That's nice, but how do we dismantle patriarchal masculinity exactly?
Part 5 of our patriarchal masculinity series. Getting into the nitty gritty of what we can actually do about it.
A couple of things before we get going today- first off this is the 5th and final installment of my patriarchal masculinity series. Thanks so much for all the support for this series thus far!
Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here and part 4 here.
Last time we focused on societal solutions. This time we will focus on individual solutions.
Also, I talk about “masculinity” and “femininity” a lot in this article. I don’t believe these are a set of biologically set traits, but shifting societal norms.
Here’s how Wikipedia currently defines them:
masculinity = strength, courage, independence, leadership, dominance, assertiveness.
femininity = gentleness, empathy, humility, nurturance and sensitivity.
I’m currently reading BoyMom by
1In the book she tells the story of going to visit a facility called “Failure to Launch” where young adult and teenage boys can stay for three months to learn the skills they need to be able to thrive.
When Whippman asked the leader of the program why he thinks boys are “failing to launch,” he responded that the culprit is "a steady onslaught of the de-masculinization of society." With the rise of feminism he says that traditional manhood is under attack, and men and boys are being “systematically stripped of their natural role and inheritance.” He said that “boys have become neutered and adrift.” They need a return to traditional masculinity.
Many agree with him.
Jerry Seinfeld says he misses “a dominant masculinity.” Mark Zuckerberg says “we need more masculine energy.”
In his book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs” Senator Josh Hawley blames male loneliness as well as all of society’s ills on the decline of traditional masculine virtues.
There is a lot of fear out there that our society is becoming increasingly emasculated and feminized. (The feminine, of course, is always understood to be a bad thing).
What do we mean when we say masculinity?
There isn’t one set, agreed upon definition. Ask one person and they will say “courage and leadership.” Ask the next person and they’ll say “having big muscles, a hot girlfriend and a lot of money.”
Colloquially masculinity could just as easily be used as a synonym for violence as it could for valor.
But more often than not, masculinity is defined more by what it isn’t rather than what it is.
And what it isn’t is feminine.
After researching men and masculinity for over three decades, writing 19 books and 250 peer-reviewed articles, psychology professor Robert Levant has come up with seven primary markers of Western masculinity.
Coming in at #1?
Avoidance of femininity
Restrictive emotionality
Self reliance
Importance of sex
Toughness and dominance.
Achievement and status.
Negativity towards sexual minorities
But if rule #1 for being a masculine boy or man is “avoid femininity” - masculine men are in a real bind as women gain equality. Every T-shirt with the word “girl” on it now includes words like “strong, powerful, confident, tough.” Women can now be the breadwinner, pay for their own dinner, become CEOs, play basketball and video games. If masculinity requires men to avoid the feminine, where are they to go as femininity expands?
Patriarchal masculine men have painted themselves into a corner where the only masculine behaviors and attributes left to them that women haven’t touched are the dangerous and destructive ones.
recently left this insightful comment on the first article of this series: “Men are rejecting plain, regular masculinity because they see its characteristic traits in increasing numbers of women — and to distance themselves from the threat of that proximity, they are opting instead for a cartoonish, patriarchal simulation of masculinity.”Patriarchal masculine men are male flighting themselves out of healthy masculinity.
You can kind of start to see the logic of the right-wing masculinity warriors here- get women out of the healthy components of masculinity so men can once again comfortably avoid the feminine there.
Problem solved.
Or is it?
Unfortunately, Robert Levant’s extensive research finds that the closer a boy or man adheres to the seven principles of masculinity, the more likely he is to 1. experience psychological distress, 2. have difficulty forming close relationships, 3. become depressed, anxious or suicidal and 4. have issues with substance abuse and violence.
They are also less likely to ask for help or seek therapy or emotional support.
An 85 year study on life satisfaction has found the that #1 most important indicator in predicting someone’s life long health and happiness—more important than diet, fitness, air quality or wealth—is the strength of their relationships.
But the closer a man adheres to rigid masculinity norms, the more difficulty he will have in forming strong, intimate relationships, the more he is cut off from the primary ingredient to life satisfaction.
I agree with many right-wing masculinity warriors that boys and men are facing a mental health crisis that needs addressing.
But patriarchal masculinity norms are not the solution to boys’ problems, they are the cause of them.
Advocating for more masculinity or a return to a dominant masculinity is making it much more difficult for boys and men to thrive.
