Traditional masculinity is toxic

Well, I've been banging on about this since I first started this blog.  Now it's official:

Last August the American Psychological Association (APA) released its first-ever guidelines for therapists working with men and boys. Nobody paid much attention to these for several months, but they went viral this week. This was largely due to the APA condensing its academic report into a tweet explaining that the key takeaway is that traditional masculinity is harmful and socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage. Suddenly everyone on the internet was an armchair psychologist and conservatives were up in arms about war on men.

Traditional notions of masculinity, marked by stoicism, competitiveness and aggression, are clearly toxic to both men and women. As the APA write in an article accompanying the study: “Men commit 90% of homicides in the United States and represent 77% of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide.” They also point to research that found men who bought into traditional notions of masculinity were less likely to seek mental health support than those who had more open gender attitudes. The guidelines advise psychologists to understand “how power, privilege and sexism work both by conferring benefits to men and by trapping them in narrow roles”.

While all that sounds eminently sensible to me, certain intellectuals on the right have predictably interpreted it as meaning the APA has it out for men. The Fox News host Laura Ingraham, for example, made the compelling argument that toxic masculinity is actually great because she “loves James Bond”. (Please can someone explain to Ingraham that Bond is a fictional character?) Meanwhile Tucker Carlson, that bastion of reason, asked: “What would happen if you told girls the qualities that make you feel female are poison and you must suppress them?” I don’t think he quite understands that feminists have been fighting against poisonous gender stereotypes for a very long time. And, by the way, the APA has a set of guidelines for women.

Despite the right using the APA guidelines as an opportunity for outrage, we should all be highly encouraged by the new guidelines. It’s a great sign that toxic gender norms are being gradually interrogated and dismantled and it will literally save lives.

[From Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian]

Toxic masculinity

Elliott Harvey blinded in one eye by a homophobic attack (Source)

A man is blinded in one eye in an attack in a Melbourne night club.  Why?

Mr Harvey said he went to the Rubix on Phoenix Street on Friday, May 26, to watch a band. As he was going into the venue "some aggressive young guys" walked past him.

"I think they particularly disliked my hair cut, having my hair up in a fountain like this," he said, pointing to his ponytail.

"All the things they said to me were pretty trivial, just homophobic insults."

The three men, believed to be aged in their 20s, punched him to the ground, and then continued to punch his head and right eye.

"It was cowardly really ... I was on the ground when they punched my eye out," he said.

"I was just wondering where my eye had gone, I couldn't see out of my right eye, that's a pretty alien feeling."

Mr Harvey was taken to hospital in a taxi after the attack and has had several operations since. Nothing has restored his eyesight.

"I had a laceration to my right eye which has been sewn back up," he said.

"A couple of days later they reattached my retina to the back of my socket, which has restored very little sight. It's all just touch and go at the moment."

The injuries mean that Mr Harvey, an environmental conservationist, cannot work.

"It's drastically affected my life," he said.

"I can't work because I can't drive, but also depth perception has a lot to do with walking through undulating forests.

"I can't really go surfing because of the glare.

"A lot of the things that make me happy are pretty sad right now."

[Read the original report here]

 I was blinded in one eye by a homophobic attack at school.  And yes, it makes lots of things very difficult.

Mr Macho Men, so afraid of their own gay leanings that they have to beat up and blind another human being!   Mr Big-Deals, determined that everybody should be like them: homophobic, narrow, conformist.  Mr So-Braves, ganging up, and kicking and hitting (all three of them!) someone when he's down.  Sorry, guys, this is not how real men behave.

I keep on having ppl tell me how much more tolerant ppl are  today.  And yet there are still homophobic arseholes so filled with hatred for gay men that they attack someone, unprovoked, and blind them.  Scum.  I hope they get long prison sentences.

Teaching boys what it really means to be a man

Benson Saulo (hat) and friend Hunter Johnson. He started a new educational session that reframed what it means to be masculine. Teaching agains violence and macho/ego identities. Pic Simon Schluter 22 May 2015.

An interesting article about teaching teenagers to be better men.  What really disturbed me was the terrifying data about how many young men die via suicide.

Benson Saulo recalls the day his best friend wound up behind bars.

Drunk on a night out in Sydney's CBD, his friend got into a fight with a bouncer. Before long, the towering former rugby player broke the bouncer's neck, rendering him disabled for life.

