Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
The first act of violence that patriarchy demands >of males is not violence toward women. Instead >patriarchy demands of all males that they >engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that >they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If >an individual is not successful in emotionally >crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal >men to enact rituals of power that will assault >his self-esteem
-bell hooks
As someone socialized transfeminine that quote always hit hard. Especially now as I’m older and making closer friends with adult men who are trying to heal from that psychic mutilation I’m seeing all the ways that it runs deep.
And the thing is it’s not a voluntary trade of power for vulnerability. It is backed by violence against those who cannot or will not engage in it. From social isolation to fists this violence keeps those who are uncomfortable in some form of line.
And then we see that men trying to heal from this are often unable or uncomfortable to go to each other for healing and find themselves overburdening their wives and girlfriends for something few of them have the frame of reference to understand. And some of these women have also internalized these ideas of men and push that continued expectation onto them.
Idk that’s at least what I’ve observed of the phenomenon. But I can say that a lot of the damage can be healed and you model a more whole adulthood for your sons.
This hits me hard. I am a cis male and currently trying to get rid of something like toxic masculinity, but as you say it is deeply rooted.
I acually never strived for the stereotypical man image, I wanted to have an emotional side. Now i know i always just considered "having am emotional side" just as another kind of requirement to be a good man. So i tried listening to others and beeing open myself, talking about emotional things. But only those, that i thougt were accepted. I never talked about my real worries. They always seemed to ridiculous to me. A good emotially healthy man shouldn't have them or solve them himself. Now it feels pretty dumb in retrospect, but I am no longer letting this feeling stop me from talking about something. In some way I also have the feeling i betrayed other people with a fake personality.
I know this is not the mistake of feminism. I cannot really say what went wrong to land in this position. I do not even know why i tell this now. In some way, I just want to tell my story and hope someone can relate with it. Secondly i want to say, that the following is not obvious for everyone, at least it was not for me: Beeing emotional is not just some requirement for you, it's also about having an opportunity to get support for your worries.
Facts tho.
It's always the dudes who are only friends with other dudes that have the most issues.
More of a cultural thing than anything, but it's always good for dudes to have women as friends as well, women are just better at talking about some things. They don't have the same social hangups as a lot of men.
Shits better than it was, but it's still weird when people only have friends of their own gender.
Many women and men do not like their SO having friends of the opposite gender, especially if they are alone together. So that means having a female friend that you can privately confide in is not easy to have or maintain if either party is in a relationship.
The "safest" way to have an opposite gendered friend that you can talk to is one that you only talk to at work during work hours, which isn't an option for male dominated fields(e.g. construction) and men in those environments are probably the most in need of a female friend to talk to.
The irony is that the people who don't want their SO having an opposite gendered friend probably need an opposite gendered friend to talk to.
If there's that much lack of trust, only having same gendered friends isn't helping anything.
It's just prolonging a bad relationship
I really don’t understand heterosexual people that are like this. I’m a gay dude. I’m attracted to dudes, I have lots of gay dudes that are platonic friends. It’s possible to be friends with people without boning them lol.
I think the fear isn't that everyone of the preferred gender wants to bone your partner, but that you have no way of knowing which ones do. The uncertainty is what I think gets to a lot of people.
Still, it's silly. If one of the core values of your relationship is that you're exclusive, it's up to you and your partner to honor that, not up to every other person who comes along. If your partner won't respect that if a friend offers, then they don't respect the relationship to begin with and you're better off finding out.
At least, that's my take from listening to other people. I'm not a sociologist or anything.
I get where you're coming from but I've witness toxicity regarding masculinity from both men and women. Honestly, it's definitely possible to have healthy relationships with other dudes. All of my best friends are guys and we aren't afraid to talk about anything, like our feelings. So it's really the company you keep that really matters, regardless of gender imo
Unfortunately, "my friends and family are all assholes, must be feminists fault" is extremely common and rarely shaken off.