These are the things that the World Happiness Report identified just this month as the areas most correlated to happiness:
Caring and Sharing.
Sharing meals with others.
Living with others.
Connecting with others.
Supporting others.
Trusting others.
Giving to others.
Scroll up and compare this list to the seven principles of masculinity. These lists are in conflict.
As I’ve already said many times in this series- there is nothing wrong with maleness, it should be celebrated. There is nothing wrong with masculinity when defined as strength, courage, independence or assertiveness. It should be celebrated. But there IS something wrong when boys and men CAN’T be empathetic, gentle, humble or sensitive (ie feminine).
There is something wrong when as a society we routinely value masculinity over femininity and work to severe the feminine.
Key ingredients for individual happiness are feminine-coded, relationship-based skills. Key ingredients for societal thriving are also feminine-coded, community-based values. We are struggling as a country because we have severed ourselves from care.
Boys and men are struggling because they are severed from care as well- caring for themselves and others, as well as receiving care.
If we want to help boys and men, we must work to de-stigmatize “the feminine.” We must work to equally value both masculinity and femininity, both men and women.
That’s nice. How do we do that?
This is a comment from
from part two of this series:
Yes how do we convince men to express both masculine and feminine?
It’s a good question, but I have to wonder how much of our time and energy that could be channeled into effective change is instead wasted on the effort of convincing.
I tend to agree with
who responded:
The gender hierarchy is similar to the class or race hierarchy in that asking those at the top to pretty please come down and join the rest of us- its gonna be a tough sell. And it’s going to suck up a lot of time and energy trying to do it.
At least once a month a woman will message me asking for tips/tricks/books/podcasts/ANYTHING to help wake her husband up to the patriarchy- to his own patriarchal conditioning, to the power imbalance in their marriage.
I really, really, really wish there was a magic book or perfectly worded paragraph to gift wrap to men where the fog would clear and they would loudly proclaim "Ah! I see now! Thank you! I'm sorry! Off I go to therapy!"
Unfortunately we don't really have control over whether or not someone else will change their mind and the effort to convince them to can drive us crazy.
I’m reminded of Melodie Beatty’s very wise words in CoDependent No More:
“You are not responsible for making other people ‘see the light ‘and you do not need to ‘set them straight.’
You are responsible for helping yourself see the light and for setting yourself straight.”
Last week we talked about October 24, 1975 when 90% of the women in Iceland went on strike. Imagine if these women thought their job was to convince all the men to wake up to the patriarchy before they worked towards equality. They’d still be stuck trying to convince them!
I keep thinking about this random detail in an article I read that said that in the Icelandic newscasts that day you can hear kids in the background because the male newscasters had to bring their kids into work.
How do you think those conversations between the male newscasters and their wives went that morning? I imagine the husbands didn’t say, “I see and validate your state of inequality. Please go to the strike. The newsroom will love our toddler’s babbling.” I imagine they were more like “*expletive* Ok ok, I get it, you’re upset, *expletive* but I can’t just have our kids on the news!”
I imagine just about every one of those Icelandic women had to do a fair amount of disappointing that day. In order to do that, they would have to already know their own value and be willing to stand up for it even when it meant inconveniencing and disappointing others.
One thing I got from Melodie Beatty’s book is that the only person you have to convince of your boundaries is yourself. If you want your husband to start doing his own laundry for instance- you could come to him with research of how helping others will make him more happy, you could tell him that all the husbands on your block do their own laundry, you could remind him he was perfectly capable of doing his own laundry before he had a wife. You could try to convince him until you are blue in the face.
Or.
You could just stop doing his laundry.
Convincing also unintentionally reinforces the hierarchy- those at the bottom begging those at the top to dish out more fairness maintains that fairness is theirs to dole out or not and the bottom is stuck with their decision. It reinforces the hierarchy of the masculine above the feminine, men above women.
I’m not in the business of convincing those determined not to understand. It’s both a bad energy and a waste of energy. I’d rather empower myself and those already convinced to move the needle towards equality instead.
So how do the rest of us “stop doing the laundry” of patriarchal masculinity?
Let’s start with what not to do
Two things that aren’t helping:
Complaining and blaming each other instead of self-reflection.
Keeping boys from being exposed to anything feminine.
