Gender Neutrality: Masculinity
Men are broken. A bold claim for sure, but we have broken them and are not making any efforts to fix what we have done. From birth, we present boys with impossible and unattainable standards and expectations, and we shame them and question their gender—their sense of identity—when they don’t live up to it. We continue to make demands of them, placing barriers to the love that we systematically deny them from their first moments on earth, and we act surprised when we see countless men turning to extremism that promises to make things easier, even if these promises are lies. If we want to move forward for the betterment of everyone, we need to stop leaving these men behind and letting them fall into the arms of extremists. For the love of men, as humans rather than as a gendered stereotype, we need to fix what we have broken.
Beauty Standards
It’s common knowledge at this point that women face many literally impossible beauty standards and gender performance expectations. From increasingly AI-generated beauty ideals online to the myth that a woman can “have it all”, it’s clear that women are done with the limitations they’ve experienced for so long. However, there seems to be a lack of acknowledgment of the similar harms being enforced on men as well. Many of the arguments made regarding women are also present, and unfortunately sometimes deadly, for men.
Starting with the obvious outward limitations of masculinity, through CGI and drugs, depictions of men in media are impossibly muscular, and getting more so all the time. Being shown characters like superheroes and bodybuilders creates shocking levels of body dysmorphia in men, with many turning to eating disorders, drugs, and potentially damaging workout routines in an attempt to achieve these bodies. And for understandable reasons too, as many straight men recount experiences where straight women mock them for not living up to these ideals. We’ve made it to the point where we are normalizing body shaming among men, from small dicks to short kings to anyone without digitally-altered musculature. These men describe how emotionally painful it is to be body shamed by the people they are trying to attract, literally putting their safety in danger to try and earn conditional love.
This extends to demeanor as well, with those same straight women admitting to finding men less sexually attractive when they are not dominant. This leads to uncomfortable behavior in sexual encounters, not only for women who experience sexual violence from men who have been taught since childhood that that’s how they’re supposed to behave but also for men who don’t necessarily want to be aggressive or dominant. Many men admit to wanting sweet, emotional encounters with people they love, but feel they can’t maintain a woman’s attraction if he doesn’t adhere to the dominant standards that people say are attractive.
This disconnect between what people want and what people expect creates barriers for men to find fulfilling relationships, which is particularly damaging when romantic relationships are the one socially acceptable way for men to receive affection.
Emotional Neglect
From birth, we emotionally neglect boys. With their brains less developed out of the womb than girls, they actually need more affection and emotional care. And yet, because of baseless norms of men not being as emotional as women, we miss this need and unintentionally neglect them when they need us the most. This is damaging for men in the long term, leading them to struggle with emotions and relationships later on. It doesn’t help that on top of that, we mock men’s relationships. Men’s friendships are often surface-level because of deeply rooted homophobia, we turn men with close relationships with their moms into jokes (sometimes as far as incestuously, a la Buster Bluth), and we doubt that straight men could want to be friends with women without wanting to sleep with them, which makes men believe any enjoyment they get in the company of women must be romantic in nature. With all these emotional struggles, it’s no wonder that men are so often the victims of suicide.
We have created a world where we punish men for seeking out any relationship that isn’t grounded in heterosexual sex, leaving these men in emotional pain. Additionally, they are told they can’t express that pain without the risk of being shamed for weakness. The lies we tell men about themselves and their lives hurt everyone except the systems in place that create these norms for their own benefit.
Capitalism and Colonialism
No one is benefitting from the way we treat men. Men are hurting and alone with no way of expressing that without the threat of shame. Women are struggling with sexual violence but also with relationships and working lives. Women want men to help more with childcare, but we are quick to think men alone with a child or a man who says he likes children are pedophiles. Women want help with household care but we diminish men’s masculinity when they engage in domestic behaviors.
No one is standing to gain from this except for colonialist capitalism. The media we show boys growing up prepares them not for a domestic life of love, family, care, and support. It prepares them for battle. We are making young boys think of themselves as potential heroes, like their childhood idols, to prepare them for military service. Much popular media for boys like GI Joe, Marvel, first-person shooter video games, etc. work to make boys think positively of not just joining the US’ militaristic ranks, but also of the actions they impose on others globally.
