depression and addicted to pharmaceuticals and refuses to get help. His cold moods and silence over the years drove his (second) wife to leave, and now he is living his last days in a mansion alone, the sea waves chomping at the shore. When his son, my friend, calls—the only of his children who will speak to him after childhood—the marble floors echo with the response he barks into the phone: “Nothing is wrong with me!” Even wealth and status aren’t cures or preventatives for the curse of male terseness.

The poet Christian Wiman writes in “The Limit,” an essay about masculinity and violence: “Anything that suggested madness rather than control, illness rather than health, feminine interiority rather than masculine action, was off-limits.”

The world is suffering from the madness of men who, on the surface, are in control, and mad is considered an acceptable masculine emotion, while sadness is equated with madness and the feminine.

When the poet Robert Bly died, I picked up his book Iron John. It is, as the subtitle tells us, A Book About Men. Under my circumstances of being a woman, perpetually left in the dark on this subject from the perspective of men themselves, I was intrigued. Published in 1990, it arose out of Bly’s work with the men’s movement of the 1980s, when men, in response to the women’s movement, began talking about how they might redefine masculinity. Bly writes that when he facilitated men’s gatherings, “It was not uncommon for [the men] to be weeping within five minutes. The amount of grief and anguish in these younger men was astounding to me.”

While the book troubles many aspects of what we call today toxic masculinity, it is also faulted and troubling in ways that have been pointed out by others. I’m not here to either argue in defense of the book or take it apart critically (which would certainly be a worthy effort), I only want to mention that I picked it up and read it during a time when I was searching for answers. Bly has a certain way with language, and it was the evocation and embrace of the unprocessed grief of men that spoke to me. It was Bly’s invitation to men to bring to light their inner worlds through the ancient technology of story that I felt was important.

Behind my father’s disappearance into drink and all-is-well-ness is, surely, a dammed-up reservoir of grief, and this damming has been the damning not only of him but of four wives, two children, and who knows who else. And so goes the untold story of so many men’s lives. My friend’s father, alone in his seaside palace, is a war veteran who served as a translator in Vietnam. In Mad Men , we later learn that Don Draper, who won’t talk to his wife, doesn’t have a therapist, drinks too much, and is absorbed by work happened to suffer a traumatic childhood that haunts him. The man I was seeing lost his father (a man who he described to me as “stern”) early, at 21. Bly’s neo-Jungian approach instigates a psychospiritual journey of healing wounds, an inner process of reflection that modern men are conditioned against.

“We are living at an important and fruitful moment now,” Bly wrote in 1990, “for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by popular culture are worn out.” Never mind, even, the rapists; the warlords; the mass shooters; the sexual predators; the authoritarian politicians who revoke women’s rights and inscribe the female womb with laws and legislation—who, by and large, are all men. And yet, it is all part of a continuum, and Don Draper doesn’t only not talk about his feelings but also cheats serially on his wives (Betty, then Megan), and my father is not only always “good” but has also cheated and lied, and the man I was seeing had an ongoing friendship of an undefinable nature with his ex that he hid from me, and Wiman, who inherited a male silence that makes him suicidal even as he finds expression as a poet, is the grandson of a man who murdered his wife in front of his three children, and the men in the Westerns I like to watch (for the landscapes) are as terse as they are precise with a gun, as emotionless as they are driven to violence, and not usually depicted in those films are the oil rigs pocking the landscape, the mining claims on the lands emptied of their Native inhabitants.

Dallas Goldtooth, a Dakota and Diné organizer of the Keep It in the Ground Campaign and the Indigenous Environmental Network, has said that, “You cannot only just talk about toxic masculinity, you have to talk about white supremacy in the same conversation, you have to talk about settler colonialism in the same conversation because they are all supporting each other…. They’re all working together to drive this planet over the cliff.”

Bly, a white man, failed to make this connection as clearly, but he wrote:

The dark side of men is clear. Their mad exploitation of earth resources, devaluation and humiliation of women, and obsession with tribal warfare are undeniable. Genetic inheritance contributes to their obsessions, but also culture and environment. We have defective mythologies that ignore masculine depth of feeling, assign men a place in the sky instead of earth, teach obedience to the wrong powers, work to keep men boys, and entangle both men and women in systems of industrial domination. …

One way to see the men’s movement that grew from the women’s movement is as a testament to how women’s stories mobilize and awaken change.

It is also a testament to the insidiousness and entrenchment of the bad old patriarchy, as the movement from the beginning was rife with backlash to women’s voices, with claims of male oppression that bubbled with obvious fears about the decentering of men’s narratives and the diminishment of male power. Bly wrote his Book about Men in the wake of centuries of books by and about men.

Yet, as Bly would have it, I think, these books were not “conscious.” It seems that the men’s movement for Bly, at least, was a coming-to-consciousness—not a challenge to the women’s movement, he assures us in the preface, or an insistence on centering the male experience and narrative, which has already been centered enough, but a becoming-conscious of that narrative, so that it might be reimagined. Though his book is faulted, he was concerned with inspiring “new visions of what a man is or could be.”

The Diné leader Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining) has said, “I see the men as being the architects of these dreams and visions [of reimagining masculinity].” So while I was glad to learn that the men’s movement, as it were, is, if not nonexistent, passé, we might say, I also wonder how us women and nonbinary people can use our voices to call for a movement of men. How can we call them in even as we call them out? Bly’s book, in its best passages, does just that, acknowledging the harms that men cause while calling them into the process we might simply call healing .

