Male Solidarity Cannot Disappear When Feminists Leave

My uncle is an engineer.

He is one of the few men in my family who entered and left university with a degree in his hand, to show for his intelligence. My father and other uncles either had financial difficulty or family drama impeding their success.

My grandmother and late grandfather were elated. Uncle T, in my grandfather’s eyes, was a true evolution of his career as a carpenter. My uncles and father were proud as well, but they felt the need to remind him, or state, aloud to themselves, the world, and him, their own accomplishments without your typical higher learning credentials. At times, it felt like a simple tack-on to his college-related sentences; at other times, it felt dismissive of his experiences.

Perhaps the most controversial portion of my uncle’s life, the part that drew scrutiny later on, was his marriage. He and his wife had a fairytale meeting, college sweethearts, his very first relationship; they loved each other like an elderly couple sitting on the porch on a Sunday afternoon.

Uncle T did what most of us do: fill the airwaves with manifestations of our wildest dreams, that we and our lovers take as promises. These words are easy to be soothed away in youth, but as the couple gets older, the promises seem less sure. My aunt began to notice that my uncle’s grand visions of himself weren’t coming to fruition. And their marriage began to take a toll, and my aunt started to distance herself from him.

What were once arguments became authentic divorce conversations. Uncle T looked for camaraderie but couldn’t find any. His father had a 40+ year marriage under his belt; how could he truly fathom the quandary of being in a serious breakdown that could result in divorce? Uncle T’s sons were both under the age of 12; confiding in them would be both morally wrong and rather unproductive. His only escape was his brothers.

My young ears and mind were painted with the conversations turned verbally violent. My Uncle T was looking for support but found ridicule. His brothers picked apart his decisions, his choices, and they recalled my aunt’s schedule and its inconsistency. They mused and theorized in his presence that he was being cheated on, not even consoling him of the rumor, but using it to bludgeon him about his ignorance.

I heard this humiliation ritual about maybe 3–4 times before they ceased entirely. Long story less long, my Uncle T crumbled under the weight of his dying marriage. Things got so bad for him, he had a nervous breakdown in my grandparents’ living room.

They are just country folks, my grandmother and grandfather. They didn’t know about depression, anxiety, and things of that nature. But, they did know something was wrong with their baby boy, all they could do was call the ambulance and get him the help he needed.

It’s not the statistics.

It isn’t graphs showing the rise in mental health-related incidents for men over the years.

It isn’t even my work with young boys between the ages of 5–8 years old that moves my spirit to talk of such things.

It’s stories like my Uncle T, who was going through a tough time, and found himself longing for something he couldn’t have access to. Something my father and uncles didn’t have access to give him.

True male solidarity.

As men, it isn’t a novel concept or endeavor. We know when to use it, when it arises in us. Typically, from my estimation, moments when a woman is centered in the conversation, or is in the physical proximity. But when she leaves, when she steps out of that room, or is no longer the center piece of the dialogue, we eat each other alive. We’re taught to be that way. And such conditioning is killing us.

When Male Solidarity Arises

An attractive woman walks in.

She enters and takes her place wherever that may be, a classroom, a work office, the bus stop, or the train station. You notice her, and so do the other men. You may trade glances with each other, marvelling at this individual you have never noticed before. That is a type of solidarity.

You may not know the other men in the room, but in that very instance, a switch flicks on, and men view each other as individuals like themselves, experiencing the same situation, the same type of attraction. In that short burst of time, the men find commonalities with each other that may never have presented if that woman had never strayed in their direction.

This is a more mild-mannered, less harmful version of male solidarity.

The other is in the case the woman airs her perspective, which may take away advantages or place the world on a more equal footing. The men will support each other and stand by their masculinity, which links them all together. They will use the same facts to rebut those they deem feminists, gender theorists, politicians, and anyone who supports women’s empowerment in a fashion that is deemed too zealous.

In both cases, the differences in the masculine experiences juxtaposed with the entrance of women or feminine experiences in the physical or the intellectual, cause us to see beyond the immediate blocks that create solidarity. We see men as brothers, going through and experiencing what we feel and experience when it comes to men.

Now, you may beg the question, what about sports, what about the military, what about the typical places where men have gone to seek male camaraderie?

In my estimation and experience, these don’t breed wholesale male solidarity, just identification with the group moving towards a particular goal. I watched my boys overly identify with the baseball team they competed on, and shun the other boys they must compete against on a Saturday morning, or boys whose baseball was never their sport to begin with.

It mirrors our clubs, our organizations, our collective entities, providing camaraderie and support to only those the group can identify with, rooted and based on class, race, profession, heritage, or alma mater.

