Is the positive masculinity movement a necessary step in the right direction? Or is it impeding progress by neglecting to address the very heart of the issue?
You can put it in terms of race, too: if something has to be coded white to be acceptable (if it can’t be accepted while coded black), then the system itself isn’t acceptable at all.
I first realized this around 2007, when I listened to commentators publicly lose their mind when Obama did something “too black” and Hillary did something “too female.” To them, the political system was only meant for — should only accept — politicians who acted like white men, even when those politicians were not. It was white men who set the baseline for acceptable behaviour. Anyone who deviated from that behaviour by doing something “too Black” or “too female” was open to vicious criticism.
Absolutely. And, I would argue, the backlash from some elements of Black community culture -- which, NOT coincidentally, are male-dominant, femininity-fearing elements! works the same way in reverse. Black schoolkids who are picked on by other Black kids for "acting white," i.e., behaving in class and getting good grades, are really being attacked for perceived "effeminacy," leaving an unspoken assumption that being "authentically Black" is being Black while stereotypically "male." This of course hurts everyone, and probably Black girls in particular.
Have you spent much time in African American urban communities lately? There are plenty of gender-nonconforming young people who value education. The stereotypes you cite date from the 1990s.
Lil Nas X “ Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” came out four years ago. A gay black man gave Satan a lap dance and it went off the charts. That’s African American culture today (which is very different than other Black African cultures and is *extremely* American).
Not stereotypes. Research findings…from study of school desegregation. Black students in segregated Black schools who were then sent to desegregated white schools suddenly performed worse. That achievement gap has persisted over time. Studies showed Black achievement in that context came at the cost of cultural identity. In other words, they only achieved after coding themselves as “white.”
This coding was enforced by the white educational system they joined. Other Black students who didn’t code themselves as white may have picked up on the coding and held it against the Black students who did. But the overall issue is the system that confers achievement only to the students coded as white.
Similarly, broadening the coding of masculinity does nothing to change the nature of a system that confers power to masculinity at the expense of everyone dominated by it.
No, I'm not that familiar with more recent trends in Black community culture, and it's very, very good to hear that those old stereotypes are disappearing. I hope that keeps up!
As I implied by mentioning Lil Nas X, those stereotypes are pretty much gone at this point. The fact they are still brought up at all is pretty much the legacy of structural racism in our country.
African American culture has always been strongly matrifocal (cf Rosa Parks, one of the great organizers of the NAACP). It’s not surprising that “urban” communities are ahead of the curve here as they have always been ahead of the curve in terms of cultural change (which is what I was implying when I emphasized the American half—huge swaths of popular culture in the United States in just time delayed African American culture).
The Musk/Trump breakup is a recent example of the problem. So many have feminized their bickering, likening it to “Mean Girls” scenes and even AOC saying, “The girls are fighting.” We’ve all internalized degrading the feminine as negative and undesirable. Isn’t it simply 2 underdeveloped humans who are used to getting their own way having a very public argument? Their negative HUMAN traits of selfishness, power, control, and entitlement are on full display, and those are traits all humans have to work through, preferably at a much younger age.
Another thought I had was that many have stated that the wives in Secret Lives of Mormon Wives are in lavender marriages because the men seem so feminine. Maybe the benevolent patriarchy in Mormonism that encourages men to develop their more tender, loving sides has confused many other men, even gay men. And yet Mormon wives struggle with a high rate of depression. Could it be that the patriarchal model, even couched as “benevolent,” is the problem? Yes, yes it is.
I wrote then deleted four paragraphs on how Mormon men in the public eye are all seen as gay. An essay for another day. 🫠 But yes great pull about the dialogue around Musk and Trump. Whenever men or women want the quickest insult for men they call them a girl. The problem goes so deep.
I came over here just to mention the Musk/Trump debacle and how it has been framed as "girlies" fighting. Ugh! No one benefits when we use that language.
I believe Brit Hartley had mentioned that TBMs assume exmos become liberal, but she said leaving the church just lets their liberal values come to the forefront instead of being hidden behind a wall of shame. I would guess gender confusion is the same: always there but now not withheld.
That may be part of it, certainly. It's just interesting that Mormons have such a strict gender binary, but it doesn't fully align with the gender binary of broader American culture and there is a mismatch.
I must be in a particularly pissed off mood this week (my weekly post was titled, "I am so fucking tired of explaining your own internalized misogyny.") because I am just so over women using up all their energy in the pursuit of "fixing" men. It's like white people asking Black people how they can be less racist. Do the fucking work. There are resources galore on ways to unpack the inherent racism within each white person who was raised in a society that puts a premium on whiteness. The same goes for feminism. If men were really interested in having richer, fuller, more complete lives where they are allowed to use all the crayons in the box, none of which is better than the others, there is a fuckload of feminist theory at their literal fingertips. They aren't interested because they see no value in women beyond our ability to have babies, satisfy their sexual urges, cook, clean and prioritize their well being.
