Three Hundred Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man — Category 4
CATEGORY 4: Ways men are either required to master both masculine and feminine roles, or given little space to embody either. [12 items]
[This post is part of a longer series; see the Index for an overview.]
CATEGORY 4: Ways men are either required to master both masculine and feminine roles, or given little space to embody either. [12 items]
Explicit misandrist statements are in at least one way worse for men than explicit misogynist statements are for women, since men have to moreover deal with the social norm that they should be better than letting words hurt them; that they shouldn’t stoop to take the bait; and that they shouldn’t be so fragile so as to get upset by some random woman (or indeed a significant other) saying men are trash. They’re damned if they let these statements go unpunished; but if they fight against them, they’ve already lost in the eyes of those around them. This fucking sucks. And to begin with it just sucks that people feel they get to insult an entire group (because you don’t get to complain if you’re not a minority group, where ‘minority group’ just so happens to be defined as ‘any group that does not include you and people like you’), and it sucks that people whose entire mission statement is to value empathy and kindness and choosing your words carefully, who are against discrimination and against generalizations and against insults — that these exact people often let this behaviour run rampant in their communities.
There are many cultural forces that essentially demand that men feel less confident and more insecure about themselves, telling men to be more careful, take fewer risks, minimize harm rather than maximize benefit. Culture offers men neither confidence nor the freedom to be insecure. It feels particularly cruel when men spend a lot of time listening to women, turning them more insecure as a result, only to find out that women now like them less because of their decreased confidence. If an ideology makes the people it’s trying to change less attractive to those espousing said ideology, maybe said ideology’s adherents should stop and have a think.
Men are told by society (incl. many women) that they have to be ambitious, to never be satisfied with what they have, to never take no for an answer, to always strive for more; men are told that it is normal to run up against boundaries in this process, rules that people will try to impose on them, norms that society would have them adhere to; and men are told that to make the most of themselves and their own lives, they must push these boundaries and break these rules… but the moment these things push up against a woman’s boundary (where I mean ‘boundaries’ much more generally than a purely sex-related reading of the word; e.g. intersocial boundaries, boundaries regarding lines of intellectual questioning, etc.), suddenly men are asked to make all these qualities of themselves, and indeed all of their desires, wholly subservient to the woman’s boundaries and desires. (It is, for example, completely out of fashion nowadays to romantically pursue a woman across a dozen no’s in the hopes that she will eventually change her mind.) Many men are left with a sense that society is asking of them, if not to be two mutually incompatible types of people at once, then at least to have an amazing range, with regard to the trait of having and pursuing their ambitions, to be capable both of great insensitivity and great sensitivity to other people’s opinions of oneself.
In sex, men are frequently expected to simultaneously hold both their own boundaries and those of their partner, as well as to ensure both their own pleasure and that of their partner.
In many ways, traditional gender dynamics were such that men were able to rely on their wives caring for them and securely fulfilling several kinds of emotional needs for them, shoring up their masculine weaknesses, freeing them up to go out and provide for their families while their wives took care of their own feminine tasks. Nowadays, firstly with the average later age of marriage, and secondly with women’s increased refusal to fulfill their traditional roles, many men are left without the feminine support that they need. In particular, they were never (and often still are not) taught how to fulfill these needs for themselves (and my guess is that even if they were, they’d ultimately still be worse at it than women). Men absolutely still have to fulfill their old roles; culture has not let up on this; and men are now moreover asked to learn how to perform women’s roles, too, as it becomes more acceptable for women to reject these roles.
When women demanded to be acknowledged as men’s equals in traits like intelligence, capabilities, power, and so forth, society over time has changed so as to meet their demands; but many women themselves have refused to change to love and respect men who are their equals, instead often still desiring that e.g. their partners are more intelligent than them, more capable than them, more powerful than them, and so forth. To frame it differently: women sought to take up masculine roles, but instead of freeing men up to take up feminine roles, they demand that men fulfill masculine roles even better than they did before. This is obviously untenable; and to be sure, many women are getting hit by the fallout from this themselves; but ultimately men are getting blamed for it, since they are the ones viewed as falling short of women’s expectations for them.
Assuming that men are naturally more interested (but not necessarily better) at e.g. thinking in terms of numbers and abstractions, and women are naturally more interested (but not necessarily better) at e.g. thinking in terms of people and feelings (and note that all of these are very valuable framings)1: men are nowadays asked far more to learn how to think in feminine ways, whereas women are less often asked to think in masculine ways. Contemporary culture demands that its people learn not mathematics but history, not how to reason but what kinds of words not to use, and so forth. Compared to technical knowledge, social know-how is a premium cultural resource nowadays; in particular, society is quickly relinquishing extant social affordances for people who are technically skilled but socially unskilled. Meanwhile, men are still expected to make more money and not risk unemployment, so they also bear more responsibility to ensure they develop whatever technical skills they have, since those are relatively more likely to form the basis of their job prospects.
Many of men’s natural cultural roles depend in large part on them owning their agency, taking risks, and so forth; to fulfill these roles, men need to feel, firstly, socially free, and secondly, inherently capable, of taking action and exercising their own agency. Society’s increased focus on framing reality in terms of one’s victimhood, disables many of these roles. This would be bad enough in itself, yet society moreover has done little to free up more space within feminine gender roles for men to fill; thus men are left with little recourse.
If you tell men they’re bad and entitled and misogynist for wanting to fuck hot women, you’re not going to get them to stop wanting to fuck hot women, you’re just going to make them embrace that they must indeed be bad, entitled, and misogynist. This is of course not a good thing; it often greatly hurts men and destabilizes their lives, for them to think of themselves (even parts of themselves!) as intrinsically evil. What’s especially cruel about this is that when some of these men eventually cross a line, as one might well expect, culture then points to them as examples of men who really wanted to fuck hot women and who were very evil about it, thus strengthening the narratives that put men on these paths to begin with. There exist many such negative cycles that are devouring men daily.
Given the way even many of men’s positive emotions (like enthousiasm, love, lust, and so forth) are often rejected and viewed negatively, it becomes easy especially for young men to figure that if both their love and their hate get rejected all the same, they might as well turn to hatred. (And of course: hatred in men is punished far more harshly than hatred in women, despite the latter often being just as real and, though admittedly it tends to express itself marginally less murderously, it is in many ways no less vicious.)
It feels cruel, in a society where men are still very frequently judged for having weaknesses, being less capable, and so forth, that they are also told to take self-improvement steps that require them to accept that these weaknesses exist.
It feels cruel, in a society where men are still very frequently given the message that they should take full responsibility for their own actions, personality, and general state of being, that they are also told they are immature for finding it difficult to rely on others, or even for failing to frame life in a way where they recognize it makes sense to do so. For example, seeking help requires that one accepts that one was never meant to be capable of doing everything alone. This acceptance can be a profound and radical act for many men, one which much other messaging in their lives has barred them from even understanding exists. Culture by and large does not understand why this sort of thing would ever be difficult for men; it only notices that it is difficult for men, and, cruelly and confusingly, denigrates men for being incapable of accepting that they are sometimes incapable.
Scott Alexander argues that this distinction is much less nurture-based than is usually thought in Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences.