This brief article by Christian Williams serves as an introduction to the special section in the March/April UTNE Reader issue on issues facing boys and men in our culture. Here are the three articles in the collection.
I already posted the third article above, which offers the perspective of a transman on what makes a man. All of the articles are good and recommended.
The Trouble with Tough Guys
2/26/2013
by Christian Williams
When I was growing up the boys in my neighborhood relished every opportunity to prove how “manly” we were. We shot fireworks at one another for fun, raced (and crashed) our bikes with reckless abandon, and played football in rocky lots. It’s almost as if we invited injury and looked forward to the chance to show off to the girls in the neighborhood that we could take the pain. We knew “real men” didn’t cry, no matter how much it hurt. Man, were we stupid.
Fortunately, I outgrew that adolescent bloodlust, but I’m still not immune to the trappings of traditional manliness. Hubris is my adulthood Achilles’ heel; I don’t normally read instructions and often find it more appealing to get lost than ask for directions. Somewhere along the line, stubbornness became baked into my psyche. How did that happen?
Take a look at the male icons of Western culture and you’ll see a pattern: tough and rugged like Clint Eastwood, charming and fearless like James Bond, overconfident and womanizing like Don Draper. Consciously or not, boys in this culture identify these traits as “manly,” and the result is a continuous cycle of boys becoming men who strive to show no weakness, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional. You might assume that tendency is just a natural male characteristic, but the truth is men aren’t wired that way—it’s something we learn.
Take mental health among men, for instance. For a man who’s been taught by his father and the culture he lives in that burying your feelings is the manly thing to do, stress becomes something you ignore and depression something you just learn to live with. It goes without saying that the end result of this emotional neglect isn’t usually a good one for the man or the people around him. Everyone has a breaking point, and some are more violent than others. To make matters worse, if a man does summon the courage to ask for help, our current mental health system is woefully underfunded and understaffed to provide adequate treatment.
The good news, though, is that more people are starting to recognize and rectify these damaging and potentially dangerous myths about masculinity. The call for better male role models signals the emergence of a mentor/mentee approach that’s sorely needed in our society today. Equally valuable are the lessons about masculinity we can learn from those experiencing it from a transgender perspective. Altogether, there’s hope that we’re breaking down yet another wall of ignorance.
Speaking of curing ignorance, you may have noticed something different on the top of the website; specifically, the tagline right beneath the Utne Reader logo.
The purpose of the tagline as we see it is to pique a reader’s interest into what we’re really about. While the previous tagline “The Best of the Alternative Press” did a great job identifying where the articles within came from, it didn’t do much to explain why we think they’re important enough for you to read. In this age of climate change, income inequality, and corporate influence on every facet of our lives, we think it’s necessary to emphasize the active role all of us need to play if we hope to leave this world better than we found it.
We recognize our duty to that end is to provide readers with the most interesting, surprising, cutting-edge, and thought-provoking information we can find on the issues that matter to you most (and some you didn’t even know about yet). You may not always agree with what you read, but we’re confident we’ll at least get you thinking and formulating your own opinions. It’s our mission to cure ignorance, and we figured we may as well say it loud and proud. We hope you like it, but more importantly, we hope you’ll join us.
~ Image courtesy, licensed under Creative Commons
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