At 57 I have zero desire to spend time convincing men of my humanity. I have a 13 year-old son whom I love dearly. I am raising him to see all the ways that women are devalued and question who benefits from our free labor. I teach him that every person should have autonomy over their own body. LGBTQ+ is not a foreign concept to him, and he knows that gender is a spectrum beyond male and female. I teach him that "energy" is not masculine or feminine, it's human. Of course I know he will encounter other boys who are not as enlightened. It isn't my job to parent other people's children, but maybe my son's friends will learn from him, or at least question why (if) they believe girls have less value than boys.
I hear you though I raise you this: I am a masc genderfluid person who has spent his life mothering my own mother. It is indeed exhausting to be the caregiver yet it is not always the person who needs care fault that they need it. (My mother was severely emotionally abused by her mother and did the best she could. She’s in therapy finally at 75 and is learning to respect my boundaries).
So, a bit of advice from a stranger: your son is picking up on your stress and it sounds like you need some space to take care of yourself.
Thank you for sharing your experience with me. I am happy to hear your mother is getting the therapy she needs and was able to learn to respect your boundaries. IMO it is a parent's job to take care of their children, not the other way around. It wasn't fair that you were thrust into the role of caregiver at a young age, even though your mother wasn't at fault for her abuse. I understand your advice is coming from a good place, but I can see that you are projecting your experience with your mother onto me and my son, although I'm not sure for what purpose. I know a woman's anger can be very triggering for men (and other women too), especially if they grew up with an angry and traumatized mother who lacked boundaries. All I can say is that I did not grow up that way, but my life is not without it's own trauma. I know about caregiving as my husband lived with a terminal cancer diagnosis for three years before he died in August 2021. While I do take care of myself (therapy, meds, exercise, sleep) I do feel the stress of being a single parent in a culture that doesn't support mothers and their children. I am incredibly fortunate that my husband had life insurance and I am financially independent; this is not the case for a large majority of widows.
I’m not exactly seeing how I’m projecting anything. I did not claim that your son was going to have to mother you. I just expressed concern and said you should take care of yourself.
Given all the stress, anger, and grief it sounds like you are holding, I can imagine that your son is also holding a lot of stress, anger, and grief towards the world too. And that, like any child, he’s picking up on your emotions. So, it sounds like finding more ways to relax than venting on the internet might be helpful for you both?
“At 57 I have zero desire to spend time convincing men of my humanity.” I hear that. Yet.
What I got from this original post is that the goal is to convince men of THEIR humanity. And I would venture to say it is worth the effort if the humans of our future want access to all the colors in the box (à la the original metaphor).
This reminds me of stretchy jeans. For years, jeans for women incorporated spandex to help make the jeans softer and easier to move in. When brands tried to expand and use the same fabric blend with men’s jeans, they couldn’t call the jeans “stretch” or “stretchy” because men equated them with women’s, even though the jeans had a masculine cut. When marketers rebranded the spandex incorporated jeans as being male-coded for “work” or “adventure,” then suddenly men found great value in them.
To give my answer to the question at the end: in this non-ideal world, positive masculinity is sometimes a useful and even necesserary tool that we can't afford to disregard entirely, while realizing it is indeed antithetical to and harmful to the end goal
Ursula Le Guin-style phrasing: Not a step or a bridge on a linear journey but one item in the carrier bag, to be used reluctantly and always keeping in mind that the goal in using it is to be able to throw it away as soon as possible
Donna Haraway-style phrasing: Staying with the trouble rather than astralizing (abstracting) the issue into false dichotomies
I see many men who “gently” dominate in my faith tradition. They are “nice”, they “speak softly and carry a big stick” often in the form of authority from a Father God who is kind and gentle as long as everyone is doing what He says which can change from polygamy to monogamy and back again. But this Father God always seems to command in the form of supporting male dominance. This Father God does not partner with a Feminine Deity, if She exists it is in submission to His dominance. This is the ultimate of goodness and divinity, and that pattern is true in most religion. What would compel men to refute this? What would compel a human being to give up authority and power? I guess that is the question for me. The pain caused by lack of connection would have to become more painful than it the pain caused by giving up dominance right? I like the crayon analogy. Perhaps feeling the freedom of coloring with the whole crayon box can be a step forward no matter how the colors are labeled at this point.
Yes great thoughts here Amanda- “The pain caused by lack of connection would have to become more painful than it the pain caused by giving up dominance right?” Yes and the link made that dominance pains the dominator as well as the dominated.
I think we should also uplift faith traditions aren’t this. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism are two. Plenty of female Rabbis, a focus on social justice (to the extent that many are anti-zionist), and the center of the religion is shabbat dinners where everyone argues with each other.
Which, given the almost 2000 year history of trauma in the Roman/Christian world since the destruction of the Second Temple and end of hereditary priesthood, is a pretty good confirmation of Amanda’s thesis about pain leading to compassion.
Great piece Celeste! As someone who wrote my book (Sexism & Sensibility) in conversation with Ruth while she was writing BoyMom, I really appreciate the focus you place on domination and how pervasive it is. I hadn’t quite thought about it so starkly. It got me thinking that it need not always look like domination. Quietly shutting out women and withholding affection, feedback, etc. can look very passive yet feel quite aggressive. Thank you!