The Black feminist bell hooks, who died just weeks after Bly did at the end of last year, did that too. She wrote in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, “[A boy] learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder. …Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.”

And yet, as Goldtooth has said, “It’s a good assumption that the vast majority of the people that will come to [a talk about toxic masculinity] will be women, or women identified.” This year, I read bell hooks. I read Bly. I read Wiman. I waded through loads of self-help advice for anxiously attached people pursuing relationships with dismissive attached people. I watched Mad Men , thinking, searching for insight. I listened to Goldtooth, to Woman Stands Shining. I am writing this essay.

In pointing that out, I am talking about the emotional labors required in order to be a resilient woman who can better understand her suffering at the hands of men. Goldtooth says that, “Women’s safety and health is dependent on them knowing men better than men know themselves. You have to know how a man thinks, you have to know what motivates a man, you have to know about the dangers a man poses to your well-being.”

The man I tried to love broke up with me over the phone on Valentine’s Day (for his ex?—who would know, for he didn’t explain anything). And now I am tired of knowing men better than they know themselves, while still being left in the dark with only my abandonment.

Bly calls our age “a time with no father,” and the writer Stephen Jenkinson says that Iron John , which spent 62 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, “detonated… a hunger.” It does seem to be a time with no father. But I do not just hunger for a father, I hunger for a brother who won’t hurt me, for male friends who protect me, for good, healthy men around me, for bosses who respect me and honor my work, for a loving partner who can listen. This is an emptiness that only seems to grow, a hole at the center of our world, an absence-ing of these men. Where are they?

Single again, I visited the bizarre virtual space in which one can witness the performance of masculinity in a vividly pronounced way, a kind of concentrated spectacle put into motion by my left-swipes, a diorama into which I peered, mostly aghast. Straight woman seeking straight man. There, I quickly noticed an undeniable trend, which was for men to assert that they were “a simple guy” and to ask for “no drama.” People (men) who cannot begin to fathom their own complexities and the mazes of their nuanced psyches can only see people (women/non-binary) who do as bringing “drama” into their lives. They cannot glimpse the tragicomedy in which they are actors asserting their simpleness, holding up their big gaping-mouthed fish, flexing their biceps; they can cast a line into the depths of a lake all day but dare not throw a hook and sinker into their own psyches and be present for what bites.

While women fish for intimacy with them, for the words they can’t say, they leave to do their own fishing, ever absent from women’s lives (the stereotypical “Gone Fishin’” bumper stickers), women always left reeling. Simple guys. Open books. No drama. I’ve learned to see these as red flags. Bly’s book deserves a look because its primary argument, I think, is that men are not simple, that they are every bit as psychologically complex as women and all genders, and that they will do best to acknowledge it.

Wiman writes that when he became suicidal and decided to tell a friend, “My heart began to race, I had difficulty breathing, and I simply had no language for what I needed to say.” He recognizes in both his and his father’s voices “a sort of mumbling quietude” in moments of “emotional encroachment.” Once when visiting my father I thought I would speak directly to him about his callousness and refusal to acknowledge my existence (he has hardly ever asked me a single question about my life lived halfway around the world from his), but when I asked him if he could sit down and talk, he looked exactly like one of the fish the men hold up in the photos, all fear-eyed and shocked, his mouth gaping with no words coming out, like he’d been pulled out of water and couldn’t breathe. I decided I wouldn’t try.

I have listened to both Goldtooth and Woman Stands Shining speak about toxic masculinity in numerous conversations. From small, Indigenous communities that have dealt with such huge grief, they both seem to, more than many thinkers, call men in with compassion while calling them to be accountable, and I wonder at the wisdom of knowing, in reckoning with the long legacies of oppression that they do, that they cannot afford to cancel half of their communities.

So while I do not want to hold a pity party for men, I do not want to cancel their suffering—the suffering that I witness in all the men around me, even though they have been conditioned to. In our reckoning with toxic masculinity, canceling the grief of men is yet another act of repressing something that wants to come forth in the collective psyche, something that needs to be spoken, reckoned with. Doesn’t this canceling, then, mirror the canceling of young boys who are conditioned not to express their feelings and thus their full humanity and so become men who are already in some sense canceled and thus confused about how to exist in the world?

Might mansplaining be a way, at least sometimes, of taking up space when a man does not know how to occupy the space inside himself and has rarely articulated something true about the way he is feeling? Might it be a way of performing fatherliness in this time of no father? Isn’t the emotional unavailability of men—the deep silent pools from which many kinds of harms and outward ills plume up—what a movement of men might ply, searching for deeper currents?

I want to ask, as the thinker Báyò Akómoláfé has said, “queer questions” that lead to “uneasy arrivals for tending to the tense fields where new kinds of beings and becomings can thrive and grow.”

It isn’t up to women, nonbinary people, and children to heal men, though. It’s time for men to become response-able for their grief (Akómoláfé’s spelling of the word.)

I have endured wounds inflicted by men that I live with every moment. They are etched into me, and I have spent the better part of my adult life engaged in healing myself, which is also a process of becoming responsible for the wounds I carry. I, a woman, am writing An Essay About Men because they have so often left me in the dark, sitting up at night, burdened with the weight of their inarticulations. And is it a good assumption that the vast majority of the people who read this will be women or women identified?

