Can we think a bit more deeply about masculinity? Toxic masculinity has a certain usefulness and punch as a phrase. It expresses what some men put out into the world but it doesn’t address the whys deeply enough.
Until recently, and still to this day in many parts of the world, men were raised to be protectors: fighters and economic providers. Conscription – men being trained to kill – only ended in Britain in 1960. Women, meanwhile, were being raised to be nurturers and carers – to be midwives to their needs, to support their initiatives, whether or not the women worked also outside the home. Men were to be receivers of emotional support, women to be receivers of economic support and “protection”.
The 1970s saw the beginnings of enormous changes between women and men, which led to today’s expanding notions of gender.
These changes are not trivial. Over a 50-year period, girls and women all over the world have been endeavouring to reshape their lives. One of many consequences has been a questioning of the emotional labour that women have provided for men – often when the men haven’t realised they needed or were receiving it. Sometimes, women purposefully withdrew this kind of caring. They went on strike to show what was missing. Other women grew resentful or fatigued by the lack of emotional reciprocity or recognition in this arrangement, and pulled back from giving. The old “protector” bargain wasn’t holding up, as men failed to see women’s longings.
Women then began to look more directly at their own vulnerabilities and their desires in heterosexual (and same-sex) relationships. It was challenging. The charge of neediness and clinginess, which had been hung on women, required understanding. Where had that come from? Was it accurate? If so, why? Did it come from unmet needs in their relationship? Had women foisted on to men longings that their men didn’t see or know how to respond to?
The changing economic climate produced clashes at another level. Women’s work, inside and outside the home, was being quasi-valued as Thatcher and future governments deindustrialised the UK. This removed many men’s skilled occupations, while elevating the prestige afforded to money-making. It destabilised the social contract. Men’s place, women’s place, parenting and the ideas of masculinity and femininity were being shaken up.
The issue of emotional exchange, in which women gravitated to looking after men’s vulnerability – often before the men themselves had acknowledged it – and men provided protection to women, wobbled. Households increasingly needed both adults in paid work to get by.
It was an interesting time where, for some, these vast social changes could be addressed. Often, they couldn’t be. There were neither the words nor emotional concepts to do so and the world was moving too fast. Voids opened for many men without much explanation: long-term unemployment and the pressures of “social mobility” produced much pain and dislocation. Women, meanwhile, seemed to be advancing. There was an emphasis on girls’ education and “empowerment”. Shamefully, boys’ education was not being creatively revamped. Boys’ vulnerabilities weren’t being either acknowledged or addressed.
These changes weren’t uniform. Of course they weren’t. Class, race and geography were and are critical spheres of influence, affecting possibilities and limitations. Fear and antagonisms sat beside the story of romance, as the rapid change in declared sexual behaviours occurred alongside expanding gender definitions.
Vulnerabilities unaddressed, often unknown or unnamed by the individual, can end up being expressed in brittleness and toughness. Being able to acknowledge uncertainties to oneself and to others is as an aspect of strength. Cleaving to something unnamed that was missed can produce anger or despair. Boys didn’t anticipate that there would be a rupture in nurture as they became adults; in other words, that they wouldn’t be able to simply rely on women’s solicitations and comforting without showing more of themselves. Girls knew that they were “supposed” to give support but were growing up to think of economic and emotional equality, not protection.
Rap artists said how it was for them. Jordan Peterson, how it was for him. Andrew Tate speaks of how to be a different kind of man. But a return to a “boys will be boys” ethos hasn’t offered masculinity the pleasures of knowing oneself more fully or expanding what masculinities can be. The “crisis” of masculinity was reformulated into a new machismo, which in our police service protected sexual predators.
Machismo doesn’t put us women in our place. That ship has sailed. It has offered a fundamentalist pull which endangers all of us; men, women, children, non-binary and trans people. It’s time for a new conversation that opens the door to speaking of vulnerability and nurture as essential for all of us, and as an aspect of strength – as an antidote to toxicity.
Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst and social critic. She is the author of many books including What Do Women Want? – co-authored with Luise Eichenbaum
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