Yes and this also boomerangs and fuels a lot of trans exclusionary feminism. If it is impossible for a man to be soft, kind, compassionate, etc then it is impossible for a trans woman to exist.
On a fundamental level, JK Rowling has the same view of men and women as Andrew Tate.
Your comments on Mormon men had me thinking about my journey through evangelicalism. The last church I attended before leaving altogether was a PCA church, one of the most explicitly patriarchal evangelical denominations. I attended it because the men were genuinely nice. They could look me in the eye and carry on a conversation, with kindness and thoughtfulness. After encountering, again and again, direct bullying and mysogyny in “egalitarian” Christian spaces, by men who championed women from the pulpit, I just gravitated toward the warmth of nice men in explicitly patriarchal spaces. It’s a story that did not end well. But now I’m wondering if these social spaces where male dominance is believed to be a divine right gives men room to explore the full spectrum of their humanity, without their sense of domination feeling threatened. To be clear, I’m not advocating for these spaces at all. Ultimately the harm I encountered by the nice men in the PCA church very deep. Its just interesting note the way male domination functions and various spaces, and helpful to make sense of my own experiences through the lens of that understanding.
I love a phrase from consulting that says: “What can we create together?” (Peter Block, Flawless Consulting)
Positive Masculinity seems to come from the manosphere. I wonder what would be the solutions that would emerge from a culture the values all experiences and can hold a collective accountability. I’m not talking about a world wide movement, I’m at the group of people space.
I’m so inspired by these conversations: Whipman, Davis, hooks, Finkelstein, et al. I want to start such a space. A place to practice coloring with all the colors especially the gentleness, empathy, humility, nurturance and sensitivity colors.
Arturo, I recently joined a mixed gender group that seems to value all experiences (it’s early days but 🤞). As someone who has chosen to spend most of her time in groups of women, it felt like a whole new exciting world opening up, full of possibility. It gave me hope to sit with men who do not withhold and seem to experience the fulfillment of taking in women’s voices. Which is to say, not categorizing anyone…just allowing everyone to be human.
And it thrills me to no end to be placed in stable of thinkers (or a box of crayons) with Whippman, Davis and…hooks(!).
Thanks for writing this. Men learning to embrace the parts of ourselves that we think of as feminine would transform both us as individual people and our society as a whole. So many of us grow up thinking that we have to somehow separate ourselves from girls and women and in doing so, we cause a lot of harm.
I’d say positive masculinity is not a step in the right direction—it’s at best a distraction or maybe just what you can say out loud while the quiet part still reinforces all the toxic aspects of masculinity. As you acknowledge: "Point being- as long as we hold onto masculinity—healthy or otherwise— as the ideal, we will continue to devalue boys and men who are less masculine. We will devalue women. We will continue to pump the minds of boys and men full of shame over the healthy human parts of themselves that they see as feminine.” This rings true for me as well: "I'm a man who likes women. I'm a man who fears being seen as less than a man. These primal and cultural forces war within me….” Ultimately, that’s the problem positive masculinity doesn’t address.
As a Ashkenazi Quaker with a lot of generational trauma, I sort of went through this cultural process as a personal process. I was never shamed about sex, my home life was always implicitly matrifocal, other students at my Quaker school gently teased me out of any ideas of chivalry my mother had inoculated in me, and by the time I became an adult my goal in life was to be a house husband who only worked to the extent that it allowed my partner to live a full life. When I fantasized about marrying my college girlfriend, I dreamed of taking her last name because she was an only child and my brother had kids already (he's thirteen years older than I am).
At this point I've admitted that I'm a gender horseshoe and am more my mother's daughter than my father's son. But that's only after about 15 years of psychological dysphoria during which I despised myself for being a man. It got so bad I could not speak the words "I am a feminist" aloud to myself despite that being a core aspect of my identity (I sometimes suffer from psychosomatic muteness—I could write down the sentence but I couldn't verbalize it).
The shame from being a man literally broke me and it took me enabling a former girlfriend gaslighting me for over two years to get myself to realize that. I still love her despite the fact that she told me all my friends and family were lying to me when they told me I was a decent person. She didn't understand why she was doing it and I did—she was treating me like her father treated her mother and I was acting like her mother in return.
Of course, here's where the religious kicker comes in—my parents were both Ashkenazi, her father was Ashkenazi, and her mother was Irish Catholic. There's the classic joke: "What's the difference between a Jew and a Catholic? A Jew feels unbelievable guilt towards her mother; a Catholic, towards God".
Both sets of our parents were in unhealthy codependent relationships in which the gender-coding was a mess compared to WASP standards. My mother literally took control of my father's life less than a month after they met and it was a good thing! Because, as they both admit, he would have thrown his life away if she hadn't. And my former girlfriend's mother played the Virgin Mary, giving all her love away to her daughter rather than modeling how to stand up for yourself.
