Toxic masculinity and how it damages us all

Masculinity and privilege are thorny topics, as writer Matt Haig found out recently. Here’s my response to his blog post

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This was going to be an email to Matt Haig in response to his blog post about mental health and masculinity, but it got too unwieldy for an email so I thought I’d post it as a blog. Really it’s too long and unwieldy for a blog post, too, so read as much or as little as you like.

I pretty much agree with everything Matt has written. I’m rather disappointed that he’s been discouraged from writing a book on this subject by Twitterers who essentially think he’s wrong to care that men are killing themselves in increasing numbers.

Concepts of masculinity that repress emotion and encourage violence are equally bad for men and women. We need address this if we are to improve life for all genders.

Boys don’t cry
We start them young, telling schoolchildren that ‘boys don’t cry’. I believe this amounts to psychological abuse. Crying is an important – if not necessary – emotional outlet, and to deny that to a child must be hugely damaging. How else is that child going to express emotion? Well usually through the only route left to him: violence and anger.

We encourage boys to fight, telling them to stand up for themselves, to not be weak or cissies or, worst of all, girlie. Because this is what happens when you admit of two, polar genders. What one is – masculine = strong, admirable, desirable and so on – the other becomes the opposite, making the feminine weak and undesirable. Being a girl is bad; for a boy, being associated with girls and girliness is hugely insulting.

There are massive problem with this, for both boys and girls. Being strong brings benefits: adventurousness, confidence, self-belief, among others. Girls who show these characteristics are called tomboys, because girls aren’t meant to be like that, are they? They should be demure, quiet and retiring. Adventurous, outgoing girls are a bit abnormal, a bit boyish.

Our girls are growing up with no self-confidence (read The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman for more on this). In world already stacked against them (think unequal pay, women underrepresented in all walks of life, lack of power and so on and so on), we aren’t adequately preparing our girls to succeed.

And what about the boys? There are the ones that don’t fit the mould. The ones that don’t want to raise their fists to defend themselves, who cry when they’re hurt, whether physically or emotionally. These children are bullied, made fun of, laughed at, and not just by other kids but by adults too, who should know better. And then there are the ones who do resort to fighting.

In either case these children are not being given the tools they need to deal with the complex emotions that human life brings. Instead they’re being taught that emotions are not for them, not if they want to be real men. Feelings should be hidden away, repressed, their only emotional outlets are anger and violence.

Photo: Regret by Neil Moralee 

Boys who can only express feelings through anger and violence will grow up to be men who can only express feelings through anger and violence. This won’t always come out as actual violence. In fact mostly it won’t. One of the more confusing things we do to our boys is punish them – with violence, either physical or verbal – when they do ‘stand up for themselves’. So they learn to express their anger in other ways.

In the adult world this could be aggressiveness in the sports field or in business; it could be a need to control a man’s own life and those of people around him; it could be that he completely shuts down when faced with emotions he can’t deal with.

Silent isn’t strong
How can you talk about something that you’ve hidden so deep inside yourself that even you can’t recognise it anymore? You can’t. How do you admit you have an emotional problem when your entire life you’ve been told that men, real men, don’t have emotions? You don’t.

A friend of mine once described depression as anger directed inwards. There are many ways in which I don’t agree with this. I think of anger as being quite a galvanising emotion – it prompts you to get up and do something, even if that something is negative, whereas depression is all about the apathy.

But in other ways it seems totally right. Anger is an incredibly destructive emotion that causes all kinds of damage, and depression is so very damaging. It separates you from yourself and then turns that self into an object of hate. The final, though certainly not inevitable, outcome of that hate is suicide.

The most recent figures for suicides relate (from the Samaritans) to 2013. In that year, 78% of all suicides were men and the rate of suicide among men was at its highest since 2001. Suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged between 20 and 34 in England and Wales. The proportion of male to female deaths by suicide has increased steadily since 1981.

These figures don’t show the whole picture, of course. Men tend to choose more violent methods of suicide which are more likely to succeed. When you take into account attempted suicides, men and women are more evenly matched. But still, more than three quarters of suicides were men. That’s shocking. And one of the reasons given is that men are reluctant to seek help. Think about what this means: in modern society people are being driven to take their own lives rather than admit they have a problem. There is something deeply wrong with this.

If your reaction to this is a sarcastic “Boohoo!” or “Didums!”, as some people’s was on Twitter, then that’s part of the problem. Ridiculing men who don’t fit into a fixed and dangerous concept of masculinity contributes towards male anger and violence, it strengthens those forms of masculinity that we should be breaking down. If someone is in pain, we should react with sympathy, regardless of gender.

Anger turned outwards
Arguably much more frightening is that anger that isn’t turned inwards. The anger that leads to violence towards women. Last year 150 women were murdered by men. This is significantly higher than the average of 104 women killed in this way per year. Male violence towards women increases in times of economic hardship (this government is creating a situation in which women die).

As a woman, this is both shocking and terrifying. What’s worse is that it doesn’t even begin to cover the amount of violence and abuse that women experience on a daily basis. One thing that I’ve experienced is a man standing in front of my gate so I couldn’t get into my flat until I gave him my telephone number. He then phoned the number to ensure it really was mine. Only then did he leave me alone. I have plenty of similar stories.

Boys who can only express feelings through anger and violence will grow up to be men who can only express feelings through anger and violence

There are women who have been threatened, spat at, even punched just for turning a man down. It’s incredibly common for a woman to be called a bitch or a slut because she didn’t react with rapturous joy after a man has yelled at her in the street. I count myself lucky because these things haven’t happened to me. Lucky because I’ve not experienced violence and abuse. That isn’t right.

There’s a growing movement on social media that says that we need to teach men not to rape instead of telling women not to get raped. This should be the ultimate no-brainer. I shouldn’t have to avoid going out at night, avoid certain areas of town, avoid wearing certain clothes, to ensure my own safety. I should be able to take it for granted that I’m not going to be attacked.

The vast majority of rapes and sexual assaults are not about sub-human monsters hiding in bushes and jumping out on unsuspecting women. No, most rapes are committed by ‘normal’ men – men we’re friends with, who we work with, who we sit next to on the bus, who pour our drinks in bars. Ordinary men who think they’re entitled to access to our bodies, who think that sex is a right rather than a privilege.

And why do they think that? Because that’s what society has taught them. And when they’re thwarted in their desires, they can’t go home and shed a few tears because they feel humiliated at being turned down (because let’s be honest, being turned down isn’t nice, it’s upsetting), they can’t turn to a friend and say “She said no and actually that hurt my feelings”. No, they have to ‘stand up for themselves’ and take what’s rightfully theirs.

Feminism is surely about equality. About lifting us all up so that we all have the opportunity to succeed. Mostly this will be about giving women more power, more opportunities, because, obviously, historically we have been denied this. It’s also about creating safe spaces for women by removing male aggression. The quickest way to do this is to remove men – give us women-only spaces, which is happening and is a good thing.

But even better is to have spaces where men and women can be together and be safe. Equality can’t be about dividing genders. It has to ultimately bring us all together. We don’t just want safe spaces, we want all of society to be safe. Doing this must involve giving men the emotional outlets they need so that they don’t have to resort to anger and violence.