Thoughts About Guys: How to Be a Good Man
Giving Ourselves The Tools To Be Better People in a Changing World
It’s official: we’re talking about young men again, if we ever really stopped. As the election approaches, people have once again taken notice of the massive gender gap that is growing in the younger generation. This has generated articles, like this one from Politico, trying to tie obvious right-wing propaganda efforts to the broader dissatisfaction of young men with liberal politics and society more broadly.
Discourse around what’s the matter with young men seems to pop up every six to eight months without fail, which is why I actually wrote a piece over a year ago about it. I’ve been holding onto it, as too much gender talk is bound to get anyone in trouble. However, I think it’s worth putting more stuff out there that falls somewhere outside the binary of “clinical analysis that treats a very diverse group of people like a problem to solve” and “clearly right-wing attempts to manipulate resentment into reactionary politics.”
As with anything else, this is based on my own experience and viewpoints, and trying not to be overly prescriptive. Hoping to use it as an opportunity to talk more about men and gender in a way that doesn’t make everyone involved want to tune out altogether.
Everyone seems to have a problem with men. From the right and left, we tend to get conflicting ideas around how we are supposed to define our own masculinity. Are we supposed to be louder or quieter, stronger or more passive, more or less sensitive? While gender expectations have never been as solid as they may have seemed, the discourse around masculinity has only increased in recent times. Both the New York Times and The Washington Post submitted their entries in the last few months, elevating these worries to the highest levels of respectable discourse.
Much of the discourse around men has come from women writers, including these pieces. To a certain extent it makes sense: phenomena are often best observed from the outside, and women often have to deal with the consequences of uncertain masculinity just as much as men do. However, leaving so much of the discourse around men and masculinity up to women is inherently fraught. It is easy for many men to become dismissive, defensive, and even worse when challenged by these pieces. When a friend of mine wrote a piece detailing her experiences with poor behavior and the processes she thought could fix it for other people, she was attacked both publicly and privately. These men who lashed out weren’t actually referenced in her piece, but maybe felt it hit too close to their behavior.
That being said, it is not wrong for some men to feel like they are often being talked down to. Some analysis really does take a more clinical and judgmental tone, so even pieces that don’t can set off those triggers in people. What we can’t let that obscure is the fact that any crisis facing masculinity is something that harms all people, regardless of gender.
As a man myself, I can only speak to my own experiences. I actually fit the bill of many of the disaffected young boys who struggled with self-esteem and self-identity in a world that was changing quickly around me. However, over the last several years, I have grown to form strong bonds with people of all genders in a community that has never made me feel ashamed of who I am. Along the way, I have been able to learn how to translate some of the better parts of masculinity into a prosocial way, based deeply in my more egalitarian values.
At the core of these debates is the largely unacknowledged fact that the tools that men have been given to relate to the world around us are simply not working. While I can only speak to my own experiences, I think that there are a set of new tools we can use to not just become better men, but better people overall.
First, Look Inward
When I look at what differentiates the men in my life who can navigate often treacherous social situations with respect and those who can not, what immediately stands out is the ability to take feedback and engage in honest self-reflection.
If someone says something critical about us, our initial response is to get upset. It is only natural, and it is certainly not a gendered phenomenon. However, even though we all face these same challenges, we face them in different ways. Traditionally, men certainly receive our fair share of criticism while growing up, but it often comes from authority figures who often happen to be other men. During this process, men are generally taught that women, whether a mother or a wife, are there to serve as a caretaker.
In my case, I got lucky. I had some of the traditional experiences, but I also had emotional support and authority figures of all genders. Additionally, I was involved in the arts and music from a young age where criticism is a practice that is applied constantly and without ill will. Even then, it still took a while to be able to reflect around myself as a person, rather than just the work I do. It took more than one woman in my life calling me out when I was younger for certain things to set in, and it did not feel good.
Near the end of high school, I was actually able to develop a fairly diverse friend group after years of toiling away by myself. That being said, I was still a teenage boy, and there were girls I was friends with that I wanted to be more than friends with. Unable to process this in a productive way, I would act properly foolish: express too much, lash out when I didn’t get the response I wanted, and withdraw in shame at what I had done. This cycle repeated more times than I would care to admit, and I got yelled at my fair share. Eventually, it was the care I had for and from my friends and my family that allowed me to push through it, but not before dealing with some self-hatred.
