This is how I came across Jack Donovan.
Donovan is author of The Way of Men, a book imploring men to reject contemporary notions of masculinity. He also hosts a podcast called “Start the World”, where he explores and supports a return to tribalism. He conjures up immediate comparisons to Brad Pitt in Fight Club in voice, philosophy, and distrust of institutions.
[Donovan] views addiction as an understandable, yet unacceptable consequence of men feeling lost.
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He was, understandably, a bit suspicious when I reached out to him via e-mail and identified myself as a woman and a feminist. “As everyone has been cheering for the disappearance of white men from the planet, it’s surprising when anyone is concerned that white men are doing their part to help the process along,” he wrote back. He scoffed at the fact that I was interviewing scholars.
Donovan has had countless men reach out to him looking for guidance. He views addiction as an understandable, yet unacceptable consequence of men feeling lost. “Many of the younger guys I talk to — guys who actually want families — just look at it all like “what’s the point?” and lead lives of self-indulgence that will ultimately become self-destruction instead,” Donovan wrote.
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This, for me, is the big reveal: young men don’t see the point. And this is the piece that resonated with Brandon when he described his life the year before he descended into addiction.
“I had been with my high school sweetheart for seven years,” Brandon said. “It got to the point where she expected to get married, have kids. And I felt like, that’s what I’m supposed to do –almost what I have to do. There’s this rigid role that, as a man, you have to have.”
I asked Brandon how he felt about this invisible, yet inescapable pressure — to be a Good Man. It came down to him feeling as though he could either succeed or fail, with no room to land in-between.
“In my mind, it was like one road or the other,” Brandon said. “I could either do the whole family thing, or I could just break up with her. And I chose to break up with her. And then I could have an excuse to go out and do whatever I wanted to do.”
In Donovan’s words, Brandon stood at the crossroads, saw the pre-destined path, and thought, “What’s the point?”
This speaks to a specific need – an urgent one – to re-evaluate how we talk about men, how we describe their problems, and the requirement for a different kind of sensitivity when we talk about white male privilege. The point isn’t to assign blame or shame, but to come to solutions that show us the way forward.
When Hodgson attended last year’s International Conference on Masculinities in New York City, he heard a recurring theme: “There was a lot of emphasis on the importance of men getting in touch with their feelings, and a lot about the importance of them having connection, but not a lot about how. And the messaging of being a man is that you’re supposed to do it on your own and figure it out yourself.” Even as Hodgson felt grateful for that conversation, he sensed that it was missing some next steps — the ones outlining the path toward change.
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In many ways, the death of white men represents a canary in the coal mine.
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And this is where my perspective as a feminist hits home: the objectives and goals of feminism, to free all people from oppression, have only succeeded insofar as securing women’s abilities to mimic and overvalue patriarchy.
What do I mean by this? Allow me to share some examples that repeatedly come up in my clinical practice:
- A male client reveals to me that his wife has hit, scratched, or shoved him. He feels that it’s OK, “Because she’s a woman.”
- A male client does the majority of child-rearing and household duties while his wife works. She comes home and berates him for “not being a man.”
- A male client is banned from spending time with his friends (going out to lunch, watching sports, fishing) because his wife does not like his friends, even though she frequently gets together for “girls night out.”
In each of these instances, women have appropriated patriarchy, in the name of equality, to have power and control over their husbands.
This is not what Gloria Steinem had in mind.
It is time for us to stop valuing equality. After all, one could argue that the Deaton and Case study showed increasing equality in poor health outcomes, with the health of white Americans trending down to meet the already poor health outcomes of minority communities.
In a world that only values equality, it’s just fine that women’s drinking is coming to mirror men’s drinking, and that women’s use of heroin is surging, closing the gender gap with men’s use.
In a world that only values equality, we can feel resigned to staggering income disparities, with one percent of the population being wealthy and the 99 percent sharing the burden of poverty– so long as each person in the 99 percent has an equal shot at having less than the generation before.
An equal world is not a better world. So where do we start?
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We must value male community.
We tell men to connect and be in touch with their feelings, but give them no path to meet this demand. One of the only socially sanctioned common spaces for men, the bar, encourages maladaptive coping behavior like overdrinking. Rather than “ban the bar,” however, we need to expand and value places for men to come together outside of the home.
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We must give our children a sense of purpose and possibility.
With the American Dream out of reach for most, we must explore and construct a new set of values. Who do we want our children to become? What kind of people do we hope that they will be, to family members, neighbors, and friends? That is the question, post-recession, that we need to start answering.
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Women must stop policing masculinity.
It is unacceptable for women to feel entitled to the same kinds of patriarchal strategies that feminism worked so hard to eliminate. Insulting men by questioning their competence, complaining about their income when they are doing the majority of domestic labor, or ridiculing them when they are depressed or anxious makes us perpetrators of patriarchal crime. We must also recognize that men are not women, and that they biologically are wired to process information and respond differently; demanding that they immediately respond to our statements, identify their emotions, or tell us everything the minute we want to know is unfair and degrading.
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We must value the integration of culturally masculine and feminine traits.
This isn’t about genitals – it’s about culture. As determined by culture, there is resilience to be gained by embracing the masculine and the feminine. Through both, we find wisdom. Rather than overvalue one to the exclusion of the other, we can find ways of building both into our lives and values. (Hodgson depicts this beautifully in the Man Kind Project Journal). We can look at stereotypically masculine traits (such as courage, achievement, competence, logic, history, responsibility) and imagine the wisdom gained by equally valuing stereotypically feminine traits (such as context, emotion, multi-tasking, nurturing, vulnerability, relationships).
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We must teach and value self-soothing skills.
