The unspoken reason it is so hard to be on the left and promote masculinity

Why is it so hard to uphold masculinity and gender equality at the same time?

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Disclaimer: I talk about “masculinity” and “femininity” a lot in this article. I don’t believe these are a set of biologically set traits, but ever-shifting societal norms.¹

And while this essay focuses on only two genders, I recognize that gender is a spectrum, not a binary.

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Last week The New York Times posted a discussion called “America Has a Masculinity Crisis” on their Opinions podcast.

The conversation was held between two people on the left, and the reaction to the podcast… sounded familiar.

It’s the same reaction the American Psychological Association received when they wrote that traditional masculinity can be psychologically harmful. It’s the same reaction the razor company Gillette received when they ran a commercial that called masculinity norms into question.

The reaction is summed up perfectly by the comment,

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP TELLING MEN THEY SHOULD BE MORE LIKE WOMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Plenty of these reactions came from people on the right, but many came from those on the left as well.

Masculinity is a far tricker topic to discuss on the left than it is on the right.

It is honestly difficult to be a cheerleader for masculinity on the left.

…just not for the reason we usually hear about.

We hear about how the left has rolled out the red carpet for the gals and the gays so hard that there is simply no room left on the runway for men. We hear about how hard it is to belong to a party where you are repeatedly cast as the villain.

These conversations are valid, but there is another reason, and one I never hear discussed, as to why it is so hard to go to bat for masculinity on the left.

Richard Reeves² is one such person on the left promoting masculinity.

source

In his first ever Substack article Richard wrote,

“The Left tells men, “Be more like your sister.” The Right says, “Be more like your father.” Neither invocation is helpful. What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.”

A vision of masculinity compatible with gender equality.

Why would that be so hard?

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C.J. Pascoe is a sociologist who spent years observing teenage boys in high schools in California and found that for the boys, being masculine was often their top priority. But interestingly, the worst insults among boys were not merely the inverse of masculine traits such as: you are weak, you are a coward or you are incompetent.

Rather, the very worst insults for boys were: you are a girl, you are a f*g, you are a pussy.³

It wasn’t all that embarrassing to not exhibit masculine traits, but it was the worst humiliation to be associated with femininity.

Here’s the thing, if masculinity simply means courage, integrity, responsibility, independence, strength and resilience, then great! There is no conflict whatsoever with masculinity and gender equality.

Unfortunately the practice of masculinity often isn’t just to be a man, it’s specifically to not be a woman.

In writing the book Guyland, Michael Kimmel interviewed hundreds of men. He found that masculinity is much less about proving that you are a man than it is about proving that you are not a woman.

Ronald Levant is a former Harvard professor who has been studying boys and men for over 30 years. He studies not what people say should define masculinity, but how those who strive for masculinity actually behave. His research shows 7 norms of Western masculinity⁴. And coming in at #1? Avoidance of femininity.

Terrence Real in his book I Don’t Want to Talk About It says,

“The achievement of masculinity is not an acquisition so much as a disavowel… Boys and men when asked to describe masculinity predominantly do so with double negatives. Boys and men did not talk about being strong so much as they talked about not being weak. They did not list independent so much as not being dependent. They did not speak so much about being close to their fathers so much as about pulling away from their mothers.

In short, being a man generally means not being a woman.”

In practice, masculinity acts less like a collection of traits and more like a binary ranking system. So long as a behavior is clearly not feminine, then it is masculine.

For instance, Ruth Whippman in researching for her book BoyMom visited a home for “failure to launch” boys and men ages 15-30. The leader of the group said that what is wrong with the world today is “the steady onslaught of the de-masculinization of society.” Specifically that America has become “too feminized.”

But after Whippman attended the program for a few days, she noted that the traits promoted in the group were not what we would typically consider “masculine” traits like strength, stoicism and independence, but rather “relationship building, emotional openness, vulnerability and a sense of community.”

And so long that when men are encouraged to exhibit these traits, the traits are clearly labeled “masculine,” well then, all good! Super helpful! 10 stars! The program has rave reviews.

But when men are encouraged to exhibit these exact same traits, say by the American Psychological Association, and those traits are labeled “feminine”…. well then FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP TRYING TO MAKE MEN MORE LIKE WOMEN!!