And then, by the grace of years of intensive therapy, I managed to break the cycle and gave my former girlfriend the courage to move out of my apartment even though she was the one performing the abuse. I still love her; she still loves me; we're not talking right now because that is best for both of us. Someday I hope she realizes the gender dynamics of what happened because she is a true genius and could change the world if she gave herself the chance. I would have happily stood in her shadow if she let me but she couldn't let herself not be my victim, because I was treating her like my parents treated each other—with infinite love and a lot of yelling.
So, from my perspective, starting off with the idea of positive masculinity is pretty much essential. I was comfortable being mistaken for a woman for years before I could admit I was genderfluid (pronouns she/he). It would actually delight me and I would rush to reassure women who did so (it was always from behind as I have a quite full beard). I was far more comfortable with my social femininity than with my social masculinity. Being confronted with the former made me laugh; being confronted with the latter could literally steal my voice.
bell hooks is right—the patriarchy royally sucks for men. But for men to admit that they are human, they have to be ok with being men first. Both men and women need to want matrifocal societies before the gender binary can fade away. Everyone needs to be grossed out by the idea that calling a man a woman is the worst possible insult. It needs to be societally ok for a gay man to address a classroom full of 17 year olds about the difference between sexual pleasure and sexual orientation (to paraphrase my high school french teacher: "it doesn't matter the gender of the person when you are getting a blowjob").
But those changes take time. When my openly gay french teacher was telling us that, other students at my school still used "gay" as a synonym for "uncool" even though we all loved Larry and there was a giant Gay-Straight Alliance board outside his classroom (ah, the 90s 🤦🏻). If men can't let their guard down on a societal level, we are never going to convince them that it's ok to be feminine. The liberal men who agree with everything on this blog are almost there; they probably only need to read something like Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" series to understand the rest. (I highly recommend it—a near utopia breaks down because they decided to bury the gender binary in the aftermath of religious wars).
Love this!!! Maybe positive masculinity is a move towards better or more connection and friendship for men, but yeah your point about Mormons is well taken. It’s probably not moving the needle for dominance culture which is like poison for the soul…
I don’t see positive masculinity as a helpful stepping stone. I see it as a side quest that will derail real progress and make healthier end goals that much more distant. As a therapist who uses IFS, and think parts work and addressing shame is the only way to help men embrace a more expansive view of their own masculinity and let go of gender norms that propagate the hierarchy.
I think you hit it on the head here. Positive traits are *human* traits, but so often they're labeled feminine (a few of them masculine). On that note, I think the resurgence of "traditional masculinity" we're seeing promotes more of the toxic traits than we've seen in decades and it's scary--and of course, a widening scope of what's "feminine" and more vitriolic rejection of it.
I recently wrote about dominance and how it might be at the root of relationship failure between men and women--men are seeing relationships as competitive hierarchies and women see them as equal partnerships.
That last sentence is incredibly heteronormative and not that far off from JK Rowling. I know plenty of relationships in which the woman is the “dominant” partner. One of my friends is a composer and literally writes music for her husband to play. He literally has to follow a score to do things exactly the way she wants unless it’s an explicitly collaborative project. When her career brought her back to New York, he quit his job to follow her and spend more time with their son (it was always the plan; they just couldn’t afford it at first).
If positive traits are human traits then it is not logically possible for all men to see relationships as competitive hierarchies and all women to see them as equal partnerships. In our society a completely equal partnership is pretty hard to maintain unless you either choose not to have kids or are rich.
Plus, many people don’t actually have that much problem with some hierarchical structures even within an equal relationship. One partner may be the “decider” in certain areas because both partners want them to be. One husband might decide on dinner most nights because the other husband is too tired after a day at work to decide what to make and would rather be told what to do. That's a hierarchical dynamic but not a competitive one.
There’s even a whole subculture dedicated to eroticizing hierarchies. If you ask anyone who knows anything about BDSM, they will tell you that the submissive partner is almost always the one who sets the limits (when they don’t it’s because the dominant partner is not comfortable doing certain things to the submissive partner. ie: A submissive partner may want to be called slurs that the dominant partner does not want to say). A woman who wears a power suit by day and is tied up at night is as much a trope as the reverse.
Which is why "positive masculinity" is important for both men and women as we transition to an egalitarian society. Without that idea, it's hard to allow space for "negative femininity" and we need that to help both men & women grow up. Bring on the hysterical men who are too emotionally needy! Bring on the nagging fathers! Bring on the men who are late to dates because they spent too much time on their makeup!
When you can insult a man by calling him "a girl" and the implication is that he's being *childish* is when we'll really start making progress.
(The context to all this is I'm masc genderfluid and I'm exhausted from being a mother to everyone in my life this spring. Many of the adults I'm closest to in my life have been acting like children and gender has had nothing to do with it).
You can put it in terms of race, too: if something has to be coded white to be acceptable (if it can’t be accepted while coded black), then the system itself isn’t acceptable at all.