I’m angry about the massive energy that I have to put forth to articulate to men their own wounds and need for healing, even as they continue to actively wound me, put me in need of yet more of my own healing. My father, just for instance, offers no support to me morally or otherwise in his elder years, no presence, as it has been throughout my life, and as it is for so many of us. And being mad is something that women-identified people have not been allowed; the same patriarchy that makes anger the only acceptable expression of sadness for men also deems us shrill or hysterical for this natural emotion in response to our pain, while men can stay cool and aloof.

But we know that all books have covers, and that you can’t judge by them, and men are full of grief like the rest of us. We have been bound by roles, but we can rewrite them. Our inner worlds are drama-filled, deep, and we plumb them with story, an ongoing act that changes the story, and we are never open books. I am mad, and I want to keep talking about this until men begin to talk amongst themselves, as they must on the way to healing our world.

Holly Haworth

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It’s time to rethink modern masculinity

Masculinity is a construct that can be imagined, reimagined and reshaped over generations – it is not toxic in itself, writes Rob Garfield. Plus letters from Cahal McLaughlin and Miles Doubleday

Susie Orbach’s opinion piece ( We are all vulnerable: that’s where a new conversation about masculinity begins, 10 February ) gets right to the point. Men need to reset their relationship with masculinity. Power, privilege and prestige – the perks of traditional manhood – have distracted men from embracing vulnerability and inclusivity as strengths.

Masculinity is a construct that can be imagined, reimagined and reshaped over generations. In itself, it is not toxic. Many traditional behaviours associated with masculinity are quite lovely and appreciated. It’s extremism that makes masculinity toxic.

In our organisation, the Men’s Center for Growth and Change , we call on men to open their hearts, expand their emotional skills and teach these to their sons and daughters. In our research, we discovered that close male friendships enhance men’s health, their partner relationships, their parenting and their work performance .

It can’t be overstated how important it is for men to embrace these changes now, for our own wellbeing and for the future of our children and our planet. I hope we will all heed Orbach’s call to join women, along with others from diverse and marginalised backgrounds, to create a more humane and equitable society. Rob Garfield Author, Breaking the Male Code: Unlocking the Power of Friendship

“Vulnerability … as an aspect of strength” is a contradiction that lies at the heart of how to engage with crises in masculinity. For men to be, and to be seen to be, vulnerable, uncertain, unclear, thoughtful, suggestive and individual, instead of strong, certain, clear, decisive and action-oriented, has long been a limitation on our ability to be fully human. There is a fear of being hesitant and unsure. But it can also be liberating, turning away from the risks associated with certainty and embracing thoughtfulness and consideration.

The risks are not just in gender-based individuality, but in work-based cultures, such as corporations and public institutions, where uncertainty is regarded as a weakness for the organisation that must become more “efficient”. Maybe the most efficient way to improve our lives is to be more considerate, to feel and reflect before deciding and acting, both individually and collectively. Cahal McLaughlin Kearney, County Down

Recent history has seen a movement towards reframing masculinity and femininity as social constructs rather than genetic imperatives. Once one is open to such a framing, this makes it possible to imagine alternative social constructs that are not as harmful to women as the historic framing which still blights so much of our social interaction.

When men see masculinity as a social construct, this makes them more open to seeing how that construct does not serve them, but harms them, albeit in different ways from how it harms women. For vulnerable men tempted to double down on their masculinity, this offers a more fruitful approach to take, as it leads to the recognition that men and women need to work together to build new and better social constructs, even if only in their individual relationships. Such collaboration would, I imagine, also lead to a reduction in complaints of involuntary celibacy. Miles Doubleday Halton, Lancashire

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Essay on Masculinity

Masculinity is a form of gender that is most seen as an identity for the average male–a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles that are generally associated with boys and men. It is commonly defined as a form of power and the expectancy to be both tough and able to suppress emotions other than anger at the drop of a pin. Men are expected to adhere to a somewhat strict “code” of masculinity and are shamed whenever they do things that society deems “feminine” or “un-masculine”. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word masculinity is going to the gym to find it to-the-doors full of muscular men that are focusing their lives around “pumping iron” and “getting jacked”. While it is not necessarily a bad thing if that is a chosen hobby or interest, it begins to become expectations for boys to conform to at a young age.

Expressing masculinity without it being seen as toxic is something most men struggle with at some point of their lives—whether it be as a child when their father scolds “suck it up and be a man”, or in the adult world when men are expected to suppress both emotions and neglect mental health to be “masculine”. Many men struggle with mental health issues at one point or another in their lives and end up suppressing the need to reach out for help due to the social judgement that is involved with anything that is not directly textbook masculinity. Distancing as a man due to this results in feelings of dissociation, feeling lost, bottling up emotions—and at worst cases, suicide.  Suicide among males  is 4x’s higher than among females. Male deaths represent 79% of all US suicides. (CDC) (SAVE, 2021)

Anti-femininity is something taught to boys at a young age–the shaming of liking pink, for example, due to it being a “girl’s color”. With some research, I discovered pink was originally a favored men’s color as recently as the 19 th  century. “In fact, pink was even considered to be a  masculine color . In old catalogs and books, pink was the color for little boys,” said Leatrice Eiseman, a color expert and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. “It was related to the mother color of red, which was ardent and passionate and more active, more aggressive.” (Bhattacharjee, 2018). As we grow up and mature, we are expected to adhere to a specific set of standards—expected to be drawn to things like watching sports, enjoying cars, and being self-taught handymen. The number of products that are marketed towards men are never ending—unnecessary things like tactical sunglasses, work gloves, even razors have been gendered to try to sell more to the men who refuse to buy anything other than “masculine” labeled products. When, razors for example—are manufactured on the same assembly lines before they are sorted into masculine or feminine themed packaging and pushed towards the selected gender. Even cartoons are marketed towards a mainly boys or girls’ audience—creating a distinction of types of cartoons boys and girls are “supposed” to watch which leads to boys watching “girly” shows like Hannah Montana to be frowned upon by both parents and society also. I watched Hannah Montana growing up, much to the disdain of my father—although it did not hurt me as many parents fear it will when they let their children choose what they want to watch, whether it be more masculine or feminine themed shows.