And when there isn’t a need for physical violence, men are being prepared to fight for their country economically. Keeping the US as one of the leading global economic forces helps to further colonialist power, and that is only made possible by maintaining capitalism. The US has made men desperate for high-paying, well-respected jobs at the expense of everything else by making breadwinning the only way to achieve the love they so desperately need.
Almost everyone alive today won’t remember a time before the 1950s, a time when the US American dream was alive and well, according to the media. If you didn’t look at the world around you and only remember the perfect TV nuclear families, you’d think that the breadwinning father, homemaking mother, and a few children were living the dream. However this dream was, in reality, a lie, and while women have fought to change that dream for themselves, not much has changed for men.
Women have empowered themselves to the point that they don’t need men financially, they don’t need a relationship for sexual fulfillment, and they have fewer expectations to have a family, instead pursuing a career. As a result, many women are claiming that men are useless and unnecessary, with some forgoing relationships altogether. The things men have historically done to earn love are being taken from them. Middle-class jobs that could support a family and provide pride are continually being replaced by automation. No woman claims to want to date a broke man, and they have been denied opportunities to build the emotional and relational skills necessary for relationships of a high enough standard for today’s empowered women when they don’t provide financially.
Men have lost everything they had to earn the love they can’t get anywhere else without ridicule. As a result, we are seeing countless men turning to extremist political positions in a desperate attempt to regain their methods of earning love. However, going back won’t fix anything, and we have made no real attempts to fix things for men going forward. We need to start fixing this if we want to bring men back from the brink of extremism.
Gender Neutrality
One thing that needs to be addressed is the constant efforts to undermine men’s sense of identity with every misstep they take. We are still putting things into gendered boxes and shaming people for stepping out of those boxes.
While feminism has added many things to the woman box, very, very few things get added to the man box. When men do engage with things outside of their box, be it makeup, fashion, emotional expression, childrearing, homemaking, etc. we are quick to label them as gay or genderqueer or even just not a man, despite none of this having anything to do with gender or sexuality at all. This also ignores the countless cultures around the world with differing gender norms and expectations, furthering the colonialist powers behind Western gender roles.
Even further, there are claims that various masculine traits are inherent, such as men’s sexual drives, aggression, and dominant tendencies. Not only does this hurt cis men, but it’s also a common method of transphobia against both trans women and trans men. Trans women are excluded from women’s spaces because of claims that they have an inherent predatory nature by nature of being assigned male at birth, and trans men are demonized as traitors by cis women for joining the gendered ranks that they see as the enemy. But these don’t make sense because as trans people demonstrate, gender is not a fixed thing.
Gender is fluid both socially and physically, so labeling anything as gendered makes no sense. We need to start moving past gender and focus on people as humans who are capable of doing human things and living human lives. We all have similar needs and can have similar wants no matter what body we are born into or what body we choose to occupy later in life.
This is a difficult concept for many people, as a majority of the people in the world are neurotypical. Neurotypical brains have fewer synaptic connections in the brain, which renders them reliant on heuristics and mental shortcuts to get through life. This includes the schemas of gender, where mentally putting people into boxes helps them make sense of the world more easily. There’s a reason that many trans and genderqueer people are autistic, as we don’t do the mental shortcuts that gender relies on. So, moving toward gender neutrality can be a challenge for allistic (non-autistic) people, but this effort is necessary if we want to show men that they are valuable no matter what they do, and that the sense of identity that they find in being a man is not dependent on achieving expectations that have set them up for failure.
Conclusion
We cannot continue to keep leaving men behind. To this day, we are losing young boys to extremism because they are out of options to achieve even a fraction of the life we have told them is necessary to be considered a man and maintain a hold on their sense of identity. We need to remove the barriers to that sense of identity, not just for cis men, but for everyone. Our enforcement of men’s gendered expectations and norms and demonization of men by even seemingly progressive feminist circles is only hurting people. We are enforcing the power structures that oppress people around the world when we refuse to hold, love, cherish, and help men. This is not to say that people who have been harmed by the actions of men have to forgive them or that it rests on them to change the men who have already given into these harmful expectations and use them against others. However, we are leaving the new generations of boys and men behind while we still have the chance to help them. The new generations are agents of change, and yet we are not taking action to make the world a better place for them. By creating a new world for the young, we can encourage those who are already in the grasp of extremism and hate to change for the better, and hopefully take some steps toward a better world for everyone.
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