I first realized this around 2007, when I listened to commentators publicly lose their mind when Obama did something “too black” and Hillary did something “too female.” To them, the political system was only meant for — should only accept — politicians who acted like white men, even when those politicians were not. It was white men who set the baseline for acceptable behaviour. Anyone who deviated from that behaviour by doing something “too Black” or “too female” was open to vicious criticism.
No thanks.
Yes!!
Yes. This.
Absolutely. And, I would argue, the backlash from some elements of Black community culture -- which, NOT coincidentally, are male-dominant, femininity-fearing elements! works the same way in reverse. Black schoolkids who are picked on by other Black kids for "acting white," i.e., behaving in class and getting good grades, are really being attacked for perceived "effeminacy," leaving an unspoken assumption that being "authentically Black" is being Black while stereotypically "male." This of course hurts everyone, and probably Black girls in particular.
Have you spent much time in African American urban communities lately? There are plenty of gender-nonconforming young people who value education. The stereotypes you cite date from the 1990s.
Lil Nas X “ Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” came out four years ago. A gay black man gave Satan a lap dance and it went off the charts. That’s African American culture today (which is very different than other Black African cultures and is *extremely* American).
Not stereotypes. Research findings…from study of school desegregation. Black students in segregated Black schools who were then sent to desegregated white schools suddenly performed worse. That achievement gap has persisted over time. Studies showed Black achievement in that context came at the cost of cultural identity. In other words, they only achieved after coding themselves as “white.”
This coding was enforced by the white educational system they joined. Other Black students who didn’t code themselves as white may have picked up on the coding and held it against the Black students who did. But the overall issue is the system that confers achievement only to the students coded as white.
Similarly, broadening the coding of masculinity does nothing to change the nature of a system that confers power to masculinity at the expense of everyone dominated by it.
No, I'm not that familiar with more recent trends in Black community culture, and it's very, very good to hear that those old stereotypes are disappearing. I hope that keeps up!
As I implied by mentioning Lil Nas X, those stereotypes are pretty much gone at this point. The fact they are still brought up at all is pretty much the legacy of structural racism in our country.
African American culture has always been strongly matrifocal (cf Rosa Parks, one of the great organizers of the NAACP). It’s not surprising that “urban” communities are ahead of the curve here as they have always been ahead of the curve in terms of cultural change (which is what I was implying when I emphasized the American half—huge swaths of popular culture in the United States in just time delayed African American culture).
That's all good news! As is so often the case, looks like it's Black folks who are pulling American culture up to a more evolved level.
AMEN
The Musk/Trump breakup is a recent example of the problem. So many have feminized their bickering, likening it to “Mean Girls” scenes and even AOC saying, “The girls are fighting.” We’ve all internalized degrading the feminine as negative and undesirable. Isn’t it simply 2 underdeveloped humans who are used to getting their own way having a very public argument? Their negative HUMAN traits of selfishness, power, control, and entitlement are on full display, and those are traits all humans have to work through, preferably at a much younger age.
Another thought I had was that many have stated that the wives in Secret Lives of Mormon Wives are in lavender marriages because the men seem so feminine. Maybe the benevolent patriarchy in Mormonism that encourages men to develop their more tender, loving sides has confused many other men, even gay men. And yet Mormon wives struggle with a high rate of depression. Could it be that the patriarchal model, even couched as “benevolent,” is the problem? Yes, yes it is.
I wrote then deleted four paragraphs on how Mormon men in the public eye are all seen as gay. An essay for another day. 🫠 But yes great pull about the dialogue around Musk and Trump. Whenever men or women want the quickest insult for men they call them a girl. The problem goes so deep.
I came over here just to mention the Musk/Trump debacle and how it has been framed as "girlies" fighting. Ugh! No one benefits when we use that language.
I have noticed a lot of exmormons tend to have some gender confusion after leaving, I wonder if that's related.
I believe Brit Hartley had mentioned that TBMs assume exmos become liberal, but she said leaving the church just lets their liberal values come to the forefront instead of being hidden behind a wall of shame. I would guess gender confusion is the same: always there but now not withheld.
That may be part of it, certainly. It's just interesting that Mormons have such a strict gender binary, but it doesn't fully align with the gender binary of broader American culture and there is a mismatch.
Well said
We’ve all internalized degrading the feminine as negative and undesirable
No no no no no...As a boomer man i think this is progress girl
I must be in a particularly pissed off mood this week (my weekly post was titled, "I am so fucking tired of explaining your own internalized misogyny.") because I am just so over women using up all their energy in the pursuit of "fixing" men. It's like white people asking Black people how they can be less racist. Do the fucking work. There are resources galore on ways to unpack the inherent racism within each white person who was raised in a society that puts a premium on whiteness. The same goes for feminism. If men were really interested in having richer, fuller, more complete lives where they are allowed to use all the crayons in the box, none of which is better than the others, there is a fuckload of feminist theory at their literal fingertips. They aren't interested because they see no value in women beyond our ability to have babies, satisfy their sexual urges, cook, clean and prioritize their well being.
