As I sit here reading this article by Jenny Asenci — a feminist writer — I feel something defrosting in me. No, something is healing. A wound which I didn’t even know I had is healing. As it seals itself back together I find myself crying. The essence of what I’m reading is “men are not inherently toxic” and “male pain is valid.” Nothing revolutionary about these statements. But it feels like something I needed to hear so much that I am crying with relief as I feel the words being taken up by my soul. That same feeling of thawing and healing wants to express itself through these words, I assume to continue the healing process.
I am not usually one for discussing the gendered struggles of women and men at the same time. It always seems to devolve the conversation into whataboutism. But I feel I need to do it here, if only to point out a serious issue which is quietly hurting a lot of people. Margaret Atwood, a poet and writer amongst other things, coined the famous quote: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” I think this quote sums up the whole issue here, as its one which has been cited hugely as fuel for much of the debate around #MeToo and other feminist issues predating the movement.
Attwood rightly addresses the fact that there is a long and appalling history of often murderous male violence against women. Countless women have died at the hands of men embellished by a patriarchal society, men who were often motivated by experiences of rejection by women, and countless more women live in fear of physical violence. On the contrary, the most pressing fear for men is merely being rejected, or otherwise embarrassed, by women. Men are afraid that women might not want to have sex with them, because their fragile egos couldn’t handle that. It seems a man’s greatest threat is that a woman might be unimpressed, or even amused, by his lack of endowment, stature, or competence. There is truth in this, but to so regularly compare these two separate fears contributes to the whataboutism I hate seeing the conversation devolve into. Regardless, Attwood’s quote does touch on a truth which carries a chilling ring when cited following incidents of misogyny-fuelled murder.
This seems like a solid justification for shutting down any sort of protest from men about how they are treated as part of a collective. It’s implication of women’s struggles being categorically worse than men’s, as well as its regular citations in relation to mass shootings which are the most extreme manifestations of misogynistic violence, put women in the incontestable position of societal victim, and any man complaining about his treatment is invariably cast as bitter, resentful, weak, petulant — a whiner. Aww, poor baby, not getting all the sex you were promised by daddy patriarchy? Aww, feeling left out of the conversation because some of the collective attention isn’t on you for once? Aww, upset because the achievements and positive qualities of a different gender are being focussed on at the expensive of the coverage of your own genders qualities? Aww, what about the men!?
Boo hoo!
There are certainly whiners and trolls, bitter and resentful men who hide their bigoted anger behind a thin veil of dubious logic and reason, or who are brazenly extremist and discriminatory, hostile and even violent. “Aww, poor baby!” is something I genuinely find myself saying in my head when I stumble across a true whiner. But the quote by Margaret Atwood would have one believe that, because the biggest fear for men is being laughed at while for women it being killed, any man who complains about his treatment as part of the male collective is a whiner. In contrast, any complaint by a woman is valid because they have the much greater fear of misogyny-fuelled murder to contend with. This effectively invalidates any complaint by a man about how he is treated based on his gender.
At best, adherence to this notion boils down to a lack of nuanced and informed conversation, as there are, in fact, much greater threats related to being a man than being laughed at by women. At worse it represents a collective form of gaslighting which often manifests as the haphazard, inaccurate and damaging use of the term “toxic masculinity” and the implicit, often non-verbally communicated expectation that men shut down and lock up emotionally — partly due to the dominant narrative that men can’t be victims in a system where they are the ones doing all the oppressing.
I don’t have the credentials to compare my suffering to anybody else's, namely because I don’t know what it is like to be anybody else. I don’t understand what it’s like to have a fear of walking through the park at night. I don’t understand what it’s like to feel obliged to avoid rejecting someone’s sexual advances for fear they might hurt or kill me. Women’s struggles are obviously far more nuanced than the two examples I’ve just mentioned, but as Margaret Atwood points out, women are more burdened with these fears of sexist violence than I am as a man. However, physical violence is not the be all and end all of suffering and abuse, and nor is being laughed at by women the greatest of all masculine fears. If it is, it shouldn’t be, and the fact that it might actually be a man’s biggest fear is part of the problem.
Suicide is the most common killer of men aged under 50 — this statistic is spreading like wildfire. Where does the threat of suicide fit into Margaret Attwood’s observation? Is suicide not a form of physical harm? Is being laughed at for expressing your most vulnerable self due to sexist gender roles not a step towards suicide if it happens repeatedly and even from the people closest to you, including women?