Many men avoid pursuing the hobbies, emotions, and actions that make them happy because of society’s concepts of masculinity—leading to living life in a shell of fear about their interests being seen as something feminine and bottling up your emotions. I, for one myself, had trouble in recent years—being frowned upon for not seeing distinct lines between what is deemed women’s and men’s clothing, wearing eyeliner and black nail polish, and enjoying things that would stereotypically be deemed feminine. Even though I still presented a very masculine persona in the eyes of society, there was still a side of me that I hid away due to the fear of being judged for how I enjoyed spending the days of my life. Why should something like a label on an item of clothing define which gender is able to be the sole one to wear or shop in that section of the store? I have multiple pieces of clothing from both the men’s sections and women’s as well, and they both do their jobs just as well as the opposite does. Men’s pants and even shoes are a must for me to shop for–although the ladies’ cardigans and sweaters fit more comfortably, instead of being swallowed up by them like the men’s section outerwear offers. Plus, there are so many more color choices for women’s’ clothing versus how few color choices most men’s’ clothing offers. Being a smaller framed guy myself, it’s harder for me to find men’s clothing that actually fits correctly–leading me to have more worries than the usual jock does about my masculinity, and internal struggles about how society views me as a male, but it shouldn’t mean I cannot enjoy my life how I want to either. Here in the 21 th  century, men have developed a sense that we can wear and enjoy what we want to—without being shamed or judged for simple things like eyeliner or even nail polish. Even then, the stigma of what society deems “masculine” seems to lurk above our heads, hanging like an old coat in a long-forgotten closet.

The definition of masculinity should be something more along the lines of being able to live your life in complete comfort—both with emotions and hobbies and interests also, rather than what role society deems correct for men to live their lives in. Some strive to call this sense of self “gender-fluid”, or even the old school term “androgynous”—although the second reminds me of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, as influential as it was on my childhood, I would not go out on that limb to say I was androgynous in the least. Whether you prefer to use a pre-existing term like “androgynous”, “gender-fluid”, or even just comfortable in your own masculinity—what matters the most at the end of the day is that you are comfortable in your own skin.

Reidenburg, Daniel J. “Suicide Statistics and Facts.”  SAVE , 2021, save.org/about-suicide/suicide-facts/.

Bhattacharjee, Puja. “The Complicated Gender History of Pink.”  CNN , Cable News Network, 12 Jan. 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/colorscope-pink-boy-girl-gender/index.html.

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Masculinity Essay

Masculinity : Masculinity And Masculinity

Masculinity At its Manliest In both Douglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe’s Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts and Sharon Bird’s Welcome to the Mens’s Club, we see compelling arguments for the treatments on the categories of “masculinity.” By comparing both articles, the significant similarities and differences between the two variations can be identified. In doing so, the function of “masculinity” in society, according to each author, can also be seen. Using the “masculine” Kristoff in Disney’s

Masculinity There are different ways for men become masculine, people can teach them or let them figure it out when growing up. Masculinity is usually described as being strong, manly, or dominate. It is also used when someone is describing men and how masculine they are. Many people use the word “masculine” to describe a man and put them into a category if they see that he fits. Many people believe that boys should not be brought up by punishing them if they did not do something masculine. They

Hegemonic Masculinity : Masculinity And Masculinity

Multiple Masculinities The certain qualities a man processes plays into how masculine he is rated to be. The way he portrays himself in his looks, actions and everyday life paints a bigger picture for the type of male he is. Connell argues that hegemonic masculinity is the ultimate goal that men strive for. Hegemonic masculinity is the idea of men being powerful, strong and dominant. Not many people actually live up to this theory, but nearly all men strive to achieve it. Marginalized masculinity and

Masculinity : Masculinity And Masculinity Essay

be a shot to his manhood. To most men and boys in western society, masculinity is what separate the men from the women and the boys from the girls. However, what is masculinity and why do most men and boys’ try so hard to guard theirs? My understanding of masculinity, and as technically defined, is having customary qualities attributed to or usually applicable to a male. My position is that society encourages hegemonic masculinity thus forming basis for males to exhibit traditional masculine qualities

‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘the field of masculinity’ depicted in this film. ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, which is proposed by Connell (1987), is assumed to ‘the pattern of practice (i.e., things done, not just a set of role expectations or an identity) that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue.’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, p.832) However, hegemonic masculinity has strong influence not only over women, but also over other men as Demetriou (2001, p.341) states. Hegemonic masculinity dominates

What is hegemonic masculinity? What are the merits and shortcomings of this concept? In Connell’s original conception, hegemonic masculinity can be understood as ‘the pattern of practice that allowed men’s dominance over women’ (1987). Hegemonic masculinity is the exclusive masculinity of which only a few exhibit. The majority of men in fact experience complicit masculinity, allowing them to dominate in the patriarchal system in which it created. Connell (1987) believed it was this that created