At 57 I have zero desire to spend time convincing men of my humanity. I have a 13 year-old son whom I love dearly. I am raising him to see all the ways that women are devalued and question who benefits from our free labor. I teach him that every person should have autonomy over their own body. LGBTQ+ is not a foreign concept to him, and he knows that gender is a spectrum beyond male and female. I teach him that "energy" is not masculine or feminine, it's human. Of course I know he will encounter other boys who are not as enlightened. It isn't my job to parent other people's children, but maybe my son's friends will learn from him, or at least question why (if) they believe girls have less value than boys.
I hear you though I raise you this: I am a masc genderfluid person who has spent his life mothering my own mother. It is indeed exhausting to be the caregiver yet it is not always the person who needs care fault that they need it. (My mother was severely emotionally abused by her mother and did the best she could. She’s in therapy finally at 75 and is learning to respect my boundaries).
So, a bit of advice from a stranger: your son is picking up on your stress and it sounds like you need some space to take care of yourself.
Thank you for sharing your experience with me. I am happy to hear your mother is getting the therapy she needs and was able to learn to respect your boundaries. IMO it is a parent's job to take care of their children, not the other way around. It wasn't fair that you were thrust into the role of caregiver at a young age, even though your mother wasn't at fault for her abuse. I understand your advice is coming from a good place, but I can see that you are projecting your experience with your mother onto me and my son, although I'm not sure for what purpose. I know a woman's anger can be very triggering for men (and other women too), especially if they grew up with an angry and traumatized mother who lacked boundaries. All I can say is that I did not grow up that way, but my life is not without it's own trauma. I know about caregiving as my husband lived with a terminal cancer diagnosis for three years before he died in August 2021. While I do take care of myself (therapy, meds, exercise, sleep) I do feel the stress of being a single parent in a culture that doesn't support mothers and their children. I am incredibly fortunate that my husband had life insurance and I am financially independent; this is not the case for a large majority of widows.
I’m not exactly seeing how I’m projecting anything. I did not claim that your son was going to have to mother you. I just expressed concern and said you should take care of yourself.
Given all the stress, anger, and grief it sounds like you are holding, I can imagine that your son is also holding a lot of stress, anger, and grief towards the world too. And that, like any child, he’s picking up on your emotions. So, it sounds like finding more ways to relax than venting on the internet might be helpful for you both?
On those points we can agree. I appreciate your candor. Thank you.
yes do the work.....men who devalue women are not really manly and i think your son will be fine...
“At 57 I have zero desire to spend time convincing men of my humanity.” I hear that. Yet.
What I got from this original post is that the goal is to convince men of THEIR humanity. And I would venture to say it is worth the effort if the humans of our future want access to all the colors in the box (à la the original metaphor).
This reminds me of stretchy jeans. For years, jeans for women incorporated spandex to help make the jeans softer and easier to move in. When brands tried to expand and use the same fabric blend with men’s jeans, they couldn’t call the jeans “stretch” or “stretchy” because men equated them with women’s, even though the jeans had a masculine cut. When marketers rebranded the spandex incorporated jeans as being male-coded for “work” or “adventure,” then suddenly men found great value in them.
Excellent article as usual!
To give my answer to the question at the end: in this non-ideal world, positive masculinity is sometimes a useful and even necesserary tool that we can't afford to disregard entirely, while realizing it is indeed antithetical to and harmful to the end goal
Ursula Le Guin-style phrasing: Not a step or a bridge on a linear journey but one item in the carrier bag, to be used reluctantly and always keeping in mind that the goal in using it is to be able to throw it away as soon as possible
Donna Haraway-style phrasing: Staying with the trouble rather than astralizing (abstracting) the issue into false dichotomies
Yes I like those phrasings 😊
I see many men who “gently” dominate in my faith tradition. They are “nice”, they “speak softly and carry a big stick” often in the form of authority from a Father God who is kind and gentle as long as everyone is doing what He says which can change from polygamy to monogamy and back again. But this Father God always seems to command in the form of supporting male dominance. This Father God does not partner with a Feminine Deity, if She exists it is in submission to His dominance. This is the ultimate of goodness and divinity, and that pattern is true in most religion. What would compel men to refute this? What would compel a human being to give up authority and power? I guess that is the question for me. The pain caused by lack of connection would have to become more painful than it the pain caused by giving up dominance right? I like the crayon analogy. Perhaps feeling the freedom of coloring with the whole crayon box can be a step forward no matter how the colors are labeled at this point.
Yes great thoughts here Amanda- “The pain caused by lack of connection would have to become more painful than it the pain caused by giving up dominance right?” Yes and the link made that dominance pains the dominator as well as the dominated.
I think we should also uplift faith traditions aren’t this. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism are two. Plenty of female Rabbis, a focus on social justice (to the extent that many are anti-zionist), and the center of the religion is shabbat dinners where everyone argues with each other.
Which, given the almost 2000 year history of trauma in the Roman/Christian world since the destruction of the Second Temple and end of hereditary priesthood, is a pretty good confirmation of Amanda’s thesis about pain leading to compassion.