“If we have to attached the label “masculine” to a behavior before it can have value to men, we’re still buying into the basic gender hierarchy in which male is superior and female is lesser and giving weight to the idea that a man embracing anything feminine is a humiliation.” - Ruth Whippman

The reason it is so hard to promote masculinity on the left is that the left supports gender equality⁵.

And at least in its current American iteration, masculinity is achieved through distance from femininity. And not just distance from, but distance ABOVE⁶.

Which means gender inequality is not an accidental side effect of masculinity; it is built INTO the category itself.

It is far less complicated to extol masculinity on the right. The right ranges from being far less pressed about gender inequality to outright sanctifying it. Thus, our current culture of masculinity fits right in without a problem.

It’s far more complicated to uphold the imperative to not be like a woman if you support gender equality.

But can’t we be separate but equal?

Is it so wrong to be distinct? What about the men who don’t want to be above women, but still want to have characteristics, traits, and aspirations separate from women and femininity?

Men who don’t want superiority, but who simply want a place and an identity to call their own?

Fair enough.

Can the gendered characteristics be separate but equal?

Separate but equal…. separate but equal…. where have we heard that phrase before?

Oh yeah… the 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation under the mandate of “separate but equal.”

Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote:

“Laws permitting, and even requiring, [the separation of the races]... do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other.”

They weren’t saying black people were inferior to white people, just that they should be separate from white people.

Sounded pretty good at the time. Sounded pretty fair.

Just one small problem.. “separate but equal” was definitely separate, but it wasn’t anywhere even close to equal.

Not in schools, not in homes, not in colleges, not in businesses, not in hospitals.

Not even close.⁷

Turns out a group cannot build an identity around being above another group for centuries, remove the words “above” from the mission statement, and expect the hierarchy to poof disappear.

Obviously race and gender are not exact parallels here—women have far more rights today than black people had in the early 1900s and proponents of traditional masculinity are not asking for such a stark delineation of separateness, but it is worth digging into WHY it is so very important to be separate if we truly are equals.

White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued. This has happened with teaching, biology, cheerleading, social work, architecture, gymnastics, library sciences, psychology, and veterinary school.

Dr. Anne Lincoln found that when it came to young men applying to veterinary school, even one more woman applying was a greater deterrent for boys applying to that school than $1000 in extra tuition cost.

If white and black people were truly equals— as proponents of segregation continually claimed—why were white people so anxious to separate themselves?

If men and women are truly equals— why is it such an insult to act like a woman?

In the quote we started this article with, Richard Reeves said that telling boys to be like their sister is not what we should say to boys.

But if we believe in gender equality, ‘be like your sister’ would be like saying, “be like your team mate.”

If masculinity and femininity were equal status categories, “You talk like a girl” wouldn’t be an insult. It would simply be a description, “You talk like this person I know.”

If we truly held men and women in equal value, listening to female artists wouldn’t be embarrassing, ordering a girly drink wouldn’t be embarrassing, choosing a female profession wouldn’t be embarrassing, having lots of friends that are girls wouldn’t be embarrassing.

This is not to say that wanting to be unique is evil.

This is not to say we should all morph into androgynous blobs where everyone wears grey to avoid blue or pink. This is just to say that it’s worth interrogating why distance from the feminine is so very important.

Particularly given our hefty historical baggage of inequality.

Masculinity is in crisis, just not for the reasons we talk about.

We talk as if masculinity is in crisis because the definition of masculinity has shifted.

But as someone with two boys, I can assure you, the very worst insults for boys remain exactly the same as they were in the 1950s- that golden age of masculinity- you’re a girl, you’re a f*g, you’re a pussy.

All seven of Ronald Levant’s norms of masculinity are still well intact for men.

Wikipedia lists “strength, courage, independence, leadership, dominance and assertiveness” under its masculinity entry. All of those qualities remain just as aspirational for men today as they were half a century ago.

The thing that has changed since the 1950s is not the rules and mandates of masculinity.

The thing that has changed is women’s equality.

Women moving up in education, employment and leadership.

Masculinity is not in crisis because the definition has changed. It is in crisis because it is currently predicated on being ranked above women and femininity in an increasingly gender equal world.

That’s the crisis.⁸

But it only has to be a crisis so long as being feminine is seen as a degradation.

And that is not something that is set in stone.

We don’t have to be in crisis

It’s a common argument that domination is inherent to maleness.

There’s nothing to be done. It’s biological. Hormonal. It’s testosterone.

But actually researchers repeatedly find that testosterone isn’t so concerned with domination as it is with STATUS.

Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has dedicated much of his career to studying testosterone and has found that,

“Testosterone doesn’t make you aggressive. Testosterone exaggerates pre-existing social patterns of aggression… What testosterone really does is when your status is being challenged, testosterone makes you do whatever you need to do to maintain status.”

And good news—status is not biological, it is sociological.

Where the rules of status change, behavior follows. There is a study of Sapolsky’s where they had research subjects play an economic game where you gain status by making generous offers. When they gave people testosterone, they became more generous in the game.

When Dr. Ron Dahl was researching status he visited a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. The monks and scholars there told Dahl that the way boys earned prestige and respect in the monastery was by showing “kindness, compassion and empathy.” The young monks in their hunt for status tried to out do each other in those values, “each trying to one up each other’s kindness.”

More testosterone led to more generosity when generosity brings status. Young men went on kindness competitions where kindness brought status.

There’s nothing naturally wrong with testosterone or boys or men or maleness. There is something very wrong with how we award status to men based on the degree to which they denigrate women and femininity. (Oh hey President of the United States. Oh hey our main insult of the President of the United States is to call him a little girl or gay).

But there is hope, and that hope lies not in reinforcing age old gender hierarchies, but in leveling them.

Gender inequality does not mean men thrive and women suffer.

Gender inequality a lose/lose for everyone.

The problem with degrading the feminine isn’t just that men degrade women, it’s that men degrade anything deemed feminine WITHIN THEMSELVES.

Terrence Real says,

“When our culture teaches boys to repudiate the feminine in themselves, to hold that part of themselves in contempt, we teach them to split themselves in half. Each half of them takes on an assigned role - roles that look very much like like traditional stereotypes. The boy learns to go better than himself, to bring the dynamic of contempt into his own psyche.

The dialogue between those two internalized roles often becomes the inner discourse we call depression.”⁹

On the flip side, gender equality is a win/win for both men and women.

This is a graph from The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology showing the level of a country’s gender equality on the x-axis and the “precariousness of manhood beliefs”on the y-axis. Their article states that “precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action.”

The less gender equal a country, the more precarious that country’s idea of manhood is. The more gender equal a country, the more stable that country’s idea of manhood is.

Also- interesting that the country that ranks lowest in precarious manhood beliefs and highest in gender equality just so happens to be the same country currently ranked as the happiest in the world by the World Happiness Report: Finland.

In fact, countries that routinely rank the highest in gender equality happen to be the very same countries that routinely rank the highest on the World Happiness Report.

Not just the women in those countries, the men too.

Conversely, countries with the lowest gender equality routinely rank as the least happy.

Not just the women of those countries, the men too.

Countries with higher gender equality also have less crime, less violence, less corruption and better mental health than countries with lower gender equality.

Oh and men in more gender equal societies report have better sex lives than those in less gender equal societies.

There is no positive masculinity without equality

So Richard Reeves is right, what we need is “a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.”

But until we address the gender hierarchy lying in plain sight within our current practice of masculinity, even the most ‘positive’ version of masculinity won’t be compatible with gender equality.

And unless we actually name this, we risk having completely ineffective solutions because we don’t name the cause.

For instance, as a solution for men’s unemployment Richard Reeves recommends that men go into HEAL professions (Healthcare, Education, Administration and Literacy). But without ever addressing WHY men don’t want to go into these professions in the first place (they are female dominated and seen as feminine), the solution will be ineffective until the cause is addressed.

As Professor Chesko explains:

“…credentialed, well-meaning people who look at the genuine harm these rigid categories cause men. They’ll point to the isolation, the mental health crisis, the economic precarity, and conclude that the answer is to reinstate the categories more humanely. To tell men to be men again, just with better boundaries this time.

So instead of a cultural evolution, we get a cultural reversion to the place that led us here to begin with.

They will simply push that the solution to men being harmed by rigid gender categories is…more rigid gender categories, just enforced more kindly.”

Bingo. That’s why this matters.

Our answer to harmful rigid gender roles cannot be more harmful rigid gender roles, just ‘positive’ this time.

And while we are OBSESSED with asking the question ‘how to save masculinity?¹⁰’ We never seem to ask how much of masculinity is dependent on femininity being beneath it?

The hardest part about defending masculinity on the left isn’t defending men.

It’s defending something whose very meaning has, for centuries, depended on gender inequality… while claiming to promote equality.