Complaining and blaming instead of self-reflection
Whenever any conversation about patriarchy and problematic masculinity comes up, fingers start pointing real fast. Women point at men. Left-wing men point to right-wing men. Right-wing men point to women and feminism. We all point to someone else while saying, “Who me? Not me! It’s their fault- they need to fix it!”
We’ve got to stop mistaking complaining for productive action. Complaining is so seductive because we get the moral high ground and we get to not do anything because everything is all someone else’s fault.
Last week we talked about how gender equality is the answer on the societal level to curb the dangerous de-valuation of care and the feminine. It’s also the answer at the individual level.
We are all responsible to both unearth and root out our own inner devaluing of the feminine.
A quick note to women
It’s a heck of a lot easier to complain about men than it is to commit ourselves to our own equality.
I know, I know, everything falls to women, but I’m not saying we are responsible for changing the men in our life.
We are responsible for valuing ourselves.
To doctor Melodie Beatty’s words-
“You are not responsible for making men ‘see the light’ and value the feminine. You are responsible for helping yourself ‘see the light’ and value the feminine.”
A valuing of the feminine means we value ourselves enough to treat ourselves as an equal to those around us.
For the past few years, I have met with people one-on-one who are going through a faith crisis or faith transition2. Last month, a woman shared with me a journal entry she wrote after one of our sessions. It impacted me deeply and speaks to the reason that facing our own inequality is so very, very hard. I’ll share part of it with her permission:
"So, ‘If I am to be a human on this planet, what do I want my relationship with men to be?’ This is the question that my spiritual director asked me… I was totally blown away by this question. Never, had I ever, taken the time to consider this. And yet, it affects almost every area of my life, family, marriage, church, work, social life, friendships…
As I sat on the bank of my heart looking over my catch, I saw that I had reeled in the feeling that I did not want to answer this question. Answering requires that I actually work for equality in my relationships with the men in my life. It means that I face the part that I have played, and currently play, in my own subordination.
Instead of doing the hard work of standing up for myself, of articulating what is wrong with how I am being treated, it is so much easier to sit back and look at men from a distance. To just do what needs to be done, all the while looking down on men. Snide, sideways comments take less effort than engaging as an equal.
Right now I can tell myself that I act the way I do because I am sidelined by structures, systems and traditions all taught and enforced by men. Instead I would need to recognize my unmet needs, take responsibility for meeting them, and move forward with my own plan and authority."
Whew.
So powerful right?
A quick note to men
Just as women need to self-reflect instead of blaming men, we need men to look inward instead of blaming other men.
Whenever I talk about masculinity, men will point to other men who buy more into patriarchal masculinity than they do and say, “Boy other men sure do need to hear this, but thankfully I’m one of the good ones.”
This isn’t what we need. We don’t need more finger pointing, we need you to honestly examine your life for the ways those vestiges of manhood pressure are still affecting you—pressure to avoid expressing emotion, going to therapy, needing to always be seen as competent and in control, avoid girly movies/books/music, not nurturing the relationships in your life, be seen as strong and stoic, etc.
Professor Robert Levant when asked what the answer is to help boys and men said, “we have to stop making boys and men feel that masculinity is obligatory.”
Whenever we start talking about raising the next generation better, immediately everyone starts looking at the mothers.
But Robert says that a father’s example has far more of an effect on a boy than a mother’s words. Boys don’t need preaching- they need modeling.
“That is one of the biggest problems with masculinity, is that boys are made to feel that masculinity is obligatory, that they have no choice but to be masculine. They get this primarily from their fathers and from their peers. Recent research shows that fathers tend to believe that their job is to make men out of their sons.”
If fathers are going to model a healthy balance of masculinity and femininity to their sons, they themselves must be working towards this balance. When Robert was asked “if there are men out there who really want to deal with this, what should they do?”
He responded that the first thing they should do is go see a therapist.
Then he said this,
“But beyond going to a therapist, I would say to men who might be listening who might have some of these issues, we have to brave the shame. We were made to feel ashamed of ourselves for not being fully masculine, and that was nonsense. If you're married, if you have children, you have to learn how to open up your heart to your family, to really let them in, to take the barriers down. You can do it. It's not easy, you will feel bad about it, you might feel ashamed of yourself. But honestly, those lessons you learn as a child are not valid, and a better approach is to have an open heart and an open mind and to freely express your emotions to the people you care about.”
This is not a men vs women thing, this is an all of us vs an oppressive system thing
bell hooks agrees with Robert Levant when she addresses what she sees as the answer to dealing with problematic patriarchal masculinity in the closing chapters of The Will to Change.
