Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

Good essay

it's default position to drift towards but it bothers me that it suits abusers and makes any sort of accountability very tricky

― ogmor

ogmor there's a qualitative difference between interrogating one's own desires and holding other people accountable for their actions. a culture of accountability, to me, it about actions and not about feelings. when i do something to hurt somebody else, to my mind fostering a culture of accountability means acknowledging that and accepting the responsibility and the consequences. if i do something and i feel miserable about it later, that's something i have to be accountable to myself about, and sometimes the answer is "don't do that thing that will make you miserable", and sometimes the answer is "there's no reason to feel miserable about that", and all points in between.

Fresh points in here, as someone who knows a lot of guys who are more lone wolves than Entourage bros, combined with a yearning for a Jordan Peterson to take care of these men:

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/

“This isn’t him going to grab a beer with guys. He’s going to find psychological and emotional support from men who understand his problems,” Liz explains. “They’re not just getting together to have a bitch fest, gossip, or complain about their lives. They’re super intentional about what they’re talking about, why, and what’s important to them.”

this sounds like a nightmare

just sounds like the men's movement thing all over again. i did like 25 years back. it was fine, but i feel like the fear of effeminacy is pretty intractable even in these sorts of groups.

Yeah. This is funny because a friend of mine is writing a (very different) article about men's groups for Harper's, but people kept thinking he was from Harper's Bazaar.

The persistent idea that seeking therapy is a form of weakness has produced a generation of men suffering from symptoms like anger, irritability, and aggressiveness, because not only are they less likely than women to pursue mental health help, but once they do, they have a hard time expressing their emotions. (This is so common there’s even a technical term for it: “normative male alexithymia.”) For millennial men in particular, a major challenge is understanding they need help in the first place.

millennial men are more emotionally repressed and aggressive than other generations? can that possibly be true?

which men's movement, rushomancy? not going to make any suppositions here because there are multiple groups that could apply to in that timeframe

millenial men are maybe more likely to falsely think they have an affinity group with other men or are working on emotional development because of the availability of social media and messageboards

therapy or a real life group where you hash things out can be a harder sell to someone who thinks they're being social or confronting those issues because they have a group they regularly chat and joke with online

most men i know have done therapy. the idea that it's exclusively men who bottle up their problems, lack self-awareness or behave in a self-destructive manner seems a strange one.

plenty of people are also resistant to therapy. the most resistance i've ever seen in my life is my mother. the idea that this generation, male or otherwise, is more resistant than the one that went before seems like bs to me, but unlike that article i'm not going to assume my anecdotal experiences of the world allow me to deduce hard exact truths about billions of people.

i think it's weird to frame the mental health epidemic facing both genders as just one more front in the gender war, with women bearing the "emotional burden" of their depressed partners

please ban me from ilx

i don't doubt these women's anecdotes and it sucks being with someone who won't get help. i've even been there. and men are less likely to get help and that is on them to an extent. but why is everyone clinically depressed and also too poor to get treatment?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue

yeah it is fairly strange that someone could write an article about mental health, and presumably talk to a lot of depressed people and those who attempt to treat them, and ultimately decide that the big takeaway is to dole out some blame.

xpost

maybe men will be more likely to seek out help if they feel like not getting treatment is hurting the ones they love idk

for me depression is deeply wrapped up in guilt that i am a burden to my family, partner (when i have one), and friends so it was a little triggering this article

It's a bad article in many ways

xp. as someone who has been both the depressed "burden" partner and the "burdened" partner - sometimes both at the same time - i have never related at all to the frame used in these articles that we should look at interpersonal relationships with our closest people as work.

I feel like the HB article frames it with a certain skew but it's less a "men have bad mental health" issue than a "many men lack a certain type of socialization in their lives that provides balance and contributes to mental wellness."

I know a number of women with similar issues, and it often comes down to the social spaces people have the time to cultivate and how comfortable they are among peers in those spaces. The patriarchal model with a husband/wife, kids, man shouldering most of the financial burden, tends to create more spaces where women have some time among other moms, even if it's venting about their kids or w/e. Among my own friends with kids this accounts for a much smaller group than it would have in decades past, but it's still relevant -- and probably moreso among people who aren't really the type that would come to our online community.

Among coworkers I still know a ton of people where the husband is the breadwinner, the wife works fewer hours or takes time away from the workplace while the kids are young, etc. and that's more of what's in scope

my take is not to take the dialogue in an article that's not really about you too personally!

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/

Oh look, more gratuitously anecdotal, us vs. them bullshit.

Yeah, i mean, i’m of two minds here.

Emotional labor and domestic labor are important concwpts in feminism. Invaluable, even, in illuminating historical inequities.

This seems like yet another pop culture vulgarization of these kinds of concepts though. It’s not demonstrating some kind of structural fact of society, it’s just bashing people for because they didn’t make enough friends in their life.

For me it definitely is work. When my work life was unfulfilling and unchallenging and I had excess capacity, I have been the sympathetic ear/unpaid therapist for many of my closest friends over the years, not unwillingly. At the time it felt like friendship.

My work-life sitch is more extreme now, and uses a lot of my emotional capacity before I get home so when my boyfriend is discouraged/depressed/needs to work through things, I can barely even be there for him and I've been telling him for 5 years to get a therapist because I'm not one. It's definitely labor.

