I read this several times and it’s still not making sense.
Masculinity broadly refers to qualities we perceive to be associated with men and boys. It includes physical traits (facial hair, deep voice) and it also includes behaviors and personality traits . Some of these things are rooted in biological differences between the sexes and some of them are the result of socialization. With me so far? All of this is value neutral.
Believers in toxic masculinity aren’t saying it’s bad to be masculine. They are saying men are told in many insidious ways that to be a Real Man (and thus, of high social value), they have to behave in ways that ultimately hurt themselves and others. To put it another way, the pressure that men are under to embody masculinity has toxic consequences.
Nobody is saying that being manly or womanly is toxic: what we’re saying is that requiring people to fit other people’s idea of what one should be like is toxic (as in, damaging to the person who receives it), that this kind of toxic behavior is often linked to reducing one to one’s apparent gender, and that it is also linked to gender-based stereotypes.
As for you and others who claim that you’ve never encountered anybody criticising you for ungenderly behavior, congratulations. I believe you. But you are refusing to believe those of us who have in fact been pressured and criticised for ungenderly behavior. Or, heck, had our existence denied because our gender can’t be [whatever]: not “shouldn’t be”, but “can’t be”!
I’m reasonably sure most people in these boards have never been raped. Neither have I. But that doesn’t mean rape doesn’t exist.
I’m guessing you followed one of the best rules of life and didn’t read the youtube comments.
So let me do it for you, and in return, you can pay for my next trip to the psych ward.
“Someone is gonna meme his face”
“I knew she was a diva ”
“Embid looks like a spoilt baby going to tell his Dad what mom did to hin”
“Dont ever let the cameras see u cry after a loss go cry in shower or something”
“NEW MEME NEW MEME YEA DATS YoUuU”
“Embiid crying baby”
“Big boys don’t Kawhi”
“Come on broham, all men cry at some point in your life but hold it together playa until you get in the locker room chief. I guess this is the new generation where men want to be women and women want to be men.”
There are apparently quite a few people who think he’s less of a man because of it - that he’s either a child or a woman because he’s emotional after a big loss.
Big deal. There are quite a few people who think the Earth is flat, and that Bigfoot exists.
On a serious note, that first TVTropes link, almost all of the examples from movies show where they guy averted the trope. And the rest are old people from another time (Clint Eastwood) or old movies. Similarly, the TV shows are mostly old as well.
Can you think of a TV Show or Movie in the past 19 years that told society “Men Don’t Cry”? How many TV Shows or Movies in the past 19 years showed a man openly crying?
Finally, if women think that men aren’t supposed to cry, is that toxic masculinity?
I see a lot of people talking past each other here.
Sure, in the academic sense, Toxic Masculinity refers to some nuanced real issue, but the term itself is problematic because
While it may have been intended to refer to indoctrination of males into certain attitudes and behaviors, it has pretty much been coopted by popular usage to now mean bad behaviors of men.
Emphasis matters. The choice to pick a particular gender itself implies disparity, the opposite of its intended purpose.
The focus is backwards. Promoting ideals and solutions is more effective than targeting symptoms
The simplistic label limits awareness of many other related issues which have nothing to do with either toxicity or gender
Well, let’s summarize where we are. I’ve provided a list of authors, music, and other cultural products that feature men or boys crying/expressing emotions. You’ve provide a list of cultural products in which men are told not to cry/express emotions. So what can we conclude from that? We can conclude that there’s a large variety of cultural products out there and that they do not all deliver the same message on males crying, or on any other issue.
But then you go on to quote this from that page:
And to say this:
This argument is wrong for several reasons. First, the tvtropes.org website doesn’t prove anything. There are millions of TV shows, books, movies, comics, and so forth out there. So a website can list a small number of cases on which a particular trope occurs. That hardly proves that said trope dominates all pop culture everywhere. I can name a bunch of pop culture products featuring green characters (The Incredible Hulk, Guardians of the Galaxy, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, …). Does this prove that green characters are omnipresent in pop culture? I think the fact remains that the large majority of characters are not green.
Second, no matter how much we talk about pop culture, it proves nothing about real life. In pop culture, there are a lot of evil overlords who aim to acquire a specific object and use it to rule the world (Sauron, Voldermort, Thanos, …). This does not prove that society is full of evil overlords who rule the world with a magic ring, wand, or gauntlet. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever taken over the world with a piece of jewelry. It’s almost as if reality and fiction are different.
Of course, the people who make pop culture do come out of our society and are influenced by it, but every individual artist puts their individual ideas into their work. Therefore one work of art, or even 100, does not tell us anything about society as whole.
Any claim that “Society says _____________” or “Society considers _____________” is false, if it claims to describe all of present-day society. Society is the sum total of the behaviors of everyone. There are 330,000,000 humans in the USA and billions more in other countries. They say different things. They believe different things. They consider different things to be a masculine ideal. To make a blanket statement about what “society considers masculine” is absurd. To do so based on a list of TV shows, manga, and the like is doubly absurd.
There are no gendered expectations shaping how men and women may acceptably express emotions.
I feel like that is so self-evidently false that being asked to prove it is like being asked to prove “there is social pressure on people to be economically independent from their parents as adults” or “Eating together is an important part of social interactions”.
But there are expectations shaping how everyone may acceptably do almost anything.
Some men think men shouldn’t cry. Some men think it’s okay for men to cry. Some women think men shouldn’t cry. Some women think it’s okay for men to cry.
Which one of those is “toxic masculinity”? Which ones are something else “toxic”?
I’m still learning this myself, but my understanding is that “Some men think men shouldn’t cry” and " Some women think men shouldn’t cry" would be the viewpoints that perpetuate “toxic masculinity” - though this particular example is probably on the milder end of the “toxicity spectrum”. “Some men think men should defend their honour with violence” and “some women think men should defend their honour with violence” might be further along the scale.
I think both men AND women’s expectations as to “what makes a man manly” contribute to the culture of toxic masculinity, and hopefully people recognize this. Women being attracted to, and approving of violent assholes definitely perpetuates toxic masculinity, as does peer pressure from other men. If society is to change the idea that stoicism, domination, self reliance, defending honour, etc. are NOT concepts that epitomize manliness, it’s something that people of all genders will have to work on. The thing is, many of these attributes that are seen as virtuous may not necessarily be that toxic in principle (and have some beneficial aspects to them, even) - but they can become toxic if they are taken to the extreme (Manda JO’s story about the guy driving with a knife in his leg being a great example, IMO).
I think similar strides have already been made in society to dispel stereotypes about what epitomizes femininity - ie. the idea that being demure, helpless and chaste are desirable traits in a woman is probably much less mainstream than it may have been a century ago. The gradual evolution of social standards is likely how “toxic masculinity” will be fought as well.
As much as we talk about incels on this board and their warped views, you’d think it would be obvious that collectively men are pressured to live up to certain gendered ideals. Real Men are tall, sexually experienced, and make a lot of money. Okay, so what happens when you don’t have these things. You get a rope, that’s what you do. This Incel Logic 101, man.
Are we really supposed to entertain the idea that men and women get hit with the same shit in the exact same way?
The semistructured, open-ended interview has become the gold standard for qualitative health research. Despite its strengths, the long interview is not well suited for studying topics that participants find difficult to discuss, or for working with those who have limited verbal communication skills. A lack of emotional expression among male research participants has repeatedly been described as a significant and pervasive challenge by health researchers in a variety of different fields. This article explores several prominent theories for men’s emotional inexpression and relates them to qualitative health research. The authors argue that investigators studying emotionally sensitive topics with men should look beyond the long interview to methods that incorporate other modes of emotional expression. This article concludes with a discussion of several such photo-based methods, namely, Photovoice, Photo Elicitation, and Visual Storytelling.
The role of conformity to dominant U.S. masculine norms as an antecedent to help-seeking attitudes in men has been established using convenience samples made up largely of college-age and European American males. However, the role of conformity to masculine norms on help-seeking attitudes for noncollege-age men or for men from diverse backgrounds is not well understood. To fill this gap in the literature, the present study examined the cross-cultural relevance of a mediational model of the relationships between conformity to dominant U.S. masculine norms and attitudes toward counseling through the mediator of self-stigma of seeking counseling for 4,773 men from both majority and nonmajority populations (race/ethnicity and sexual orientation). Structural equation modeling results showed that the model established using college males from majority groups (European American, heterosexual) may be applicable to a community sample of males from differing racial/ethnic groups and sexual orientations. However, some important differences in the presence and strengths of the relationships between conformity to dominant masculine norms and the other variables in the model were present across different racial/ethnic groups and sexual orientations. These findings suggest the need to pay specific theoretical and clinical attention to how conformity to dominant masculine norms and self-stigma are linked to unfavorable attitudes toward help seeking for these men, in order to encourage underserved men’s help-seeking behavior.
There are two principal types of stigma in mental illness, ie, “public stigma” and “self-stigma”. Public stigma is the perception held by others that the mentally ill individual is socially undesirable. Stigmatized persons may internalize perceived prejudices and develop negative feelings about themselves. The result of this process is “self-stigma”. Stigma has emerged as an important barrier to the treatment of depression and other mental illnesses. Gender and race are related to stigma. Among depressed patients, males and African-Americans have higher levels of self-stigma than females and Caucasians. Perceived stigma and self-stigma affect willingness to seek help in both genders and races. African-Americans demonstrate a less positive attitude towards mental health treatments than Caucasians. Religious beliefs play a role in their coping with mental illness. Certain prejudicial beliefs about mental illness are shared globally. Structural modeling indicates that conformity to dominant masculine gender norms (“boys don’t cry”) leads to self-stigmatization in depressed men who feel that they should be able to cope with their illness without professional help. These findings suggest that targeting men’s feelings about their depression and other mental health problems could be a more successful approach to change help-seeking attitudes than trying to change those attitudes directly. Further, the inhibitory effect of traditional masculine gender norms on help-seeking can be overcome if depressed men feel that a genuine connection leading to mutual understanding has been established with a health care professional.
