Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[benji]

Yeah, it’s something I think about all the time in the work that I do (as is the case for you).

It’s easy to feel hopeless because there don’t seem to be any solutions, but that statement itself might be part of the problem. We have a tendency on the left to not find questions valid until we can simultaneously provide answers. We don’t really know what positive masculinity looks like, and so we don’t explore masculinity in a modern context. This lack of exploration, of curiosity even, constrains our takes on boyhood/manhood/masculinity to being, and remaining, incredibly surface level. And this might be more acceptable when it comes to adults — where there’s a higher level of accepting accountability required; but the ground here changes entirely when we consider young boys, which is where most of the problems take root.

What is masculinity?

What defines masculinity as a role?

We often define masculinity in “counter” to femininity; but, without that, what is it? For a cis and/or heterosexual masculine people, take away your ideas of “femininity” — take away the expectation to desire, attract, attain, malign, dominate, and control femininity/women…what’s left? What do you have? What is your sense of self?

I think about this all the time.

(stealing this from a colleague)

I’m going to post a statement, and I’d like everyone who reads it to think on how the statement hits them. What their reaction is to it:

Being a young boy is an incredibly traumatic experience.

Your post gives me a lot to think about because I think you’re right. I think about how it applies to me, being Queer, and Femme, and Black, and also overflowing with hard-won confidence. I’ve fully entered the “Can’t nobody tell me shit about me” stage of my life, but it’s not a brand of confidence that Traditional Manhood💪🏾 would be interested in selling, that’s for sure!

I think about where that confidence came from, and I have to say it started young. In much the same way you say you built your confidence by being independent of masculine expectations; I roughly built my confidence by being largely excluded from it.

Taking it back to my earlier statement, “Being a young boy is an inherently traumatic experience”…I remember that small window of time when I was a young boy just like other young boys. And I remember the ways that sexuality was thrust upon us, and “maturity” was thrust upon us, and violence was thrust upon us, and emotional neglect was thrust upon us. I remember all the ways in which traits that actually amount to a well-rounded human being were presented to us as symptoms of weakness. I remember how uncomfortable and traumatic this was, not just for me but all the boys around me. And I remember the moment when my discomfort became a unique thing, because I wasn’t like the other boys around me. I remember exactly when boys I grew up with began to mock me, when the adult men I admired began to look at me funny.

With no masculine role models that made feel accepted, and no Queer role models I could see a future me in at the time, I was largely left to forge my own way to confidence. But it wasn’t really by choice, not when I was that young. Sometimes I do wonder how I might have turn out if I weren’t essentially cast out of the in-group. Heck, I’ve dated some men who weren’t.

This is largely incoherent…but you asked for my opinion!

Also, I’m seeing a lot of references to Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate in this thread…

But for the Black/PoC here’s a name that might be more relevant and no less deserving of slander:

Kevin Samuels (Rest in Piss)

The thing is I truly believe that role models don’t create a demand; they arise from a demand.

And the mirror we all have to look into reflects the possibility that the lack of models of positive masculinity can be the result in our reluctance to even find value in the idea.

The only thing I would push back on a little bit here is that this framing kind of lets society off the hook.

Young boys aren’t born into this world inherently wanting girls, power and money. Outside of some basic biological processes and urges, boys are just born.

Rather, I think it is that society tells boys what they should want. And then tells them that they should want those things because they are entitled to them. And sometimes it seems like the only people willing to acknowledge this are the same people who want to take advantage of it. Meanwhile, the rest of us are comfortable to foster (or simply ignore) behaviors in young boys that will blossom into negative, harmful and toxic traits when they become adults. Or we don’t provide solutions, just proclamations (“Why can’t you just be a nice person?”).

I agree with this, which is why when I think about this question of positive masculinity I try to avoid the trap of grasping at what I perceive to be specific positive “masculine” traits. Not just because a lot of those traits aren’t inherently masculine (I was raised by a family of women who could protect and provide for themselves), but because I think this drive to find what “The Masculine Traits” are contributes to the problem as I see it: that we don’t allow boys to self-discover and self-actualize at all. We’re still kind of falling into this framework of thinking that there’s a set of positive masculine traits that we can substitute for the toxic masculinity that boys are inundated by. It feels like we’re still telling boys that “Being a man is THIS,” when really we should be giving boys the emotional and expressive toolkit to define for themselves what their relationship to masculinity (and femininity) is.

As for boys that have already bought into this, to me that’s the rub. I still don’t think that we as a society have truly embraced the idea that if we want better and more emotionally developed men, if we want a society more better equipped to support that, and if we want a healthier idea of “masculinity” as it exists across the gender spectrum, we have to start younger.

Because as I get older, and have more friends with kids, the more I wish I could say that the “boys will be boys” mentality existed only on the right. Even on the left we have difficulty challenging the ways we approach boyhood, thinking that the positive traits are just going to somehow manifest on their own when the kids are older, and so we’ll just deal with it then.

What a FAT weirdo creep.