Importantly, self-hatred is very different from self-reflection. For years, especially when I was receiving some of that criticism, I struggled with a ruthless sense of self-criticism: I was inherently bad, nothing I could do was right, and something in me was broken beyond fixing. There’s something about it that feels almost noble: being so willing to call yourself out before other people even get the chance, punishing yourself for your own sins. Despite how unpleasant it feels, this form of self-hatred is actually a way to let yourself off the hook. If you are fundamentally broken, then there’s no need to take the effort needed to actually work to fix yourself. If you can’t improve, then you don’t have to.
The rejection of self-hatred is key in this case, as I have seen many people swing fiercely between the false binary of “I can’t do anything wrong” and “I can’t do anything right.” Self-reflection requires a middle-ground, recognizing your strengths and weaknesses while always asserting your ability to get better. Like anything important, it requires practice, but it is a necessary step towards becoming a better man.
Master Of His Domain
While men are stereotypically supposed to be emotionless, that is clearly not true in practice. Whether it’s inward-facing emotions like resentment or pride, or outward-facing emotions like anger or cheerfulness, men have lots of emotions. But while we have always had emotions, we have rarely been given the tools to understand or work through them. Emotions based in anger, domination, and competitiveness were often seen as a necessary evil or even a virtue, but nowadays these traditionally masculine emotions are seen as less desirable. Yet we still don’t necessarily have the tools to deal with them, so we see it as a laudable goal to shut out our emotions entirely. This will never work long-term.
The most obvious solution to confronting our emotions is therapy, and it’s one that I actually do recommend. Everyone in my immediate family has been in therapy at least once over the last two decades and it is one of the things that has led to a happy relationship between my parents and between them, myself, and my siblings.
That being said, “go to therapy” is not a solution in and of itself. Some people don’t have the resources they need to find a good therapist, and even people who can afford it often don’t have the concept of what therapy is even supposed to accomplish. We might imagine laying down on a couch as we talk about our childhood, but for it to be productive it actually requires the building of emotional self-control.
I do not consider myself a stoic, but one element of stoicism that I have found to be particularly useful is the emphasis on judgements when it comes to how we handle our emotions. If something happens to you, you are going to have some initial emotional response, but you also have the ability to examine and separate the causes of that initial reaction. With that analysis, you can have more control over your response. If self-reflection is the ability to recognize that you can and should become better, self-control allows you to actually engage in that process.
Several years ago, I was on a call with two friends I was working with on a series of campaigns and they were complaining about a set of circumstances that we had all had to be dealing with. Despite the fact that I was not the topic of any scorn, I found myself getting incredibly angry and frustrated. I finally snapped near the end of the call, yelling something along the lines of “Can you all just stop complaining, I’m tired of hearing about this every single night” but with a little bit more cursing. The call stood silent for a minute and then ended.
I felt awful the following day. The outburst was very unlike me and I had no idea what had caused it. Obviously I knew that I had to change, and I apologized to my friends who I had yelled at, but I was not sure how to prevent it from happening again. Over the following days and weeks, I tried to look deeper: I felt like they were criticizing me when they complained even though they clearly weren’t.
Eventually I determined that I realized that I had mentally taken ownership of all these campaigns I was working on, and therefore every attack on them or the way they were being handled was an attack on myself. Both the underlying belief and the response were supposedly very masculine: I was taking on the responsibility of these campaigns and I was reacting with aggression against people attacking those campaigns. But I had not actually helped anyone in this case, I had just made it all about myself. Over time, through this analysis, I was able to re-evaluate my relationship both with these campaigns and with my friends to better support both.
The purpose of this anecdote is not to self-flagellate or to self-congratulate, but rather to explain how self-reflection and self-control can be used not just for the benefit of one’s self, but also for the benefit of others. Self-reflection gave me the analysis, and self-control allowed me to change my actual behavior.
Up to this point, we have introduced the concepts needed to evaluate yourself and change your behavior. In order to properly move forward, however, we are going to need more than just just these tools. You can’t put a piece of furniture together with just wood and nails if you have no idea what you’re actually trying to build.
