We Need To Fight for Men’s Well-Being as Much as for Women’s

Before being a danger to others, men are a danger to themselves. As white men from western societies, they are 3 times more likely to experience episodes of depression, mental complications and serious health problems.

Men are sick of themselves, but it is not really their fault. Having been educated to an independent and Stoic masculine ideal, they have distanced themselves from their emotions and care, and refrain from a masculine identity that they truly desire.

Yet, they have no interest in victimizing themselves. On the contrary, they have every interest in engaging in the same struggle as women, namely against fixed representations of gender. They also want to enrich their conception of male identity and give it a new, more inclusive but also more personal meaning.

Here are 4 areas where men suffer from their gender fixity, and how they re-appropriate a rich, diverse but equally meaningful male identity.

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Men Don’t Think They Need Care

The figures are overwhelming: the white developed male population is one of the population most likely to experience violent behavior, depression and suicide. Men show equal resistance to seeking medical and therapeutic help for their mental health and non-mental health problems.

As a result, the simple fact of being a white man means a loss of 3 years of life expectancy compared to a white woman from the same society, and for every female suicide there are 3.5 male suicides.

Western men are sick of themselves, and desperately need treatment. But where does this come from?

From the belief that a man, a “real” man, does not need to heal himself or to take care of himself. They have been raised to the myth that their masculinity, which defines their dignity and attractiveness to women, is never acquired.

Unlike women who never really doubt their femininity, men are in a constant struggle to prove that they belong to a strong and invincible masculine ideal.

One of the principles of this ideal is that men do not seek help, but find it within themselves, by their own strength and means. If they are ill or unhappy, they prefer to fend for themselves, or leave things as they are. To ask for help would be to admit that they are not independent enough to be men.

If this discourse is never explicit, it turns relatively strong in their minds. As a result, the countries where men value virilist and paternalistic values (work and career above all, housewives, hiding their emotions rather than expressing them…) are also those where men have the most health problems and the lowest life expectancy, without asking for help from doctors.

Conversely, in Iceland or Denmark, where men have overcome these norms, they say they are much happier and are generally in better health.

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Men Struggle in Expressing Their Emotions

Speaking of the burden of being a man in 2020, Liz Plank in her book For the Love of Men tells the story of a transsexual making his gender transition.

Since his transformation, he has felt pressure that he would never have imagined as a woman. His male friends implicitly suggest that he repress his emotions in their presence. His family unconsciously keeps him apart whenever he longs for physical touch. He has been to regret his previous situation where he could express himself freely, as if new prohibitions were being imposed on him. As if being a man added constraints to his emotional life.

What Liz Plank in For the Love of Men calls “the great suppression” is one of the biggest problems that men have to live through. Most men have been educated not to express our emotions or even feel them at all. Their parents showed them through reprimands and subtle words that crying or being afraid was not worthy of being a man. They encouraged them to show more aggressive emotions or to express them in competition with other boys.

Conversely, the girls, who were allowed to let their emotions guide them, learned to recognize them and express them in a more diverse and harmonious way.

The result is a lack of emotional management and self-awareness. And this feeds the great dissatisfaction of both men and women in their joint relationship.

Many women in relationships find themselves helping men to show more vulnerability or express their emotional problems, as they encounter many obstacles. Although women also have deeper emotional issues, men starts with a serious disadvantage: not knowing enough about their personal emotions and how to communicate, they grow apart from their partner and loved one.

Fortunately, many of these skills can be learned, and many men have come a long way to find satisfaction in their relationships. But for some men the bar is too high, and gender representations too strong and endearing to let go of.

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Men Need Intimacy and Strong Bonds

Another consequence of this toxic masculine ideal is that men find themselves having fewer deep relationships with family and male friends.

Their upbringing has led them to favor the solitude and intoxication of male competitiveness to more intimate bonds. In this respect, male-male friendship, apart from the ideal of bromance, shows striking differences from those between women and men.

Men avoid close contacts, words of affirmation and attachment, more intimate situations, whereas female friendship is nourished by these situations. However, in the 19th century, men were often in close proximity without anyone having anything to say about it.

It was not until the social acceptance of homosexuality in public that men began to create strategies to avoid male contact. By doing so, they proved to others that they were not gay, and thus avoided the public shame of being less than a man, a feminized man.

These stereotypes led men to great situations of loneliness and emotional deprivation, dangerous for their own health (knowing the crucial role of social relationships in this regard). Thus, more white men in developed societies live without reliable and positive relationships with other people. They may still have privileged relationships with women, often their own wives, but women are not always there for them.

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Men Lack a More Diverse Male Identity

All these images of the “real man” are finally projected on the personal and professional aspirations of men. Many, out of shame and fear of ridicule, avoid following “less masculine” career paths.

They feel criticized for training to be a nurse, a hairdresser, or more artistic and emotional professions, which are more attuned to their intimate desires.

These norms obviously change with the new generations, much more tolerant, but remain in the unconscious of the men who undertake them.

This also applies to the identity that man gives himself. We, the men, measure ourselves only with an abstract and uniform archetype of “the man”, whereas there are thousands of models of men to cultivate and become. We all aspire to this strong, hard and authoritative man, and we forbid ourselves not to be one of them.

The man as a caring parent, the man who listens to his emotions and those of others, the man who takes care of his appearance and beauty, are all ways of being a man that every man has the right to feel without criticism from men or women.

The fights for man and women cause thus hold hands.

. . .

We, Men, Need to Man-In not Man-up

A single ideal of man is doing us harm. We, men, need to learn to thrive in more plural ways.

We need to accept what we desire deep down to be as a man. What kind of man can we be? There are actually a lot of desirable and diverse models out there : being funny, communicative, emotional, or even athletic, muscular man?

Men’s models are not in competition, but all show masculine qualities in their exuberance and diversity.

In the end, what they all have in common is to show a brave and strong way to assert oneself despite social norms. A mindful and meaningful masculinity that knows what it wants and dares to show and express it.

At this stage, Men in all their diversity have a long future ahead of them…

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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Photo credit: Samuel Branch on Unsplash