It is often men who experienced constant sexual rejection who go on to become misogynistic murderers, but the vast majority of these emotionally damaged men will turn to self-harm and suicide, not externally directed violence. Perhaps both genders have a reason to fear being killed— the physically dangerous and potentially fatal effects of patriarchal gender roles are just much more obvious and immediate for women, and perpetration of this violence can be easily assigned to a social category: men. Conversely, it takes decades of being laughed at for expressing your vulnerable self, thousands of instances of having your intimate feelings ignored or dismissed, being told those feelings are toxic or unimportant or weak, until this manifests itself as the physical reality of suicide, and the road to the point of suicide is intangible and therefore cannot be attributed to a single simple cause. The physical, mortal danger is still there, it’s just delayed and, often, invisible.
If you ask a man what his biggest fear is, and really get him to dig deep, he might come to say that his biggest, most pressing fear is being laughed at by women, or in other words being humiliated. But does that not imply that he has closed off to the realities of his inner world to the point were he can’t see how the greater threat to him is being driven to depression and suicide by the suppression and rejection of his own emotional vulnerability?
If he was aware what the risks of emotional suppression were, which would require an awareness and acceptance of his own vulnerability, he might fear being driven to suicide more highly than being humiliated. If his fear of suicide was greater than his fear of humiliation, he would actually be less likely to commit suicide as his prioritising of expressing emotional vulnerability over avoiding humiliation would indicate some level of emotional intelligence which might offset the likelihood of his suicide. The fact that men might fear humiliation more than having their vulnerable selves silenced and suppressed, and the widespread belief that this is not a source of physical danger, itself points to a threat greater than humiliation which stems from the same patriarchal systems of gender expectations which contribute to women’s fear of being killed by men. The tragedy of Attwood’s observation is that it magnifies the adversarial relationship between men and women and firmly establishes a victim / perpetrator dynamic — rather than focussing on the underlying societal attitudes to gender roles which put both genders at risk of physical harm — and does so in a way which dismisses male vulnerability.
If we perpetuate the notion that the men do not face physical danger as a result of their gender-stereotypical treatment, we are dismissing men’s emotional vulnerability using ideas which themselves arise from the lack of acceptance or awareness of male vulnerability, because if we appreciated the richness and delicacy of a man’s inner world, men would realise they have more to fear than humiliation, and both men and women would realise that men, too, face the threat of physical harm and even death as a result of patriarchal culture. By believing Attwood’s sentiment to be absolutely true we also dismiss valid fears and feelings of victimhood in men. Over time this is internalised in men as the general sense that society does not want to hear about their more difficult and ugly emotions, particularly those associated with victimhood. Those feelings — anger, shame, fear — do not fit the dominant narrative that men are perpetrators and women are victims. Attwood’s quote embodies this sense that men should not be validated in their feelings of victimhood. Why should they, when all they have to fear is being laughed at by women, while women live in fear of being killed for simply rejecting men? Perhaps Attwood’s statement has such a deceptive explanatory power because it fits perfectly into the narrative that women are categorically victims while men are categorically perpetrators.
There is an interesting tension around discussion of how patriarchal society causes men to suppress their emotions. Men must be rigidly strong, stoic, in control — which is the opposite of being vulnerable — lest they be shamed and dismissed as a cuck, a sissy, a whiner. If they are bitter and resentful at their collective treatment it is not due to true victimisation or oppression, it is indicative of unchecked privilege and entitlement, or a result of being too feminine, not man enough to take it on the chin.
The paradox, and I’m chuckling at the irony as I type this, is that to discuss how emotional vulnerability in men is culturally suppressed, and to explore the damage this can cause, men must make themselves emotionally vulnerable and risk being labelled a whiner, or a sissy, or ungrateful and ignorant to their privilege — this last one is the most toxic of all the labels, and overlooks the fact that while patriarchal culture privileges men in certain areas, such as when climbing the corporate ladder and being represented positively in the language, it destroys them in other areas such as family life and emotional wellbeing. When we dismiss a man’s voice due to his privilege we enforce the notion that only women are victims of patriarchy, and dismiss the real pain of men's intimate emotions being suppressed by the same societal structures which give them advantages in other areas. This is so toxic because it portrays men as villains, while the very thing being used to paint men as villainous is that which is causing them to lock up, to shut down and feel so much pain inside. We are reinforcing the idea that men need to be invulnerable, and calling this supposed invulnerability a privilege because the same cultural systems which cause men to suppress their emotions allow men to acquire power. It’s slightly ironic, and sad.