"I asked him why he did it when he got out, and he said he felt he had no choice. All his life he was never able to back away, he never learnt how to step back and assess a situation," Mr Saulo said.

Many of Mr Saulo's friends from home, a rough part of Tamworth in New South Wales, endured what he described as a damaging cycle. They learnt early their value was measured by toughness. Starved of basic tools to put emotions into words, they resorted to rugby, violence and women, to find expression.

Mr Saulo said a mission to lower the rates of male suicide - the biggest killer of men under 25 - and to end domestic violence, was driving their initiative.

• Men are three and a half times more likely to kill themselves than women.
• Suicide accounts for one fifth of all male deaths between 15 and 34.  And that excludes many single-driver car accidents which experts suspect are hidden suicides
• Some other top five causes of deaths among 15-24 year olds: land transport accidents (i.e., macho driving, hidden suicides) and assault (too macho to back off).

Our hyper-masculine maleness is extraordinarily dangerous and damaging. But we homos always knew that, right?

Compassion

Compassion (Latin cum=with, passion = suffering) or its Greek-derived equivalent sympathy (syn = with, pathos = feeling) shouldn't really have anything to do with right and wrong.  When somebody is suffering, it's irrelevant whether it's their own fault or not.  That's hard to do, actually.  When someone has caused their own strife we are inclined to feel less sympathy for them.  And yet, if we were the ones suffering, wouldn't we still want to be comforted?  Wouldn't we want those we love, our friends and family, to just give us comfort and support, even knowing that our travails are our own fault?  And if we would like that, how can we refuse it to others?

According to Frans de Waal, whose thoughtful, thought-provoking and eye-opening book (The Age of Empathy) I have just reread (for the third time), we are hard-wired to empathy and sympathy.

Some quotes from Professor de Waal:

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures

I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores.

In 1879, American economist Francis Walker tried to explain why members of his profession were in such "bad odor amongst real people". He blamed it on their inability to understand why human behavior fails to comply with economic theory. We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them. Hence the bad odor.

Don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also our closest relatives, the primates. In a study in Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions, and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof. What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick for which we have fallen for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.


Sympathy and compassion are not weaknesses. They are strengths. They are what makes us human, and allow our vast human tribe to survive.  The hyper-competitiveness of the standard male model is dysfunctional and destructive, both to those who believe in it, and to the rest of us. We--our society--need something better.  I once thought that gay men, having had to come to terms with the fact that they are not (according to society) "real men", would have reinvented masculinity to tone down the selfishness and competitiveness and lonely struggle that straight men have to endure.  Alas, it's not happened.

Straights

All my life I have been despised by straight men.  Not because I was a thief, or a liar, or a rapist.  Not because I was cruel or vicious or evil.  But because I didn't conform to their image of what a boy, or teen, or man should be.  For something I couldn't help, because I was born that way.  They were happy enough for me to pretend to be what I wasn't, to lie to myself and them.  They were happy enough for me to do without love, and without the affection and caring that they got from their partners, because their partners were women, and I (for a long time) wasn't even allowed to make love to a man because it was illegal, punished by a prison sentence.  Their contempt has scarred me and deformed me.

"There had never been a time when he hadn't thought of himself as one of this company the mischance of battle had brought together: one with a secret, as many others had of one sort or another; one with an oddity, but there were plenty of those.  Lovell, who had owned a freak-booth that toured the fairs; Jansen, who was three parts coloured; Willis; Charlot; Odell, who had started with the handicap of 'talking posh'.  Now in a cold solitude he imagined, everywhere in the shadows, men quietly watching, curious, or mocking, or repelled, according to their kind, but all thanking their Maker for the solidarity that didn't include him."  [The Charioteer, by Mary Renault]

But if I say I despise and dislike and mistrust straight men, the response I get is that that is "so unfair", that "not all straight men are like that", and so on.  Indeed.  Yet the anger and hurt and disdain inside me aren't salved by exhortations to be "forgiving"  and "understanding"  and "accepting".  Bitter experience has taught me again and again not to trust men, not to let them into my heart, even as friends, not to rely on them to accept me for what I am.  No one can say I am stupid, and one definition of stupidity is to go on doing the same thing again and again even though what you do doesn't work and merely gives you pain.

And behind this whole cultural hate-fest lies the Church, with its assiduous drip-feed of homo-hatred and lies: "abomination", "intrinsically disordered", "kill the gays".