Glaser sees this as a social need, transcending gender: “We need to find ways to help people — all people, including our kids — learn to shake things off, to fully unplug, and to take care of themselves better. That means saying no to some of the external pressures imposed on us, whether it’s the expectation that our kids attend this school or that school; turning off our phones before we go to bed; accepting that the world is changing and that getting involved with our communities can be sustaining and not energy-sucking.”
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We must treat opioid addiction as a medical condition.
Opioid dependence requires evidence-based treatment, behavioral conditioning, and medical monitoring. Brain imaging techniques such as MRIs, fMRIs, MRs, SPECT scans, and CT scans reveal with irrefutable evidence that opioid use changes the structure and function of normal brain pathways. Opioid dependence is a medical condition – not a moral failure or character defect.
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We must embrace harm reduction as a human rights issue.
False ideas abound about what harm reduction means. Rather than view harm reduction as a permissive stance enabling bad behavior, we must reframe it is a human rights issue. All humans, regardless of circumstance, have a right to access life-saving healthcare free from threat of physical harm and emotional ridicule.
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We must appreciate how racial discrimination against blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, hurts all of us – especially white men and women.
There is a powerful argument here that if we had less racial discrimination in the medical profession, we would simply prescribe less unnecessary opioid pain medications to whites, and reduce underprescribing to minorities. Our society has supported an epidemic that disproportionately targets and kills whites. Additionally, the permissive attitude of police in tony, middle-class, white suburban enclaves (such as the one I grew up in), only set children up for failure, untimely death, and injury in the real world.
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We must redefine how male liberation fits into the feminist project.
Feminists work hard to debunk stereotypical female dichotomies (Virgin Mary v. Jezebel, bitch v. good girl, crazy v. boring). Similarly, feminists must debunk stereotypical male dichotomies that force men into feeling like either objects-of-ridicule or violent aggressors. We must be vigilant to our own tendency to view men as either perpetrators or wimps. We must own when we are wrong, and listen to men in the way that we want to be heard. THAT is the original feminist project.
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In many ways, the death of white men represents a canary in the coal mine. Americans are uniquely failing to connect with one another based on our belief that people of different identities are completely different – that someone else is merely “other.” And yet, in this we are united: our suffering is acute. It is time to unpack our reluctance to change – to move away from living in disconnection, numbness, and pain – and toward a radical understanding that values human life.
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The hatred of men, by both men and women, is in plain sight for all to the world to see. It has been so obvious and accepted for so long, it is invisible to most. Cultural misandry and hyper-gynocentrism are now and have been the norm for a very long time. Because it’s culturally accepted, no one cares or they simply use this fact for their own personal gain. Need examples? Women get lighter sentences for the same crimes – quite often getting off the hook completely because of their vagina and breasts. There’s an effort to close women’s prisons… Read more »
Some minor issues aside, you were doing alright until you cited Kimmel. That guy might be the most self loathing man I have ever met, and continually gives the most uncharitable readings of anything having to do with men. I can see where “white male entitlement” might be a factor to wealthy, upper class people that think the world owes them something, but for the underclass where the majority of suicide happens, “entitlement” is not the issue. It’s hopelessness due to living in a world that doesn’t care at all about you, and belonging to a race and gender in… Read more »
hi Zemus, I slightly disagree – whilst the commentary on Kimmel being a self loathing male constantly lambasting the gender is pretty close to the mark, I still believe the concept of white male entitlement is a prevailing factor especially for the lower/middle class majority. If you think it out, lower, middle, and upper classes are all sold the same ‘American dream’ which only really manifests in society for the upper classes. This no doubt leads to exacerbated emptions of, as you put it, hopelessness living in a world that doesn’t care about you for the majority of lower/middle class… Read more »
“It’s hopelessness due to living in a world that doesn’t care at all about you..” Welcome to our world. Sorry it had to come to this. We’ve been trying to tell EVERYONE this for the last few decades but the response we (non caucasian people) historically get is “race card” this and “affirmative action” that. If white-male privilege is anything, it’s having the privilege of being the last ones to realize that the economic rug has been swept out from under us ALL here in the middle and lower classes a long time ago. But that’s OK, we’re all in… Read more »
Zemus, you said “It’s hopelessness due to living in a world that doesn’t care at all about you, and belonging to a race and gender in which you are not only left to solve your own problems but blamed for the problems of others” I’m surprised you didn’t get a lot of backlash about what you said here. Didn’t you know that by just being white, you have an immense amount of privilege? I just found this “The study found that the suicide rate was ten times higher in men of lower socioeconomic status than in affluent men. ” “….… Read more »
“This is not what Gloria Steinem had in mind” … ” “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”
Nope. It sure isn’t Tom.
But, I say men need women and women need men. We need each other to make this country a better place to live for everyone. We are very long way off Tom from either sex really trying to understand and empathize with each other’s challenges.
I am not terribly hopeful in my lifetime…But, in America anything is possible. So, we shall see.
I read the link about women using drugs and all I can say is that this is not the first time, the USA has had a heroin epidemic. We had one in the 1950s where the American Mafia push it until the government toughen up the sentencing laws for it and the Mafia lawyers didn’t know about it until their clients came before the judge. The next heroin epidemic was in the late 60s and early 70s with the Vietnam War and the CIA helping to import the stuff through the use of its private airline in order to pay… Read more »
I still think that the way rich people and corporations have ran the US economy for the last 35 years is still the main cause of the suicide rate for white men and destroying the American Dream. I do agree with you on doctor prescribing pills for just about anything and everything instead of trying to find better non-drugs alternative ways to help their patients. Even schools are relying on drugs to calm down kids when they are in a combative mood instead of trying to address the underlying problems behind them. BTW, doctors and nurses are also heavy drinkers… Read more »