Great piece Celeste! As someone who wrote my book (Sexism & Sensibility) in conversation with Ruth while she was writing BoyMom, I really appreciate the focus you place on domination and how pervasive it is. I hadn’t quite thought about it so starkly. It got me thinking that it need not always look like domination. Quietly shutting out women and withholding affection, feedback, etc. can look very passive yet feel quite aggressive. Thank you!
Yes and this also boomerangs and fuels a lot of trans exclusionary feminism. If it is impossible for a man to be soft, kind, compassionate, etc then it is impossible for a trans woman to exist.
On a fundamental level, JK Rowling has the same view of men and women as Andrew Tate.
Your comments on Mormon men had me thinking about my journey through evangelicalism. The last church I attended before leaving altogether was a PCA church, one of the most explicitly patriarchal evangelical denominations. I attended it because the men were genuinely nice. They could look me in the eye and carry on a conversation, with kindness and thoughtfulness. After encountering, again and again, direct bullying and mysogyny in “egalitarian” Christian spaces, by men who championed women from the pulpit, I just gravitated toward the warmth of nice men in explicitly patriarchal spaces. It’s a story that did not end well. But now I’m wondering if these social spaces where male dominance is believed to be a divine right gives men room to explore the full spectrum of their humanity, without their sense of domination feeling threatened. To be clear, I’m not advocating for these spaces at all. Ultimately the harm I encountered by the nice men in the PCA church very deep. Its just interesting note the way male domination functions and various spaces, and helpful to make sense of my own experiences through the lens of that understanding.
I love a phrase from consulting that says: “What can we create together?” (Peter Block, Flawless Consulting)
Positive Masculinity seems to come from the manosphere. I wonder what would be the solutions that would emerge from a culture the values all experiences and can hold a collective accountability. I’m not talking about a world wide movement, I’m at the group of people space.
I’m so inspired by these conversations: Whipman, Davis, hooks, Finkelstein, et al. I want to start such a space. A place to practice coloring with all the colors especially the gentleness, empathy, humility, nurturance and sensitivity colors.
Arturo, I recently joined a mixed gender group that seems to value all experiences (it’s early days but 🤞). As someone who has chosen to spend most of her time in groups of women, it felt like a whole new exciting world opening up, full of possibility. It gave me hope to sit with men who do not withhold and seem to experience the fulfillment of taking in women’s voices. Which is to say, not categorizing anyone…just allowing everyone to be human.
And it thrills me to no end to be placed in stable of thinkers (or a box of crayons) with Whippman, Davis and…hooks(!).
Thanks for writing this. Men learning to embrace the parts of ourselves that we think of as feminine would transform both us as individual people and our society as a whole. So many of us grow up thinking that we have to somehow separate ourselves from girls and women and in doing so, we cause a lot of harm.
I’d say positive masculinity is not a step in the right direction—it’s at best a distraction or maybe just what you can say out loud while the quiet part still reinforces all the toxic aspects of masculinity. As you acknowledge: "Point being- as long as we hold onto masculinity—healthy or otherwise— as the ideal, we will continue to devalue boys and men who are less masculine. We will devalue women. We will continue to pump the minds of boys and men full of shame over the healthy human parts of themselves that they see as feminine.” This rings true for me as well: "I'm a man who likes women. I'm a man who fears being seen as less than a man. These primal and cultural forces war within me….” Ultimately, that’s the problem positive masculinity doesn’t address.
As a Ashkenazi Quaker with a lot of generational trauma, I sort of went through this cultural process as a personal process. I was never shamed about sex, my home life was always implicitly matrifocal, other students at my Quaker school gently teased me out of any ideas of chivalry my mother had inoculated in me, and by the time I became an adult my goal in life was to be a house husband who only worked to the extent that it allowed my partner to live a full life. When I fantasized about marrying my college girlfriend, I dreamed of taking her last name because she was an only child and my brother had kids already (he's thirteen years older than I am).
At this point I've admitted that I'm a gender horseshoe and am more my mother's daughter than my father's son. But that's only after about 15 years of psychological dysphoria during which I despised myself for being a man. It got so bad I could not speak the words "I am a feminist" aloud to myself despite that being a core aspect of my identity (I sometimes suffer from psychosomatic muteness—I could write down the sentence but I couldn't verbalize it).
The shame from being a man literally broke me and it took me enabling a former girlfriend gaslighting me for over two years to get myself to realize that. I still love her despite the fact that she told me all my friends and family were lying to me when they told me I was a decent person. She didn't understand why she was doing it and I did—she was treating me like her father treated her mother and I was acting like her mother in return.
Of course, here's where the religious kicker comes in—my parents were both Ashkenazi, her father was Ashkenazi, and her mother was Irish Catholic. There's the classic joke: "What's the difference between a Jew and a Catholic? A Jew feels unbelievable guilt towards her mother; a Catholic, towards God".