I cannot forgive or forget.

Why is it?

Hypermasculine intimacy

A real man

You know, my whole life has been defined by being gay-shaded, by the judgements and hatred of others. As a small boy, a young teen, a young man, a middle-aged man, and now, I have called been "queer", "a homo", " a moffie", "camp", "queeny", "effeminate", "girly", "perverted", "unnatural".  I have been despised and beaten up.  I have been ignored and excluded.  When I came out to straight friends, I suddenly and mysteriously got the cold shoulder.  How bizarre!  All the other things they liked about me weren't enough to tip the scales when they discovered I was gay.  I became persona non grata.  An untermensch.  A nothing.

I have never been good enough for the straights,  Judged always.  Never mind about the rest of me: whether I was kind or not; generous or not; honest; decent; loving; intelligent or stupid; well-read or ignorant.  None of those things mattered.  Only my gayness mattered.  Only that I wasn't "a real man", I wasn't "manly".  Let's judge people by just one of their characteristics, shall we?  Because all the other things don't count, right?  I am what I am.  I was fucking born this way, OK?

I have come to realise that my allergies, my joint aches and pains, my overeating and overdrinking, my depressions, even how much money I have now -- these have all been heavily influenced and driven by others' rancid and judgemental perceptions of me.  I am so fucking BORED with it.  Jesus tap-dancing Christ, why can't I just be me, without all this fucking baggage? My illness, my body, my mind, my soul. Driven to the state I am now in, with dodgy health, depression, poor finances.  By these pieces of dogshit.  By judgemental, obscurantist, narrow-minded, hate-filled bigots.  "Hate the sin not the sinner."  Yeah, right.  "Judge not lest ye be judged."  Oh, but we do it with love.  So that's all right, then.

And their fellow travellers.  As in a racially stratified society, where the less black consider themselves better than the ebony, and the whites look down on all, so bisexual men and straight-acting men, and the macho pretend-straights and those able to "pass" look down on people like me.  They're not "swish".  They're real men. Isn't that nice?  And when they despise us, it's only natural and to be expected.   Of course it is.  Because the "natural order" is that real men and real women are the only worthwhile humans beings around, and even though they take it up the bum, they act straight.  So it's OK.  They're not really gay, are they?  

I know I'm angry.  And bitter.  And resentful.  Tough.  The only healthy way to react to subtle and overt negative cues and discrimination from society and their unquestioned values which make me worthless and a nothing, is to fight back; to expose the ChrisTaliban and their loathsome lies; to call out gay friends who are uncomfortable with queeny men and manly women; to remind people that it's the whole person which matters.  And to tell myself every day:  I'm worthwhile; I'm lovable; I'm good; I'm a real person.  Even if I shall never be a real man.  

Tom of Finland

Depictor of the archetypal hypermasculine gay. There's room for him as well as "vulnerable goslings" (to quote Ethan Mordden). Gay is a broad church, one might even say a "catholic" church. ("Catholic" comes from the Ancient Greek, kat-holos, which means across the whole, i.e., everywhere)  Uniforms, leather, muscles, tight military pants ... it's all there.  Some straights think we long for effeminate men, men who are substitutes (in their eyes) for women.  No:  we are much broader and more catholic than that.  We love men, from the hypermasculine through the ordinary bloke on to the femme (like Luigi in Majorca Flats).  Odd, isn't it, that we should be so catholic, no?

There are other ways to get excitement ...

... you don't necessarily need to wear a lacy thong.

Tom of Finland

One of the strands of gay is hypermasculinity: big blokes in leather or uniform, with cropped hair and buff to the power 3 bodies.  Tom of Finland was the artist who made his and our  fantasies of those sorts of guy real, in fact who defined our images of the leather stud, the soldier, the sailor, the manly queer.   I confess to enjoying his drawings and cartoons, even though I know they are quite unrealistic, and that in fact this very hypermasculinity is probably a product of internalised homophobia  ("we're not homos -- look how manly we are!")  But at least the hypermasculine don't retreat into self pity.  They work out instead.  And buy leather.

I'll be posting a series of Tom of Finland's images.  I like this one especially.  Just look at the look in this guy's eyes!  I can't work out what he's thinking with any certainty, but I know that if a guy looked like that at me, I should be both apprehensive and incredibly turned on.