How we fail when talking about Masculinity Pt 1 - Guy Cry
When there's media pieces or people taking to task the "crisis of masculinity", I find that we keep talking about the same thing over and over without any results
This is a post I’ve been wanting to write ever since I thought about doing a newsletter. And I’m sorry but it’s going to be a little meta, but it’s definitely a thing a need to get out of chest.
Call it a manifesto if you will, or maybe it’s just going to sound like a real long rant.
Also this may seem like a call out, especially to people who I think are truly trying their best, but I have been reading, thinking about, talking about, and writing about masculinity for more than 10 years now. And what I’m about to say hasn’t changed in that time.
When I first began Modern Manhood back in 2015, the idea was to have interviews with people who I thought were not only good guys, but people who I thought were thinking about and talking about masculinity. A lot of the people I invited to interview were really cool, and it provided some really good content. In fact through this method is how I met Jake Stika, who I formed a long lasting friendship, and now help to enhance his organization Next Gen Men by sitting on the board of directors.
However, there was a few interviews that I had that left me with a real sour taste in my mouth, and it had all to do with how that person was interacting with me. It wasn’t anything “bad” per se, but I could just sense the lack of authenticity. That the people I interviewed didn’t truly think about this idea of gender in a deep way, and if you would catch me on a bad day I would say those people found a way to make more clout for themselves. Either because I can see in their professional life that they have use the peg of masculinity issues to bring on a more capitalistic venture, either through pay to play conferences or groups. Or that they found some sort of personal relationship with the topic, but really have no evolved being that personal experience. And no I’m not calling out specific people in general, because I see this EVERYWHERE.
So I wanted to lay out exactly what bothered me about these people and the ideas that they bring, and it’s an issue that still happens to this day. They are problems of how we talk about masculinity in the media, with people, and the pieces and people that get elevated.
This will be a little series of mine so you can see where my mind is at when I do this newsletter, but also for you to heed a little caution when reading ideas about masculinity.
Let’s talk about issue 1:
Emotional Vulnerability will Solve everything aka “Guys need to Cry”
There’s a subreddit in Reddit called r/GuyCry and it’s purpose is exactly what it says, to make guys cry. And to normalize the action of guys crying. So they will post videos of animals, babies, cry worthy movie clips and stories of guys crying. I think it’s pretty cute honestly, and fully support guys crying. However here’s where my cackles get up, they claim that their subreddit is attempting to do this:
“become emotionally intelligent, build stronger relationships, communicate effectively, no longer fear accountability, unburden and unpack their lives, seek help when needed, seek peace and pursue it, have integrity, become honest, learn coping skills, be authentic, fearlessly be vulnerable, and most important of all, walk the action of love.”
Now the sub does have a lot of venting sessions and a lot of users trying to pump people up through the process, however in my understanding of becoming emotionally intelligent is that it’s a practice. It’s a muscle that we work every day, but we also need to learn a bit about it first. And although posting something that is vulnerable online and have a bunch of people pump you up can be therapuetic in it’s own way. I don’t know if that will satisfy all of those things that the sub claims it will do. Crying in itself will not solve your relationships, or communicate effectively. Neither will these posts. I fully support GuyCry in trying to make men cry, but also I think we need to break down the context of when and where guys cry. It’s not just a blanket statement that guys need to cry more. It’s not that easy.
When NFL’er and what seems like an all around good guy Jason Kelce retired from playing football, he cried during his press conference. The next day there was an article from the New York Times titled “There Was Always Crying in Sports. The Kelces Made It Cool.”
In the article the author Scott Caciola laments how people professional athletes in the past have been made fun of for crying, using the “League of the Your Own” line “You can’t cry in baseball!” But if you’re a sports fan, if you think about it more than 5 minutes, you can find plenty of examples of male athletes crying in all sports that were not made of for doing it. I’ll give two off the top of my noggin’, when Kevin Durant won his MVP he thank his mom, and as he was crying to uttered the famous phrase “You da Real MVP”
The other is when Wayne Gretzky got traded to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988 and he cried during that press conference. The headline in the paper the next day was “99 Tears.” Hell it recently happened this week, when Vinicius a soccer player was asked about the racism he receives while playing. And I think this is the issue with the idea of Guys Crying, that it is sometimes acceptable in society when guys cry. And honestly a sports press conference may be one of those times. It’s happened time and time again, in the 80’s, in the mid 2010’s, and last week. And it will continue to happen.
This article to me just speaks of one idea, a half baked one, and adds it to the continuing issues of how we talk about emotional vulnerability vis e vis masculinity.
The problem is that people believe emotional vulnerability will be the key that unlocks and eliminates toxic masculinity at it’s core. And this is an idea that has infiltrated the masculinity conversation, and it’s not entirely wrong. It’s just not the whole picture.
Toxic masculinity is a community issue, it’s not just a guy issue. If you were to ask me, I would say men are the standard bearers for toxic masculinity, they create the culture of toxic masculinity, but many people of all genders inhabit it. Guys crying or guys being more emotionally aware will support one piece of the puzzle, but it won’t be the whole puzzle. If we don’t think about these issues systemically, culturally, legally, logistically, and emotionally, we’ve lost the plot. And a lot of people have businesses and ideas that believe that emotional vulnerability will be the key.
Take for instance all the masculinity men’s wilderness groups out there, they believe that emotional vulnerability is the only approach and that everything else will bleed down from that. The believe that the true deep work happens individually rather than holistically. However in a few research studies it’s shown that when these men go to these retreats, they will be feeling better emotionally but showed little evidence of them supporting the people around them. From the article" “Among the Spiritual Bros” by Thomas Page McBee
“The Social Research Lab asked men who participated in the group’s programs to self-report their feelings and behaviors, and found that they had improved “internal” outcomes, like lower anxiety and depression levels. However, the Lab also reported that although attitudes initially changed, “there was no evidence of impact on behavioral change,” such as how they treated the women in their lives, or how they think about masculinity beyond 6 months.”
However, the way media and people in general who are invested in the idea of masculinity are convinced that Emotional Vulnerability and emotional literacy is the rosetta stone of fixing toxic masculinity. Some will create entire businesses around them, some will stake their own careers in it, and a lot of people will buy it.
I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it at all.
Don’t get me wrong, do men need to be more emotionally vulnerable? Absolutely, just like every human does. Are a lot of men awful at this? Yep! Do I think the people who believe on this are not doing good work? No not at all. The only thing that they lack is the vulnerability to say that this is not the only thing that will help.
If we were to tackle toxic masculinity, we need to think not only about indivudual men (and people), we need to think of the community as a whole. We need to think of policies, cultures, and ideas that perpetuate society.
Do guys need to cry more? Possibly, I don’t know. I’m not certain it’s going to cure toxic masculinity though, and the more we perpetuate this idea, it will just flood the discourse around emotional vulnerability, and taking away the air from other ideas that sorely need full understanding.
But in Part 2, we’ll talk about another of these things that take up the air when we talk about masculinity: Positive Male Role Models.