However, it is not unusual for some men to under-state mental health problems (Paulson & Bazemore, 2010). Normative male interpersonal behavior can, but does not always, involve an absence of strong affect, muted emotional displays, and minimal use of expressive language, making it dif-ficult for primary care physicians and other health professionals to determine when men are actually experiencing depressive disorders (Martin, Neighbor, & Griffith, 2013).
APA has issued its first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys. They draw on more than 40 years of research showing that **traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage **https://on.apa.org/2GOqtzp
This shit is not that hard to find.
The position you have staked out is utterly foreign to anyone who’s done any serious (or even cursory) work in this field. It’s an astonishing argument to have and I hope this clarifies that you’re not just a little wrong. You’re way off in left field.
In my view, when we discuss TM, it’s helpful to show how a particular trope is damaging to the individual and others, because not all gender stereotypes are socially valued the same way or toxic in the same way.
“Men like fart jokes.” Is it a stereotype? Yup. Does it make men out to be crass juveniles? Yes, a little bit. Is a guy going feel pressured to live up to this stereotype? Eh, probably not. Ain’t no one going to revoke his man card if he admits to finding this humor stupid. Is liking fart jokes going to cause him to do self-destructive, life-threatening things? Nope.
“Men don’t cry.” Is it a stereotype? Yes, but even most importantly, it’s an instruction to men that they shouldn’t cry. So guys will feel pressure to live up to it. And if they fail at that, will they same feel weak and unmanly? Yes, quite possibly because stoicism is a highly valued trait in men. Is denying himself the right to cry going to cause harm to him? Yes, at least in some subset of men. If he doesn’t have a healthy way of releasing negative feelings, he’s risking all kinds of psychological issues. Issues that affect his relationships with others.
Why is there so much emphasis here on crying? Crying isn’t something that’s normal or ideal for anyone. If you’re crying, it means something really bad happened. Really, really bad, not just “bad.” It is not something that people should ideally be doing on a regular basis.
A woman who regularly starts crying is going to be looked at as emotionally fragile and possibly disturbed, just like a man. I don’t know any women who DON’T find it embarrassing and undesirable to be seen crying.
But… this isn’t actually true. At all. And what’s more, the “boys don’t cry” stoic mentality extends to things like diagnosing medical disorders and the ability for health emotional responses to tragedy. Check out some of the things I cite above.
There is much less pressure for women to not cry than men. I grant you that women also catch flak for crying, but the flak doesn’t threaten their gender the same way it does for men.
Let me ask you this. Do you think men are socialized to express their feelings and emotions the same way that women are? Because that’s really what we’re talking about; crying is just shorthand.
Crying is pretty normal for a lot of people. Thisarticle suggests the average woman cries 5 times a month; the average man, much less but still enough that I don’t think it only happens when something “really, really bad happens”
Interestingly, the next paragraph talks about how gender differences in crying “might” have a biological basis, but the weasel words have weasel words.
I am not a crier–and in all honesty, I think that’s because my whole life I’ve worked really hard not to because I think of crying as feminine and weak, and okay for “normal” girls but I’m not “like normal girls”, I’m tougher, like a man. That idea–that masculine is better than feminine, and that masculine involves extreme emotional control–is an example of internalized standards of toxic masculinity.
There’s only a stone’s throw from “Men shouldn’t cry” to “Men don’t need to get help for their personal problems, and least not real men.”
I hate to keep talking about black people, but I’m gonna do it again because I think it could be helpful. Many black people have internalized a message that we have to strong all the time. We don’t “get” nervous breakdowns; that’s white people mess. You have some shit you’re going through? Work it out at church. Pray on it hard enough and the shit will be healed. But going to a therapist is what white people with too much time and money on their hands do. That’s not what “real” black people do.
It’s a toxic message for obvious reasons.
When the Sandra Bland story first broke, I talked to my mother about it because it was really upsetting for me. More upsetting than any other police brutality case. My mother was confident that Sandra had been killed by that police officer (or someone at the jail). But I told her straight-up that I thought Sandra probably did kill herself because I could see myself doing the same if I had been in her shoes.
You woulda thought that I had blasphemed, the way my mother reacted to that. “WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD YOU KILL YOURSELF! DON’T YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T BE WEAK LIKE THAT! DON’T YOU KNOW THAT’S WHAT THE RACISTS WANT YOU TO DO! YOU HAVE TO BE STRONGER THAN THAT, GIRL!”
I wanted to hang up the phone. The conversation reminded me how “weird” I felt the first time I told my parents I was in therapy to get help with my depression. I felt like a failure for revealing my inability to be above the fray all the time. My parents didn’t say so, but I could almost read their minds: “She’s been hanging around white people too long.”