Beyond Independence
One of the reasons that men are lonely is that we are often told to be. Independence is one of the key values we attribute to masculinity, and it is one that is generally positive. Everyone should be able to take care of ourselves and have the basic skills to do things like replace a tire, cook a meal, and fix a broken door. However, some men take it farther. Radical independence is not just self-sufficiency, but the ability to live completely separately from other people.
Independence in this form still feels like a social virtue. If we are independent, then that means we can not be unduly influenced and can act purely based on our values and our logic. This is very appealing, but it is a mirage. None of us is purely independent: whether directly or indirectly we are always resting on the shoulders of our teachers, our acquaintances and family, and the people who have created the society and infrastructure which we all take advantage of. Instead of striving for an unattainable goal, we should look at what we are actually trying to accomplish.
One of my favorite models for this is self-determination theory (SDT). Applied across dozens of different fields, SDT studies the causes of human motivation and determines that all humans have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. In order to understand what a more fulfilling version of independence would look like, we especially need to understand autonomy and relatedness.
Autonomy is the ability to exclusively engage in behavior and activities that are authentic and in line with your values and interests. As with self-control, this requires you to have a sense of what you actually want in the face of the realities of the situation that you’re in. For me, that is a personal life and society where all are treated equally and fairly, and where myself and everyone around me get our basic needs met.
Importantly, autonomy is not the removal of any restrictions or rules; we all have various immovable objects that we’re going to have to live with. Using my example above, I’m well aware that there are plenty of reasons why my goals might seem pie in the sky. To live autonomously, however, is being able to understand those restrictions, which ones are necessary and which ones are changeable, and then take the actions that best fit your own values and needs.
The most notable way in which autonomy differs from independence is that it often requires you to be connected with other people. If my goals in life are a successful career, a loving family, and a fulfilling set of hobbies, I can not accomplish these things all alone. However, if I do not have those set goals and the ability to act on them on my volition, I will not be able to reach them. Self-reflection and self-control are key tools in accomplishing the goals of autonomy, and they are both strengthened by relatedness.
Relatedness is the need we have to feel connected in a sense of belonging with others. At its core is a recognition that we are social creatures; we rely on one another and thrive when we are being supported by and are supportive of each other. This may sound very hippie dippie, and women are often more likely to be socialized into this fact than men. However, relatedness is a fundamental building block of fraternity and solidarity. We can’t be providers unless we have someone we’re providing for, we can be a lot stronger when we combine our strength with others.
Armed with the tools of self-reflection and self-control, driven by the goals of autonomy and relatedness, we have a strong foundation to go out into the world and engage in ways that help both us and those around us. However, we are still faced with the question: how exactly do we do that?
Man To Man
For all the words that have been written up to this point, I’ve only talked about some basic concepts. They are concepts that I have personally used in my own life and have seen people use to move forward in ways that have let us all get more from ourselves and each other.
I am also writing from the vantage point of a fairly lucky younger guy. I turned 25 while I was writing this and I have certainly not faced anywhere near the number or level of crises and struggles that many men have faced. I am white, I am educated, I am comfortably middle-class, and I have been blessed to have very limited traumatic experiences in my past. Just as I don’t think that women should have to be the ones setting the boundaries of discourse for men (or vice versa), I don’t think I should be the ones setting the boundaries of discourse for all men.
That being said, we need more spaces for men to talk about men’s issues in a more explicitly productive way. We do not need fight clubs or anything like that, but whether it be written, virtual, or in person, we need groups of people discussing the issues they face and helping each other get through them in a way that creates a safer and more fulfilling community for all.
These can not be spaces of self-flagellation or self-aggrandizement, but they should directly address the bad behavior that men often engage in by addressing the real problems they face and giving them the tools they need to overcome it. This work can no longer simply fall on the shoulders of women who have historically had to bear the brunt of these issues.
If anyone is interested in working on creating these spaces, consider this to be an invitation. As someone who organizes across race, gender, class, and location, I would be eager to work with people to help get these started and work to create a stronger, more fulfilling masculinity for all.