Toxic Masculinity : Substance Masculinity

As a boy grows into a man he faces the ever-raising mountain of masculinity. In regards to the occurrence, he finally reaches maturity he has no choice but in order to fight to retain his measly sense of manhood. He is not allowed to act feminine or else he’s not man enough, he can’t show his emotions, he has to hide that he can do anything a woman can do sans give birth. Boys grow up being told they are not allowed to cry and that they are supposed to be tough, that they are not able to be like

Masculinity : Masculinity And Violence Essay

Masculinity and violence Violence is a mechanism of coercive control that is used to maintain and reinforce gender difference and hierarchy. Building on Lynch 's (2009) claim that hegemonic masculinity is "toxic to both the men and women left in its wake" this essay aims to explore the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and violence. Placing a specific focus on acts of intimate partner violence and mass shootings, and exploring the works of Lynch (2009), Keith (2011), Baugher, & Gazmararian

Masculinity

In Paul Theroux’s essay “being a Man” Theroux describes the detrimental effects of gender roles on the individual, specifically focusing on males and their quest for masculinity. “Even the expression ‘Be a man!’ strikes me as insulting and abusive. It means: Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient, soldierly, and stop thinking.” Theroux continues by describing society’s idea of manliness as destructive. A male’s desire to be “manly” fuels anti feministic beliefs, and without disposing of this traditional

The Masculinity Of Women 's Masculinity

Men often receive harsher punishment for breaking gender roles and this may explain why men are more likely to reaffirm masculinity than women are to reaffirm femininity. In a similar study done by Robinson et al in 2001, participants were told that other members of the same-sex could withstand a pain pressor task for a particular amount of time. Some participants were told others members of the same-sex typically withstood the pain task for 30 seconds, while other participants were told that members

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106 Masculinity Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on masculinity, ✍️ masculinity essay topics for college, 👍 good masculinity research topics & essay examples, 💡 simple masculinity essay ideas, ❓ questions about masculinity.

• Crisis of Masculinity in Hamlet
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• Racism and Masculinity in the Film “A Soldier’s Story”
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• Masculinity in “Refresh, Refresh” Story by Percy The present paper analyzes the relationship between the central theme of masculinity in Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh, and the setting of the story.
• Willson’s “Fences”: Where Masculinity Is Born Masculinity and its finding are shown in Willson’s play “Fences” through overcoming fences, however high they may be.
• Masculinity in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” Play “Antony and Cleopatra” is one of Shakespeare’s most dramatic plays; it is such a hard play to produce due to its enormous variety of content.
• Masculinity in The Great Gatsby and The Breakfast Club The paper demonstrates how the American culture depicts masculinity as reflected in media (movies) and American literature in the course readings.
• Masculinity in the Film “Saturday Night Fever” Male dominance is evident right from the beginning of the cast, and the plot. The film depicts men as smart, strong, and dominant over women.
• Patriarchy and Masculinity in Things Fall Apart by Achebe The theme of the novel “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe is the clash between traditional African society and the innovations brought by British missionaries.
• Masculinity and Femininity in the Workplace The effect of psychology of the feminine and masculine gender on work, performance and productivity is a paradigm of the most controversial issues subject to debate.
• Masculinity in James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway’ Stories This paper looks at the theme of masculinity as portrayed by both male and female characters in four stories by Joyce and Hemingway. The short stories focus on the inner development of characters.
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• The Masculine Role in Advertisement This paper seeks to highlight some of the significant masculine role in the advertising industry based on short stories.
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• Masculinity of King Arthur in Literature The paper discusses how King Arthur is described in the Arthurian literature, reviews the attitude to the character of Arthur and the concept of Arthurian literature.
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• Sexuality: The Matters of Masculinity and Femininity The current work is considering the topic of sexuality through historical and cultural factors, and the matters of masculinity and femininity.
• Feminism, Oppression, Masculinity, and Homophobia Feminism, a relatively new movement in the history of social, political, and philosophical thought, has found an important place in modern social studies.
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• How Do Children Develop a Sense of What Is Considered Masculine?
• What Are African Cultural Beliefs About Masculinity?
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Masculinity Essays (Examples)

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Masculinity In Charlotte Temple By Susanna Sainson

Masculinity Past and Present Masculinity and what it's been defined as, has had several expectations throughout history. Masculinity has been tampered with and reshaped over generations. Different positive and negative views are what determine what Masculinity is considered today. Charlotte Temple was a novel written by Susanna Rowson, a novel written in the 18th Century. During this time we got an idea of masculinity being seen as a man with confidence, being powerful, macho, and dominant over women. In the 21st century, however, there have been many changes. Masculine men are seen as macho without the component of dominance over women. They are instead seen as non-vulnerable men who don’t shed a tear. Toxic masculinity has taken place in the 21st century and has …show more content…

In modern day, while gender roles have become more fluid, men are often encouraged to follow non-traditional paths. The evolution of a more gender fluid society has determined masculinity as a wider range of experiences and emotions. A TED talk by Justin Baldoni, “Why I’m done trying to be man enough” opens up ideas about his lifestyle while studying masculinity and explains how he has a hard time opening up to challenges about masculinity, even to his friends. The courage he needs to build to open up to his closest friends about his emotions contradicts what he’s been told about masculinity. When Baldoni finally opens up, he addresses how much better he felt knowing his friends were also struggling with similar issues. This just goes to show how much pressure men have to open up to each other, not fall out of line, and keep their view as being tough. Justin Baldoni’s Ted talk explores masculinity with the idea of changing how men

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Masculinity and Femininity Essay

Introduction.