Male solidarity doesn’t mean that you empathize with some men and not others. It doesn’t mean that you are blind to the reality that people can hurt or harm, and just because someone is a man, they should get preferential treatment. Male solidarity means that when we see a man, we don’t see him as a random individual going about life; he is transformed and reformed to be a man who could be like us, going through a hard time in his relationship. A person capable of doing good, like we are, and slipping into evil the same way we are. They become a man who knows the struggle of working a job with little pay and the invisibility of wading through the world of unemployment.

Male solidarity means the men we come across are as much our helpers as we are the ones set to help them. This is a radical position for our culture. And the proof of its necessity is our current predicament.

When Male Solidarity Disappears

When the women leave.

When the feminists return to their corners of the internet or organizations to strategize and build.

When the gender theorists return to write their essays and their research.

When the politicians either win or lose, never to be seen in our corner of the world again.

That male solidarity we had, no matter how mild-mannered and crudely misogynistic, disappears, never to return until another brush with the feminine perspective.

Our brothers in that room become competition for a promotion, and all the antics ensue to stop their rise.

That guy you sat behind when that beautiful woman started speaking, now you will do anything to embarrass him in front of her to increase your perception in her eyes.

That friend, coming to you about his concerns about life, gets brushed aside and told to do something productive with his tears. He’s never heard, just stewing in his anger on a weight bench.

When the feminine perspective leaves, all differences between us and the men in our circle come to view, and we turn every entanglement and jousting session into a life or death encounter, tearing each other apart, for money, for status, for respect, for women.

It is why many older men don’t see young men as their younger selves or their sons, but as menaces disrupting the status quo. It’s why brothers, young men on the street, can take each other’s lives so frivolously.

We were raised to be this way. We are men ruled by old dogmas in a newer, more modern age. We have new pressures, new struggles, and things that have evolved from our grandfather’s time, and our fathers, even our older brothers.

And what is the effect of such things, this switch when the women leave the room? With shrinking social circles, men don’t feel comfortable disclosing private, intimate information with their fellow brothers. Higher suicide rates, because no one is willing to hear the pleas of brothers before they take the shot or the leap.

We speak all the time of men being victims of abuses as well, but we, as a community of men, don’t typically organize and lobby together to create steady change, whether we are the victims or we know one. We save our rage for the conversations, with no action beyond them. We don’t even take notes from the movements that are demonized, to know how to move and navigate those systems to get what is best for young boys equally.

The problems continue, the systems never change, the organizations never get founded, the ones that do exist struggle to receive funding and resources, and the struggles get placed at the feet of the women, the gender theorists we demand do research on us, and the politicians who we expect to see our pain without showing them our scars.

The lack of male solidarity is crippling us.

We End Where It Began

Uncle T did eventually get divorced, after he started to get better health-wise.

He and my cousins left my grandparents’ home and moved to a new state to start fresh. Uncle T got a new job that he seems to love, his sons are acclimated to their new schools, and Uncle T met a woman at his place of employment. Within perhaps a year and a half, two years, they became engaged and got married.

My uncle’s story was the cliche superhero film we all claim is too predictable. The man in the valley is alone, throughout, and heals himself by climbing to the top of the mountain. He never lets the pain, the ridicule, take his smile or his love for his sons. And in a twist of fate, he finds a second chance at the thing he was always looking for.

But, I still must beg the question, did the journey need to be so dark? I am proud of my uncle for taking his mental health journey seriously, in ways that, in all transparency, many of us as Black men don’t. However, why couldn’t he be supported by the built-in brothers who came from the same culture and know how it goes for men?

Because they saw the difference. They saw the college degree they didn’t have, they saw the marriage that looked Hollywood-scripted that they didn’t have, they saw the intellect that wasn’t folksy sayings from where we were from, but analytical, nuanced thinking. They saw the things that my uncle was willing to accept that they weren’t. And in turn, they turned on him and buried him alive every chance they got, lashing him with their words and isolating him with their laughter.

Please don’t let me be misunderstood. Don’t mistake my passion for anger. I know good and well, some of you are doing the work, have reframed your mind to a male solidarity perspective. You fund organizations, maybe run them. You have pushed yourself despite the ridicule to teach, be of service to young boys who may not have a father in the home. Maybe you walk the streets and give a firm handshake to any young man you see. Maybe you host game nights for the despondent young and old.

I am not critiquing the individual. I am against the culture that has made us view each other as enemies. And the only time when we see ourselves as friends is when a woman is at the center, then when she leaves, we return to our collective invisibility or demonization.

Male solidarity must be the new paradigm of the present and future. The one who can heal others, build with others, and organize with others. It must be a frame of thinking that doesn’t need to put an enemy in the center to fuel the engine. It runs on its own, without the need for hate.

For you, for me, for us, and for the Uncle T’s of the world.