The chapter “Healing the Male Spirit” is all about the importance of hearing men’s pain and our society’s woeful inability to do so. “The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, ‘Please do not tell us what you feel.’”
Men must learn to express their pain. "To heal, men must learn to feel again. they must learn to break the silence, to speak the pain."
Women must learn to hear men’s pain without interpreting it as a critique of them. "Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure."
So many of the videos I see on women “getting the ick” from men cite the source of the ick as something feminine a man does.
If we want men to be more healthy, we cannot punish them when they act healthy. If we want emotionally mature men, we cannot punish them when they act emotionally mature.
We all must reckon with how often and easily we discourage boys and men from acting feminine.
Keeping boys from being exposed to feminine voices and values
A few years ago, while on a panel promoting the film The Post, actress Meryl Streep said this,
“When you learn a language- French or Spanish - it isn’t your language until you dream in it. The only way to dream in it is to speak it. Women speak men. But men don’t speak women. They don’t dream in it.” - Meryl Streep
She’s not wrong.
User data from Spotify revealed that 94.2% of what male users listened to were male artists. 3.3% female artists and 2.5% mixed. Women listened to 55% male artists, 30,8% female artists and 14.2% mixed groups.
The readership of the 10 bestselling male authors is comprised of 55% male readers, 45% female readers. The readership of the 10 bestselling female authors by contrast is 19% male, 81% female.
The phenomenon of men being in women’s heads, but women not being in men’s heads was perfectly, though probably unintentionally, portrayed by the movie Inside Out.
The main character, Riley, is a girl. Inside her head her emotions are depicted by three women and two men.
But the very same emotions inside Riley’s father’s head? All men. The female emotions all sprouted mustaches and ties and became male.
It’s ok for women to have men inside their heads, but it’s not ok for men to have women inside their heads.
Women speak men. Men don’t speak women.
Women dream masculine dreams. Men don’t dream feminine dreams.
And while Inside Out is a relatively insignificant fictional story, the real world implications of this phenomenon are neither fictional nor insignificant.
We all cater to the male allergy of the feminine.
I’ll share a few examples I’ve caught from my own life. I have two sons in elementary school. This December when our family was selecting a Christmas movie to watch, I wanted to watch Little Women, but stopped myself from even voicing this desire knowing that my boys wouldn’t like it and would prefer a non-girly movie like Elf.
A few years ago my son expressed interested in learning to play the flute. Instead of encouraging this and setting up lessons I said, “That’s nice” and secretly hoped he would grow out of that desire.
Years ago while helping to plan a party for dozens of kids, when it came to selecting a movie for the party, I didn’t speak up when someone got vetoed for suggesting Frozen because the boys wouldn’t want to watch it.
One surefire way to ensure boys won’t ever learn to value women and the feminine is by withholding exposure to women’s voices, spaces, interests, stories and experiences.
Formula for Change
Humans are incredibly resistant to change.
Again and again, we would rather devote ourselves slavishly to things that don’t benefit us rather than change.
It’s easier for our brains to double down on incorrect, harmful thinking than to change what we think.
But in the 1960s, some organizational development professors asked the question, what ingredients would we need to overcome our overwhelming resistance to change? They came up with a formula. Then in the 1990s, Kathleen Dannemillar dusted off the formula, simplified it and popularized it.
Here it is:
In order for change to occur, we need 3 things:
1. Dissatisfaction of the status quo
2. Vision for the future
3. practical First steps towards a different future.
Let’s break it down.
Dissatisfaction with the way things are
Dissatisfaction is here. Men are dissatisfied. Women are dissatisfied. The queer community is dissatisfied.
The problem is, while the basic tenants of our disappointment are quite similar, the causes we attribute our dissatisfaction to are vastly different.
There are many who see the high rates of male suicide and loneliness, the lowering rates of male college enrollment and marriage, and blame feminism and diminishing masculinity.
They want to retreat back into oppressive cages instead of releasing themselves from those cages which caused the suffering to begin with.
In order for the dissatisfaction step to be effective towards changes that would actually help men, boys and all of us, we need to be educated about patriarchy and the perils of patriarchal masculinity. And in order to do that we must stop treating “patriarchy” and “men” as synonymous.