Both sets of our parents were in unhealthy codependent relationships in which the gender-coding was a mess compared to WASP standards. My mother literally took control of my father's life less than a month after they met and it was a good thing! Because, as they both admit, he would have thrown his life away if she hadn't. And my former girlfriend's mother played the Virgin Mary, giving all her love away to her daughter rather than modeling how to stand up for yourself.
And then, by the grace of years of intensive therapy, I managed to break the cycle and gave my former girlfriend the courage to move out of my apartment even though she was the one performing the abuse. I still love her; she still loves me; we're not talking right now because that is best for both of us. Someday I hope she realizes the gender dynamics of what happened because she is a true genius and could change the world if she gave herself the chance. I would have happily stood in her shadow if she let me but she couldn't let herself not be my victim, because I was treating her like my parents treated each other—with infinite love and a lot of yelling.
So, from my perspective, starting off with the idea of positive masculinity is pretty much essential. I was comfortable being mistaken for a woman for years before I could admit I was genderfluid (pronouns she/he). It would actually delight me and I would rush to reassure women who did so (it was always from behind as I have a quite full beard). I was far more comfortable with my social femininity than with my social masculinity. Being confronted with the former made me laugh; being confronted with the latter could literally steal my voice.
bell hooks is right—the patriarchy royally sucks for men. But for men to admit that they are human, they have to be ok with being men first. Both men and women need to want matrifocal societies before the gender binary can fade away. Everyone needs to be grossed out by the idea that calling a man a woman is the worst possible insult. It needs to be societally ok for a gay man to address a classroom full of 17 year olds about the difference between sexual pleasure and sexual orientation (to paraphrase my high school french teacher: "it doesn't matter the gender of the person when you are getting a blowjob").
But those changes take time. When my openly gay french teacher was telling us that, other students at my school still used "gay" as a synonym for "uncool" even though we all loved Larry and there was a giant Gay-Straight Alliance board outside his classroom (ah, the 90s 🤦🏻). If men can't let their guard down on a societal level, we are never going to convince them that it's ok to be feminine. The liberal men who agree with everything on this blog are almost there; they probably only need to read something like Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" series to understand the rest. (I highly recommend it—a near utopia breaks down because they decided to bury the gender binary in the aftermath of religious wars).
Love this!!! Maybe positive masculinity is a move towards better or more connection and friendship for men, but yeah your point about Mormons is well taken. It’s probably not moving the needle for dominance culture which is like poison for the soul…
Very insightful
I don’t see positive masculinity as a helpful stepping stone. I see it as a side quest that will derail real progress and make healthier end goals that much more distant. As a therapist who uses IFS, and think parts work and addressing shame is the only way to help men embrace a more expansive view of their own masculinity and let go of gender norms that propagate the hierarchy.
I think you hit it on the head here. Positive traits are *human* traits, but so often they're labeled feminine (a few of them masculine). On that note, I think the resurgence of "traditional masculinity" we're seeing promotes more of the toxic traits than we've seen in decades and it's scary--and of course, a widening scope of what's "feminine" and more vitriolic rejection of it.
I recently wrote about dominance and how it might be at the root of relationship failure between men and women--men are seeing relationships as competitive hierarchies and women see them as equal partnerships.
That last sentence is incredibly heteronormative and not that far off from JK Rowling. I know plenty of relationships in which the woman is the “dominant” partner. One of my friends is a composer and literally writes music for her husband to play. He literally has to follow a score to do things exactly the way she wants unless it’s an explicitly collaborative project. When her career brought her back to New York, he quit his job to follow her and spend more time with their son (it was always the plan; they just couldn’t afford it at first).
If positive traits are human traits then it is not logically possible for all men to see relationships as competitive hierarchies and all women to see them as equal partnerships. In our society a completely equal partnership is pretty hard to maintain unless you either choose not to have kids or are rich.
Plus, many people don’t actually have that much problem with some hierarchical structures even within an equal relationship. One partner may be the “decider” in certain areas because both partners want them to be. One husband might decide on dinner most nights because the other husband is too tired after a day at work to decide what to make and would rather be told what to do. That's a hierarchical dynamic but not a competitive one.
There’s even a whole subculture dedicated to eroticizing hierarchies. If you ask anyone who knows anything about BDSM, they will tell you that the submissive partner is almost always the one who sets the limits (when they don’t it’s because the dominant partner is not comfortable doing certain things to the submissive partner. ie: A submissive partner may want to be called slurs that the dominant partner does not want to say). A woman who wears a power suit by day and is tied up at night is as much a trope as the reverse.
Which is why "positive masculinity" is important for both men and women as we transition to an egalitarian society. Without that idea, it's hard to allow space for "negative femininity" and we need that to help both men & women grow up. Bring on the hysterical men who are too emotionally needy! Bring on the nagging fathers! Bring on the men who are late to dates because they spent too much time on their makeup!
When you can insult a man by calling him "a girl" and the implication is that he's being *childish* is when we'll really start making progress.
(The context to all this is I'm masc genderfluid and I'm exhausted from being a mother to everyone in my life this spring. Many of the adults I'm closest to in my life have been acting like children and gender has had nothing to do with it).