Masculinity and femininity is always influenced by geographical, cultural, and historical location. Currently, the combined influence of gay movements and feminism has blown up the conception of a standardized definition of masculinity and femininity.

Therefore, it is becoming increasingly fashionable to adopt the term masculinity or femininity not only to reflect the modern times, but also to depict the cultural construction and manifestation of masculinity and femininity to closer and more accurate scrutiny (Beynon, 2002, p. 1). In this regard, social, behavioral, and cultural scientists are specifically concerned with various ways in which gender acquires different meanings and contexts.

pecifically, gender is more associated with definitions attached to notions within the cultural and historical framework. According to Andersen and Taylor (2010), gender roles are closely associated with masculinity and femininity in different cultures. In western industrialized societies, people intend to believe that these masculinity and femininity should be absolutely juxtaposed as two opposite sexes due to the social functions they perform. This is why the era of capitalism is highly distinguished among other historical periods.

Cultural Variations of Masculinity and Femininity in the Era of Industrialization

Given that maleness has a biological orientation, then masculinity must have a cultural one. According to Beynon (2002), masculinity “can never float free of culture” (p. 2). Culture shapes and expresses masculinity differently at different points in time in different situations and different areas by groups and individual.

For instance, Hispanic professional males depict a somewhat higher robustness rating than other categories (Long and Martinez, 1997). In Hispanic cultural societies, traditional masculinity is associated with power status. Hispanic professional men (and women) fight the challenges of attempting to balance the popular cultural values in the United States with their ethnic identity and ethnic values.

Traditional masculinity has an appreciable influence on Hispanic men’s perception of self. Thus, social counselors must consider the cultural values and ethnic identity when handling a social issue involving the Hispanics. In addition, Beynon (2002, p. 2), argues that, masculinity in the first place exists merely as fantasy about what men ought to be, a blurry construction to assist individuals structure and make sense of their lives.

Much research has been done on discussing gender differences from a cross-cultural perspective. To enlarge on this point, Costa et al. (2001) have found out that there are significant gender variations that were observed across cultures. Specifically, the researchers have defined that gender difference were the most communicated ones in American and European cultures where traditional gender roles are diminished.

Such a behavior is explained by the fact that gender aspects are more perceived as roles people perform, but not as cultural traits. Regarding the identified period, the industrialized society is more on presenting direct associations with their social roles where males and females distinction come to the forth and are recognized as norms for behavior.

Full opposition for two-gender dimension has also been supported by Gaudreau (1977) whose research proves that the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are perceived as independent traits, but not as bipolar dimension.

In general, cross-cultural research on masculinity and femininity indicates that all cultures assign different roles to men and women. However, characteristics that are associated with each indicate some cultural diversity. Due to the fact that gender variations have been perceived as cultural determinants influencing the formation of societies, it has significant social meaning.

Historical Patterns of Masculinity and Femininity during Capitalist Period

Historical variations of gender distinctions are also heavily discussed by researchers in terms of social and dimensions. Furthermore, the studies have also underscored such aspects as domesticity and public movements related to masculinity-femininity aspects. Therefore, these differences and variations play a significant role in forming various social dimensions and evaluating social situation.

The observations made by Sethi (1984) has shown that industrialization have displayed tangible chances to the concepts of gender influencing such aspects as residence patterns, house composition, and sleeping accommodations. With regard to historical perspectives, gender and social reproduction are introduced by feminist theory.

In particular, Laslett (1989) argues that societies Europe and North America in the twentieth century were oriented on such social differences as consumerism, procreation, sexuality, and family strategies. In this respect, the researcher supports the idea that re-organization of gender relations have given rise to the development of macro-historical processes. In whole, femininity and masculinity in the industrialized society is presented as two opposite conceptions that have a potent impact on social reproduction.

The acceptable way for expressing masculinity in the modern American cultural society was for a young American man to enroll for war. Indeed a traditional way to lure young American men to enroll to war was to remind them of opportunities it offers to act heroically (Boyle, 2011, p. 149).

This approach exploits the mentality of young American men of equating heroics with masculinity. This reveals how cultural perception of masculinity-femininity can be use to motivate people towards a specific social course. These young American adults go to war with hope of getting an opportunity to perform heroic acts thereby expressing his masculinity. Nevertheless, most of the American war narratives depict the outright converse.

These narratives depict vain attempts by men to exhibit traditional paradigm of masculinity, because they manifest a state of being out of control and in need of rescue (Boyle, 2011, p 149); a traditional view of femininity. This misconception of masculinity is accountable for increase captivity and rescue associated with the intention to pull a heroic masculinity stunt.

In whole, the are of industrialization witnessed constantly changing patterns of masculinity and femininity that were based on chances in social perception of gender roles. Ranging from traditional norms on assessing gender relations to more radical, historical variations are also connected with social movements dedicated to the protection of human rights, such gender equality. In addition, racial disparities also significantly influenced the situation within the identified period.

Studies exploring cultural and historical variations of masculinity and femininity in the era of industrialization have revealed a number of important assumptions. First, cultural variations in gender functions exist due to the shifts in stereotypes and outlooks on social roles of males and females in society. Second, different industrialized societies propagandized various functions and influences in terms of domesticity, consumerism, and bipolar dimension.