And what does this say to women who didn’t “prioritize yoga and therapy” in their illness? That they messed up somehow and don’t even have the excuse of toxic gender socialization? The whole framing is just deeply flawed

Self xp

I think "yoga and therapy" was doing the work of prioritizing your own needs in that article, and not specifically those two things? That particular paragraph was about a woman explaining she was spending a disproportionate amount of time tending to her partner's social needs and acting as an ad hoc therapist

as in, she knew what she needed to be on an even keel and she was spending that time on someone else

Her perspective on that relationship is of course valid. It was too draining and she had to step away. But the anecdote is used in the service of this larger narrative about men not taking care of their mental health and slagging that burden off on their partners. Maybe there is truth there but also like a symptom of depression is an inability to take care of oneself properly

feel like we're delving deeply into the metatextual weeds here with a wee bit of projection

I find my difficulty in making and maintaining friendships has a lot more to do with capitalism than maleness. I don’t have that much trouble expressing feelings, have seen therapists, and if anything have done more than my share of emotional labor in relationships.

Treesh, in response to "The persistent idea that seeking therapy is a form of weakness has produced a generation of men suffering from symptoms like anger, irritability, and aggressiveness, because not only are they less likely than women to pursue mental health help, but once they do, they have a hard time expressing their emotions. (This is so common there’s even a technical term for it: “normative male alexithymia.”) For millennial men in particular, a major challenge is understanding they need help in the first place."

...I didn't read that as "millennial men are even worse than previous generations," but rather as "because (this certain profile of) millennial men have already defined themselves in opposition to an outdated patriarchal model, they think they have this whole thing solved because they're not like their dads--so they've stopped inspecting their emotional needs and where they're turning to for them."

Anyway yeah projection--whoo! Also if you are someone who's already gone to therapy, has a MH diagnosis and a treatment plan, etc etc, you are obviously NOT in the group being examined here--I would have thought that was clear but ymmv.

I don’t think it’s about me

The whole framing is just deeply flawed

The popular press is a very flawed source of information. It always has been. The nostalgia for editors as 'gatekeepers' who controlled and directed the flow of information (of which I am as guilty as anyone) is based on something real, but is greatly overblown. Gifted and intelligent editors have always been scarce. The only advantage most of them had over today's internet freelancers and click-baiters was a set of heuristics derived over decades and passed along from editor to editor within the publisher they worked for.

Reading critically is the only way to get value out of printed matter.

Yeah. I was trying to read it critically. The idea that people are at fault for not maintaining friendships and becoming mentally ill is what I found uncomfortable with the article. There are some strong economic winds pulling people away from each other. And it isn’t just men who experience this. Not all women have these amazing support networks of friends to fall back on

I find my difficulty in making and maintaining friendships has a lot more to do with capitalism than maleness.

I think this is a great point, and it's supported by this link, which was included in the HB article: The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness.

During the week, much of my waking life revolves around work. Or getting ready for work. Or driving to work. Or driving home from work. Or texting my wife to tell her I’m going to be late getting home from work.

...

I love “dada time.” And I’m pretty good about squeezing in an hour of “me time” each day for exercise, which usually means getting up before dawn to go to the gym or for a run. But when everything adds up, there is no real “friend time” left. Yes, I have friends at work and at the gym, but those are accidents of proximity. I rarely see those people anywhere outside those environments, because when everything adds up, I have left almost no time for friends.

Sorry https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/03/09/the-biggest-threat-facing-middle-age-men-isn-smoking-obesity-loneliness/k6saC9FnnHQCUbf5mJ8okL/story.html

Yeah bingo

I find my difficulty in making and maintaining friendships has a lot more to do with capitalism than maleness

i think that the use of these megadistant immutable superstructures as focii points for a personal emotional health is an approach doomed to fail from the start, saying that with full emphasis on the YMMV principle obv

darragh how do you think capitalism and its demands on individuals within it as a superstructure is a megadistant force? imo on a very basic material level we are forced to reckon with capitalism on a daily basis

agreed

but i think its like blaming gravity for being hit by a rock (or a collection of rocks or whatever)

not correct but not the first or best way to avoid the rocks

sorry, not *in*correct

People are working long hours and have little material security. They have little time and energy to form lasting social bonds beyond their primary one with their romantic partner. And this in turn puts too much pressure on romantic relationships so they buckle under the weight

megadistant wasn't even the wrongest adjective dmac applied to capitalism there

'Capitalism' can mean many things. In Ireland, 'employees are entitled to 4 weeks of paid annual leave and 9 paid public holidays' (I'm quoting Wikipedia here), whereas in the US

There is no federal or state statutory minimum paid vacation or paid public holidays. Paid leave is at the discretion of the employers to its employees. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 77% of private employers offer paid vacation to their employees; full-time employees earn on average 10 vacation days after one year of service. Similarly, 77% of private employers give their employees paid time off during public holidays, on average 8 holidays per year. Some employers offer no vacation at all.[182] The average number of paid vacation days offered by private employers is 10 days after 1 year of service, 14 days after 5 years, 17 days after 10 years, and 20 days after 20 years.

The headline for this article on google search results is “How Men Became Emotional Gold Diggers.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=harpers+bazaar+men&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari

now i dont wish to go to bat for capitalism nor to be seen to do so

but treesh, whilst i argue for a focus on the personal interface with the world as a more positive, achievable/constructive approach than the naming of the horizon-level societal challenge, i do still know what was meant by "capitalism" yknow

all of those factors affect everyone in the system, women too
i don't understand why that invalidates the idea that men lean on the women in their lives as emotional crutches

The premises of the piece though are radically capitalistic. Emotional connection is “gold” and people are seen as being too greedy for it.

xp deems

i should have said SOME men so as not to infuriate anyone