“The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.” - bell hooks
First steps
This series has already articulated several steps to change patriarchal masculinity:
fighting for gender equality
blurring the gender binary
working together to level the hierarchy
valuing the feminine collectively and individually
expressing and hearing male pain
looking inward to root out our own patriarchal masculinity
rejecting gender essentialism that says men are biologically stuck with the worst traits of masculinity
loving men
holding men accountable
believing men are capable of change and capable of loving, pro-social behavior
But which is the first?
A few weeks ago I published what if the future is soft? because I wanted some hope.
But how do we make the future soft?
We're not individually in charge of gender equality, the wage gap or how many women are leading countries, but Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and The Blade says that the revolution starts, for better or worse, in the home.
When we shifted from a partnership society in the Neolithic period to a dominator society- that shift started in the home with the shift from equal partnerships between men and women into men being the head of the household.
If we want a shift in the other direction, it will also start in the home.
Adrienne Maree Brown says this same thing about democracy. We all put so much emphasis and energy into who is running our government, which is important, but when she asked people are you practicing democracy in your home and neighborhoods? Are you making decisions together with everyone’s input, having uncomfortable conversations democratically and compromising? Almost everyone said no.
We must perform on a micro level what we wish to see at the macro level.
Are we modeling the kind of romantic relationship we hope our sons and daughters emulate? Are we modeling gender equality in our homes? Are we modeling a valuing of women and the feminine?
We are all involved in the revolution- every single one of us.
How do we ensure a soft future?
We love men, and we hold men accountable- both at the same time. We stay grounded. We stay in our integrity. We stay out of the drama triangle. We do not take on the role of the victim, the savior or the blamer.
As Brene Brown says- we don't puff up, we don't shrink, we stand our sacred ground.
We realize the ground we stand on when we diminish patriarchal masculinity IS sacred.
We take responsibility for our part in creating the dynamic with our partner, children, parent or boss.
The first step in dismantling patriarchal masculinity is becoming aware and taking responsibility for all the ways we currently uphold it.
Vision for the future
The ratio of complaining to creating/envisioning a better world is like 99:1 in favor of complaining.
I’m guilty of this too. We’re very comfortable voicing what isn’t going well (this is like 95% of Substack articles). We’re not so good at voicing a vision for a more beautiful world.
When I envision a more beautiful world, I envision the spaces that have already figured a lot of this stuff out.
I envision the bonobos in their grooming circles- males and females together cleaning each other off. Together caring for their young and finding food. The females working together to ensure a safe environment.
In envision the boys and men of the Minangkabau people in Indonesia, a “rape-free society” circling around and dancing and singing together.
I envision countries like Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland who consistently sit atop the happiest countries list, who actively work towards gender equality and caring for their citizens with affordable healthcare, education and childcare.
I envision a world where men are free to feel and voice their pain, grief, loneliness and fear. Where boys wouldn’t get made fun of each time they are emotional or vulnerable. Where boys and men would get to just be free, innately worthy instead of constantly proving their worth by proving their manhood.
I envision a world where we loosen our death grip on gender performance of masculinity and femininity and just be humans. Where we aren’t men first or women first, but humans first.
I envision a world where we talk openly and honestly about the devastating effects patriarchal masculinity has on us personally- for both men and women. Where we are educated about our history seeped in patriarchy- knowing it is separate from maleness- and educated on its predictable and destructive effects.
I envision a world where boys never feel that there is something wrong with him because he was born a boy, that he is not doomed to be an anti-social scourge on society because of his chromosomes. I want a world where boys and men can celebrate their maleness without the shame and fear of not being man enough.
I envision a world where we work together to level all of our current unfair hierarchies- race, class, gender and sexual orientation.
I envision a world where men don’t just “speak women,” but “dream in women.” Where they dream of close-knit relationships and communities full of equality and care for one another.
Where we all start to dream less of individual success and heroism and dream more of communal care and communal success.
A pipe dream maybe, but if we can’t envision it, we will never create it.
What’s your dream of a better world for men, women, all of us? What do you think we can do about it?
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This entire series has rewritten my brain, and this finale brought me to tears. I want to print out every piece and wallpaper my town with them, make everyone read them. Thank you for sharing, and for giving some serious calls to action! Standing my ground, seeing myself as equal to all the men in my life, not just those I trust, will be a big step, but one I feel empowered to take now
Thank you so much for this series, I really appreciate your thoughts and insights. Your writing is so valuable.