There's plenty of reasons people night not listen to your problems. Sometimes people just don't have the space. Sometimes they're just assholes.
The reasons I've seen the most frequently stem from the person trying to talk. They're oversharing. They never reciprocate. They never take steps to actually address their problems. They're using their problems to manipulate someone who isn't falling for it.
But in 40 years of adulthood, I've never seen "I'm not going to listen to them solely because they're a man".
Same thing with other types of bigotry. The more people you know and/or have to interact with from different ethnicities or backgrounds, the harder it is to blindly hate them. You see this a lot in more diverse places like cities where they tend more progressive and tolerant. And you see the inverse in more remote or rural places that are often more homogenous.
I was married for 35 years. In that whole time, my husband had many female friends. It never bothered me at all., because i wasn’t jealous like that. I was never able to have male friends, though. That was always some kind of threat.
I always got along better with guys than women, so I was always turning down outings and ghosting people in favour of my marriage. Now, since we divorced after 35 years., I have no friends at all. He kept his girlfriends from high school (even marrying one within a year of our divorce) and I’m completely alone.
Seems fair.
It's such a touchy subject because feminism definitely came about as a response to toxic masculine behaviors that have been around and are still with us. And while capitalism/toxic masculinity is to blame for most of men's mental health problems, at the same time, I think there's still been something of an overreach with feminism and there's actually some aspects of Western life where women are at a definite advantage, namely in the Court systems when dealing with divorce and custody issues. Men and women in these spaces are not treated equally and it's just accepted as "That's how it is," because we're ok with going off of outdated ideas in that space.
Having said all that, I still don't think it's fair to blame feminism for men's mental health issues, it's more just a societal thing that men in general are really considered expendable and left to fend for themselves on most of their problems. While I think it's gotten better over the years and it's more acceptable to at least talk about some things, there's still just a general apathetic attitude towards men's mental health issues. Men/Fathers will often be relied on by everybody else in the family for all sorts of things, but who does Dad have to turn to when he has problems? Mothers are often placed on a pedestal, and that's great for them, fathers though are just kind of... "Oh, it's you."
I agree with you fully. I am a feminist, and I absolutely agree that certain portions of our community has been co-opted by toxicity.
Yes, it sucks to be a woman, especially if you live in a region where you've lost access to your bodily autonomy, because that is the barest of basics for rights. It sucks getting paid less. It sucks having to maintain a job, maintain the household, be the responsible parent for getting kids to/from school/practice/clubs, etc. It sucks being the spouse that's EXPECTED to stay home and forgo their career/dreams if a dual income household doesn't make sense (childcare costs eat up a spousal income). It sucks being the sex that is more likely to end up abused/murdered/raped.
I hear all that. But I do believe that mainstream feminism has DEFINITELY crossed the lines in certain aspects.
I don't think it's necessary to jump all over a man's comment when he says "I've never beat a spouse/I help out around the house" and reply with silly things like "nOt AlL mEn" and shit like that. It makes people feel unheard and undervalued. And if people feel unheard/undervalued, they are going to gravitate to where they do feel valued and heard.
That's how we end up with manosphere bullshit saying things like "A woman's pleasure isn't necessary, but a man can't think straight without it. It's her role to keep you satisfied and fuck anyone else who says otherwise."
"Looksmaxxing" is something that I'm also REALLY fearful of our younger male generations getting into, because it stems from "You wanna get laid? You gotta be hot or a woman will NEVER choose you. This is how you get hot." And then it leads young men to picking themselves (and each other) apart physically to a really harmful level.
Ughhhh, I know I'm saying a lot here, but it's because I do believe that certain traits of current day radical feminism are driving more and more youth to the Andrew Tates of the world, and that makes me terrified for our younger girls growing up alongside them, and how they're going to be treated.
Women couldn't get their own bank accounts in the US until 1970, radical feminism was necessary. But today, we have to make sure men feel comfortable talking to us/being supported by us/delving into their hopes and dreams without being like "Okay but it's worse to be a lady".