Because I can’t help but think that if men and women were truly equal, it wouldn’t be such an insult to be associated with us.

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Want to gather to de-patriarchify our brains together? Cool me too. Come join us at our Matriarchal Blessing book club. This quarter we will read The Flowering Wand: Rewinding the Sacred Masculine by Sophie Strand. We will meet on zoom in July to discuss. Join us:

1. When I read Professor Chesko’s recent article stating that he has to talk about masculinity but he hates talking about masculinity because even in talking about it he has to concede to a division he doesn’t believe in, I felt like whooping and crying from how hard I resonated:

“One of my issues with talking about masculinity online is that I often have to use a framework for the conversation that I don’t believe in. Because the moment I say ‘masculine traits,’ I’ve already conceded that those traits belong to men, and I don’t believe that they do. At least not in the way that we talk about them as some biological imperative that we are destined to perform…

“At some point (and we’re talking centuries here, not decades) someone looked at the full range of human traits and divided them in half. Things like empathy, nurturing, emotional attunement, and caregiving went in one pile and got labeled feminine. Stoicism, dominance, protection, ambition, competitiveness, and financial provision went in the other pile and got labeled masculine. And that second pile, not coincidentally, mapped almost perfectly onto the traits our society decided to compensate monetarily and reward socially.

So right from the jump, we didn’t just sort traits. We assigned value to them and then we told men that the valuable pile was not just what they should pursue, but who they are.”

2. I wrote here about how I believe Richard Reeves’s impact on the world is net positive and how I’m fully on board with most of his goals- to support men, believe men’s pain, etc. (I just think his neglect of patriarchal masculinity- ie men’s aversion to the feminine- is his fatal flaw)

3. Cue the movie montage:

• “You play ball like a GIRL!” - The Sandlot

• “What are you McFly? A girl?” - Back to the Future

• “I’m not gonna cry, ok? I’m not a girl.” - Michael Scott, the Office

• “What are you? A bloody girl?” - Billy Elliot

4. Seven norms of masculinity according to Ronald Levant:

1. Avoidance of femininity

2. Restrictive emotionality

3. Self reliance

4. Importance of sex

5. Toughness and dominance

6. Achievement and status

7. Negativity towards sexual minorities

5. at least in theory

6. Trans activist Julia Serano speaks first hand of this phenomenon:

“Today, while it is generally considered to be offensive or prejudiced to openly discriminate against someone for being female, discriminating against someone’s femininity is still considered fair game. The idea that masculinity is strong, tough and natural while femininity is weak, vulnerable and artificial continues to proliferate even among people who believe that women and men are equals.

“The idea that femininity is subordinate to masculinity dismisses women as a whole ...No form of gender equity can ever truly be achieved until we first work to empower femininity itself.”

“…where most sensible people would agree with the statement ‘women are men are equals,’ we remain light-years away from being able to say that most people believe that femininity is masculinity’s equal.” - Julia Serano, Whipping Girl

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• In the 1930s and 40s Souther states routinely spent 2-4 times more per white student than per Black student.

• Millions of white families received federally backed mortgages while black neighborhoods were literally outlined in red on maps and labeled too risky for loans—the repercussions of which led to generations of wealth disparity that we are still dealing with today.

• Black Colleges and Universities existed only because black students were barred from white universities. They were never funded equally.

• The black hospitals had older equipment, fewer specialists, less funding and less access to new research and new technology.

8. “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, The Will to Change. bell hooks taught that we must distinguish maleness and masculinity from PATRIARCHAL MASCULINITY (which is specifically the idea that men cannot and must not be feminine).

9. When men talk about what is hard about being a man, the intense pressure to be masculine and never feminine comes up constantly— the pressure to be strong and never weak, to provide and never receive, to be stoic and never emotional.

Ronald Levant’s research finds that the closer a boy or man adheres to the seven norms of masculinity, the more likely he is to experience psychological distress including depression, anxiety, suicidality, substance abuse, violence and difficulty forming close relationships.

10. British sociologist John MacInnes in his book The End of Masculinity wrote that the masculinity “crisis” is nothing new. He says, “masculinity has always been in one crisis or another” and these masculinity crises have been raging for hundreds of years- precisely when the value of equality came onto the scene actually. He holds that "masculinity" as a personal identity does not naturally exist. Rather, it was invented in the modern era to explain the contradiction of how men and women could possess “equal rights” while continuing to lead radically unequal lives.