Finally, industrialized society is more inclined to present direct, traditional traits attached to the terms under analysis. With regard to historical perspectives, most of past events are also connected with shaping different stereotypes connected to femininity and masculinity, ranging from traditional patterns to the emergence of sub-cultural forms. Both aspects are significant in defining the social significant of these shifts for the formation new patterns and variations.

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Beynon, J. (2002). Masculinities and culture. Philadelphia : Open University Press.

Costa, P. Jr., Terracciano, A., and McCrae, R. R. (2001). Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: Robust and surprising findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . 81(2), 322-331.

Gaudreau, P. (1977). Factor analysis of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. 45(2), 299-302.

Laslett, B., and Brenner, J. (1989). Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives. Annual Review of Sociology. 15, 381-404.

Long, V., & Martinez, E. (1997). Masculinity, Femininity, and Hispanic

professionals Men’s self-esteem and self acceptance . The journal of psychology,131 (5), 481-488.

Sethi, R. R. and Allen, M. J. (1984). Sex-role Stereotype in Northern India and the United States. Sex Roles. 11(7-8), 615-626.

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Guest Essay

Ethan Crumbley’s Parents Were Just Part of a Much Bigger Problem

By Elizabeth Spiers

Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist.

James and Jennifer Crumbley never anticipated that their then-15-year-old son, Ethan, would use the 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun Mr. Crumbley had bought — ostensibly as an early Christmas present — to kill four students at a Michigan high school. At least that’s the argument their lawyers made in court before Ms. Crumbley, last month, and Mr. Crumbley, almost two weeks ago, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter in separate trials. Prosecutors argued that the Crumbleys did not do enough to secure the gun and ignored warning signs that Ethan was planning to use it.

After every mass shooting by a teenager at a school, there is an instinct to look to the shooter’s parents to understand what went wrong. In the case of the Crumbleys, this seems obvious: Ethan left disturbing journal entries fantasizing about shooting up the school, and stating that he had asked his parents for help with his mental health issues but didn’t get it. His father said the family had a gun safe but the safe’s combination was the default factory setting, 0-0-0.

One factor that’s gotten less attention, however, is how the Crumbleys’ attitudes and actions reflect an increasingly insidious gun culture that treats guns as instruments of defiance and rebellion rather than as a means of last resort.

I’ve been thinking about this case a lot because I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s in a rural part of the Deep South where almost everyone I knew had guns in the house, unsecured, and mental illness was stigmatized and often went untreated. Church was considered a superior venue for counseling, and only “crazy” people sought professional help. If the evidence for criminal negligence is a failure to lock up a gun and ignoring signs of mental illness, many of the adults I grew up around would have been (and still would be) vulnerable to the same charges as the Crumbleys.

It’s convenient and comforting for many people to believe that if it had been their child, they’d have prevented this tragedy. But prison visiting rooms are full of good, diligent parents who never thought their kid would be capable of landing there.

My parents didn’t own a gun safe, but kept guns hidden away from us, which, like many gun owners at the time, they thought of as “secured.” The men in my family were all hunters and the guns they kept were hunting rifles, not AR-15s. (You can’t feed a family with deer meat that’s been blown to bits.) I knew my parents kept a handgun, too, but it was never shown to us, or treated as a shiny new toy.

Gun culture was different then. It would have never occurred to my parents to acquire an entire arsenal of guns and display them prominently around the house, as some people now do, or ludicrously suggest that Jesus Christ would have carried one . They did not, as more than a few Republican politicians have done, send out Christmas photos of their children posing with weapons designed explicitly to kill people at an age when those children likely still believed Santa existed. Open carry was legal, but if you were to walk into the local barbecue joint with a semiautomatic rifle on your back emblazoned with fake military insignia, people would think you were creepy and potentially dangerous, not an exemplar of masculinity and patriotism.

All of these things happen now with regularity, and they’re considered normal by gun owners who believe that any kind of control infringes on their Second Amendment rights. Children are introduced at a young age to guns like the Sig Sauer that Ethan Crumbley used. They’re taught to view guns as emblematic of freedom and the right to self-defense — two concepts that have been expanded to include whatever might justify unlimited accumulation of weapons.

“Freedom” is short for not being told what to do, even though the law very much dictates how and when guns should be used. “Self-defense” is often talked about as a justifiable precaution in the event of home invasion, though home invasions are as rare as four-leaf clovers and do not require an arsenal unless the invader is a small army. (It’s also worth noting that basic home security systems are far less expensive than many popular guns, which suggests that at the very least, some gun owners may be intentionally opting for the most violent potential scenario.) Most important, too many children are taught that guns confer power and can and should be used to intimidate other people. (Relatedly, any time I write about gun control, at least one gun owner emails to say he’d love to shoot me, which is not exactly evidence of responsible gun ownership.)

Mass shooters often begin with a grievance — toward certain populations, individuals they feel wronged by, society at large — and escalate their behavior from fantasizing about violence to planning actual attacks. A study from 2019 suggests that feeling inadequate may make gun owners more inclined toward violence. In the study, gun owners were given a task to perform and then told that they failed it. Later they were asked a number of questions, including whether they would be willing to kill someone who broke into their home, even if the intruder was leaving. “We found that the experience of failure increased participants’ view of guns as a means of empowerment,” wrote one researcher , “and enhanced their readiness to shoot and kill a home intruder.”

The study hypothesized that these gun owners “may be seeking a compensatory means to interact more effectively with their environment.”