Demonstrating this tension is the case of Brendan Fraser, one of the comparatively few high-profile men who have come forward with a story of sexual assault which occurred in a professional context. His allegation was directed at Philip Berk, a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The specifics of the allegation involve a hug at the end of a meeting, which turned into a hand wandering onto Fraser’s bumcheek, which became a finger poked into an anus, a finger which was then wiggled around. An investigation headed by the HFPA suggested that “Although it was concluded that Mr. Berk inappropriately touched Mr. Fraser, the evidence supports that it was intended to be taken as a joke and not as a sexual advance.” To emphasise, there was no denial that what Fraser alleged was true; the HFPA’s own investigation concluded that sexual harassment occurred, but that was not considered strong enough grounds to warrant any sort of serious apology from or discipline of Berk, and instead Fraser was supposed to see the funny side. If he can’t see the funny side of an unwanted finger being touched and wiggled around his anus, a finger attached to the arm of man who held power over Fraser, he’s not a victim of a sexual power play, he just can’t take a joke.
Terry Crews also came forth with an allegation: “I was sexually assaulted by a successful Hollywood agent. The assault lasted only minutes, but what he was effectively telling me, while he held my genitals in his hand, was that he held the power. That he was in control.” Crews received a similar treatment to Fraser. 50 Cent uploaded an Instagram post mocking Crews, juxtaposing his story of victimisation against a photo of Crew’s formidable physique. The idea contained therein is you don’t look like a victim, therefore you can’t be a victim.
The issue facing men coming forward with stories of male victimhood is that they are often framed as cases of horesplay and tomfoolery gone a little too far, inherently harmless, or otherwise comedic instances of men being weak. Whereas women are more likely to have their mistreatment outright denied, men are more likely to have their mistreatment be confirmed and still be told that there’s no problem. Even worse, they are likely to be openly mocked for having allowed themselves to be mistreated. This is reflection of the belief that because men are physically stronger than women they aren’t threatened by physical abuse. This ignores the fact that abuse has professional, emotional and psychological implications that may extend far beyond the abusive act itself. This is more and more accepted in cases of female victimhood; men still have a lot of ground to cover.
The dismissal of men’s vulnerability can go to chilling extremes, such as with Lorena Bobbit, who cut her husband’s penis off after allegedly being abused and cheated on by him. Nevertheless, she receives standing ovations and was openly lauded by Sharon Osbourne. Besides the initial physical injury, all that is happening here is a man being, in some form, humiliated by the women who are clapping and laughing at the fact that his penis was chopped off. He also wasn’t killed. So in a superficial and tenuous sense Attwood’s quote holds true. After a moments further enquiry, however, it is obvious that the humiliation, appreciated in the greater context of suppression of male vulnerability, and considered alongside the act of mutilative and symbolic violence, poses a genuine physical risk as it completely invalidates the man’s feelings of victimhood and thus dismisses his vulnerability. Accordingly, Bobbit’s husband became suicidal after the incident, which put him in physical danger. But he deserved it, didn’t he, what with the abuse and cheating? No, he didn’t deserve it, and neither did his wife deserve to be abused and cheated on — she had to defend herself in some way. It should go without saying that there’s nothing deserving of a standing ovation here, and nothing “fabulous” — as Sharon put it — about cutting off of a man’s penis, but this is deemed acceptable and comedic because the victim is a man.
Perhaps Attwood’s observation helped get us out of the real dungeons of patriarchal violence. Now we have progressed away from the medieval extremes and excesses of male-on-female violence, which isn’t to say by any means that we have escaped it, perhaps should we reconsider the usefulness of the idea that women are the only ones in physical danger due to patriarchal culture. More importantly, we should consider the damaging effects that internalising this idea can have on men, who through believing it come to view any and all of their own feelings associated with victimhood as invalid, unimportant, who come to see their inner struggles as just part of the parcel of being a man — an expression of their privilege, something they should learn to be grateful for.
This creates a toxic social environment, and while men are unaware of it we unknowingly breath in the noxious gas of shame which arises when, by virtue of being male, one is implored to feel shame, guilt, and a need to supress these feelings. While this gas clouds our minds it might not even appear to us that we have valid feelings of pain. We have been told so many times that men should be strong and invulnerable, absorbed the narrative that men are invariably perpetrators, and had our feelings subtly dismissed enough times to unconsciously assume that our feelings aren’t really important or valid. That’s the shutting down. Once shut down, the feelings begin to fester and grow into something much, much uglier. This ugly, fermenting mass has to spill over eventually — into depression, suicide, or perhaps into violence, maybe bitterness and resentment and murderous hatred, often directed towards women, but ultimately aimed at oneself. The fact is that the vast majority of men who reach this stage of self-loathing will turn the gun on themselves, not women. Men are killed by the very same attitudes towards gender roles which motivate a deplorable minority of men to kill women out of misogyny. The lethal force of these attitudes is often inflicted on women through overt displays of violence, but it moves invisibly into men.