We have to support each other.
Very much agree with everything you said. As a man, having the patriarchy be framed as something that is harmful to men as well as women was a sort of revelation to me. When you're depressed and have low self esteem it can be difficult to be accepting towards messaging that frames you as the bad guy.
It has taken me years to start to process white & male privilege as something independent of me, something that can be examined and acknowledged without destroying what little self worth I had. Coming to terms with my own identity and privilege has been (and continues), to be a long, difficult, and life changing process. I wish more people had empathy and understanding for that.
Even saying what I've just said feels a bit taboo. I can imagine many marginalized folks reading this and rolling their eyes saying "that must be so hard for you". And I totally sympathize with that sentiment, I just don't think it solves anything.
who does Dad have to turn to when he has problems?
A big part of the slow burning men's mental health crisis is societal expectations of men.
Boys are conditioned at a young age to start cutting off outward expressions of most emotions (big exception for anger though), stifling them and striving towards some kind of emotionless state. So they learn not to seek emotional support when they need it. And to make matters worse, this also sets these boys to grow up to be less dependable as providers of emotional support.
So men start to rely on the women in their life for emotional support, which creates unhealthy dynamics for many men who don't have reliable women in their life, or forces them to depend exclusively on a wife for emotional support. Only having that one person, or zero people, in their lives that can provide emotional support is highly limiting, and can go wrong in all sorts of different ways.
Deep bonds in male friendship are important, but we're raised without the guidance and skills to build and foster those bonds. And those friendships can inform how to have healthy platonic friendships with women, and how to have healthy romantic and sexual relationships with women, too.
That's what toxic masculinity means to me: a societal expectation that men behave a particular way, and the negative consequences directly for those men and indirectly for the other people in their own lives, whether parents, siblings, spouses, friends, or children. We owe the younger men in our lives the opportunity to break that cycle and model what healthy behavior and emotions look like, so that they're not carrying their own baggage into adulthood, middle age, and beyond.
Any time I've attempted to be "vulnerable" its ended badly, as have friends that have tried the same thing. Women talk a big talk about opening up, but the last thing they want is a man that can't handle his own problems. Emotional support only goes one way from what I can tell.
I feel like trying to frame men's mental health issues as a problem caused exclusively by "the patriarchy and capitalism" seems like it's trying to wash the rest of society of their own personal responsibility to contribute to making the world a better place for everyone. Patriarchy and Capitalism are just tools of the greater power structure of society, which we all have a hand in forming and perpetuating.
And let's not pretend that the feminist movement's tendency to pump out and empower misandrists and misandrist thinking isn't going to have a negative impact men's mental health, especially if we continue to hold feminism as a scared cow beyond reproach or criticism. And let's not pretend the fact that we have the explicitly female coded "feminism" that opposes the explicitly coded "patriarchy" isn't going to give people who don't have a lot of time to philosophise an inherently combative view of the feminism.
It's hard to buy into the whole "actually femismim is for anyone who wants equality" shtick when you're working exhaustive jobs most your life and then you get exposed to the kind of feminist who says men might as well go extinct because they have sperm banks now.
Eh, I think posts like this missing the point - feminism has a lot of shades. Some of which are actively harmful to mens mental health, some of which are very supportive.
If it's about everyone having the same rights regardless of gender - I think we're all in favour. If it's about elevating one gender over another to address historical injustice, then I think that's where points of contention lie.
Let's ask the real question - does it have to be a zero sum game? Can we have the former without the latter? Surely we can.
It seems society has to swing that pendulum as far to either side as possible every time.
Men the best! Women the best, men evil! Women evil, Men the best!
humans are so fucking stupid, collectively. we just repeat patterns over and over and over
Men are the problem with men's health.
As a man, the number of times I've been told, by other men, to "man up" when I'm struggling, is too damn high.