Good parents model healthy interactions all the time. If their kids are struggling with a sense of inferiority or are having trouble dealing with failure, we teach them self-confidence and resilience. Parents who treat guns as a mechanism for feeling more significant and powerful are modeling an extremely dangerous way to interact with their environment.

What’s particularly hypocritical here is that the most strident defenders of this culture skew conservative and talk a lot about what isn’t appropriate for children and teenagers. What they think is inappropriate often includes educating kids about sex, about the fact that some people are gay or transsexual and about racism. It’s a perverse state of affairs: Exposing children to simple facts is dangerous, but exposing them to machines designed to kill is not. You can’t get your driver’s license until you’re a teenager, or buy cigarettes and alcohol until you’re 21, but much earlier than that, kids can, with adult supervision, legally learn how to end someone’s life.

Parents can’t ensure that their child won’t ever feel inferior or disempowered, or even in some cases become delusional or filled with rage. Teenagers do things that their parents would never anticipate every day, even if they’re close and communicative. Some develop serious drug habits or become radicalized into extremism or take their own lives.

One thing parents can ensure is that their children cannot get access to a gun in their house. The only foolproof way to do that is to ensure that there’s no gun in the house to begin with. Barring that, parents can make sure they are not reinforcing a toxic gun culture that says that displaying and threatening to use lethal machines is a reasonable way to deal with anger or adversity. That message makes the idea of killing someone seem almost ordinary.

That doesn’t prevent school shooters; it primes them.

Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist.

Source photographs by CSA-Printstock and John Storey, via Getty Images.

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I quit my tech job to be a stay-at-home boyfriend who cooks, cleans, and sews for my girlfriend. I have no plans to return to the 9 to 5.

• William Conrad, 25, and his girlfriend Levi Coralynn, 26, have been together for three years. 
• Conrad is a stay-at-home-boyfriend, while Coralynn, a content creator, supports them financially. 
• Conrad previously worked in tech but has no plans to return.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with William Conrad, a 25-year-old stay-at-home boyfriend and content creator from Canada. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

For the last three years, I've been a stay-at-home boyfriend. I cook, clean, and do the laundry — and I've never been happier.

My girlfriend Levi is big on social media and makes enough to provide for us both financially. She works from home, and I do 90% of the domestic chores. Our dynamic very much flips societal norm on its head, but it works for us, and we love it.

On a typical day I wake up a little earlier than Levi to make us some coffee. We usually share a coffee, hang out for a while, and do Wordle together. Then, she'll do some work while I either prepare food or do other household chores. If we're not ready to eat, I might do some work on the computer alongside her.

Since she works from home, we pretty much spend every minute of every day together, which I love because she's my best friend before anything else.

We lead a very communal life, and that applies to how we navigate money too. We've never had the perspective of "this is my money, this is your money." It's very much a joint venture, and most of our purchases are done together anyway.

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I help with the backend of her business, doing the accounts and bookkeeping, just as much as I do things around the house.

Being a stay-at-home boyfriend allows me to do what I love

Levi and I met on Hinge around three years ago when we were living in different cities. I was living in Toronto, near where I grew up, while she was in Alberta. We started talking online and knew we needed to meet in person, so she came to see me in Toronto.

Our first date was a week long and we stayed in an Airbnb . Shortly after that, we moved in together in Ontario, and we've been together ever since.

Growing up, I didn't have a strong sense of what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't want to sit in an office all day looking at a monitor. I've always liked creating things and working with my hands. But I ended up studying computer science at college and then found a job at a tech startup .

When I met Levi, I was doing freelance jobs here and there, and some more consistent stuff in the tech world. She was deep into her career as a content creator and needed help running her online business. She thought I'd be the perfect fit and asked if I would work for her. So I quit my job and became a full-time stay-at-home-boyfriend.

It wasn't that I didn't enjoy my job, but this was just a greener pasture that I could step toward. It was an opportunity that was better suited to me, I think, in the long run. I was really into cooking and sewing before I even met Levi, and this meant I could focus on those interests more and hone my skills.

I have no plans to return to the 9-to-5 and would only do so if our online businesses stopped working.

I started posting online to show the world a softer type of masculinity

In August 2022, I started posting snippets of my life on TikTok. My videos mainly showcase the meals I cook for Levi, but sometimes it's me braiding her hair, hemming her clothes, or fixing things around the house. I'm soft-spoken and have a gentle manner, and the comments from my mainly female audience have been overwhelmingly positive. These are all things I do anyway, but it was Levi's idea to share it with the world.

It was around the time that Andrew Tate , the anti-feminist influencer, was really popular, and there was an oversaturation of toxic masculinity online. We saw this need and an opportunity to present a kind, loving man in the online space. One thing I'm very proud of is showing the duality a man can have. I have both feminine and masculine characteristics, but I'm still a man.

I was raised in a very nurturing household where both my parents worked and split the domestic tasks evenly. Everyone contributed to the household, and gender was never tied to a specific role, so living this way has never affected my sense of masculinity.

Social media is giving young men a skewed image of what women want

Women often comment things like "Where do I buy mine?" on my content. And while it's always nice to hear that someone thinks I'm a good boyfriend, it's also sad that a loving dynamic seems to be a scarce thing.

Lots of women are looking for a man who will cook them a nice meal and be gentle, but maybe not enough men value these things.

I think toxic masculinity on social media might be giving young men and boys a skewed perspective of what women want. I hope to inspire other men to lean into their feminine traits more without feeling like it threatens their manhood.

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