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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#20: "Real Men Don't Cry So Easily."
There is a lot to be said (and has been said) about the stilted, stunted acceptable emotional range for boys and men. Anger, rage, and those emotional states that lead themselves to internal and interpersonal violence are generally lauded, especially if that violent response is because the man or boy was protecting something from an external force, whether that threat is real or stylized, in the way that sport is. Sensitive, nurturing, and hurting emotional states are generally supposed to be private, if they are allowed to exist at all, and a man who expressed emotions outside the accepted bounds usually has their masculinity and heterosexuality questioned or challenged, with the expectation that such a challenge will be handled with an appropriately manly amount and form of violence. The process by which boys are fashioned and crafted into weapons and then loosed onto the world.
As you may have determined from some of the earlier entries in this particular series, or possibly just from hanging around here long enough, even as a child, I was prone to a full range of emotions, and I'm sure that at least some of them were Big Feelings that spill out through a child's emotional regulation system through the sheer virtue of being too big. And others might have been Big Feelings that spilled out because my emotional regulation systems weren't quite able to handle it, and that it wouldn't have been such a problem in a more neurotypical child with better regulation. For me, most of the feelings didn't manifest in anger, thankfully. Frustration was common, yes, but also so was the kind of thing that might be euphemistically called being a "sensitive child," because even in the early ages, remember, the pattern is being established that mistakes are the opportunity to make fun of the smart kid. (A person who would eventually be a fellow anime enthusiast would illuminate for me that I was giving off arrogance as an attitude, or what I was giving off was being interpreted as arrogance. This was after the spot where he and I had a tangle, and while there were no punches thrown, I did let him use his own momentum to put his forehead into a fire extinguisher holder. I certainly wanted to get out of there, but younger-me would have argued that if someone is interpreting my attitude as arrogance, it's because I've already had enough people making fun of me for being the person that I am that my attitude has shifted toward "almost none of you are people who are worthwhile to interact with." With time and experience and a few more perspectives informing me, I realize that was a myopic attitude, but I also don't think that child was wrong, from their own perspective.)
Most plainly, I cried a lot. About a lot of things. Things like "oh, no, I almost accidentally hit someone else with my baseball pitch, I didn't mean that." (The underlying being "and now they're going to hate me or someone will make fun of me for being imperfect.") Or "I have done the thing you have told me to and asked these people to stop making fun of me for being the person I am. They haven't stopped. What do I do now?" Some of them may very well have been "I didn't do as well as I wanted on this assignent or exam, my future is potentially ruined from this." (It wasn't, but perfectionism is a bitch.) And some of that was from my own belief of "Well, nobody thinks of me as an attractive person, so I can look forward to being alone while everyone else is having relationships." And a fair amount of "I'm trying to do this thing that I am learning how to do, and it is not going the way that you said it should, and I am not understanding what the trick is, or I cannot replicate the thing accurately enough, and this makes me a failure at something that I should be able to do, and do well." And, while there was rarely an explicit judgment about being a "crybaby" from adults around me (much more so from peers who were interested in throwing as much ammunition as they could in that specific situation), the adults around me were ill-equipped to find a solution, or even an understanding, and a fair few of them were attitudinally judgmental about whether this was appropriately masculine behavior. And that combined with a lot of other attitudinally and explicit judgments about my masculinity, like not being all that great at sport or physical fitness stuff, and not having a relationship, or even an obvious crush, or the relative who asked me once whether I was worried about having a lack of chest hair (I wasn't, not really, but that was because I was in one of the phases where I didn't give a rat's ass about whether anyone found me properly manly or not.). Or even the positive judgments, like going to my senior prom without a date (where the assistant principal, as one of the chaperones, seemed to approve of the idea of "going stag") or the way that someone else got razzed about having been "rejected by [me]" when I was able to block a shot from them in P.E. basketball affairs. (Which may not have been approval, per se, as much as questioning someone else's masculinity that the nerd was able to do something better than them in that moment.)
This was before the manosphere took off online, for situating yourself temporally, but not so far in the past that there weren't ads for male enhancement products being broadcast with professional sports, or the set of advertisements with a character called "Smilin' Bob" whose perpetual smile was due to the fact that his family situation was very much improved through his taking of an erectile dysfunction drug which allowed him to feel manlier and to satisfy his wife sexually in the way that heterosexuality insists he should. (To wit, if his penis is erect, and he puts it in his wife in the way he wants to, then she is satisfied and happy with him, pay no attention at all to any of that stuff that says it's More Complicated to satisfy a partner than just sticking it in and pumping.) And then, as much as now, the airwaves were saturated with programming that spoken admiringly of men taking revenge, going on violent sprees, being police or military persons who shot obvious bad guys first, and then had sympathetic co-workers (and sometimes bosses) when they were being investigated for their use of force, in those situations where they actually were investigated for use of force. The era where Homer Simpson and Al Bundy, instead of being the parodic exaggerations they were (and that Archie Bunker had been before them), were seen as role models and men who had managed to succeed in at least some way in fighting the world where women were taking over.
Not that women were supposed to be allowed into the halls of power: then, as now, Hillary Clinton and her masculine forms of dress were a frequent punching bag, and opinion was divided about whether Bill's dalliance with the intern was because his wife was too ugly to want to be with or whether because Bill was the President and the power that he had was meant to be wielded, so he shouldn't feel bad or remorseful at doing what any other man would have done in his situation. The other criticism, of course, was that if we let women into roles of power, they would start ruling based on their feelings rather than the facts, and the government would shut down or be ungovernmable in a crisis if the President were menstruating. Throughout all of this misogyny, there was the clear understanding that men who behaved in womanish ways, whether that was caring about being fashionable, or expressing emotions that suggested vulnerability, care, or sadness, were not to be considered Real Men. This is also an era where the way that someone signified they thought you were not a Real Man was to accuse you of being gay, or that the action you were taking was gay. You were also supposed to be able to figure out whether the person who was saying this was meant it in a way kind of akin to "hey, man, XYZ," or whether this was someone who was calling your masculinity into question in such a way that meant there was going to be homophobic violence done to you if you didn't properly front so they would back off and you wouldn't be considered a "pussy" who deserved to have that homophobic violence done to you. (Or you didn't escalate to violence yourself over the perceived slight as a way of claiming the top ground in masculinity and put the onus on the accuser to defend their own masculinity. It's a fucked-up system, okay?)
And, even though I knew it was shit then, and I know it's shit now, it's still kind of there in my head? Like, I still have to perform that kind of macho bullshit every now and then, because sometimes you go along to be the guy because otherwise the salespeople won't tell you what you need to know. Or sometimes I need to be the guy because it makes things work easier and other guys won't be terrible to someone perceived as a woman if she's got a guy with her. Or sometimes I need to do it because someone said the men's room looks terrible and I'm the closest thing to a man that's there. Or because there's someone who's being a misogynist ass and needs to have someone he'll respect explain something to him in very small words before turning him back over to the knowledgeable person that he was dismissing before. Because there are still enough adherents who haven't decided for themselves that this idea is shit and they're not going to do anything to keep bringing it into existence, and they're going to do a better job mentoring the next generation so that the men can talk about their feelings and have feelings in the full range of possibilities. And that such things will be considered acceptable, possibly even manly, to express some amount of vulnerability. Even if it's only to each other, it will make a good start to the process of helping the boys turn out to be better men, rather than weapons, or people who need professional help so that they can remember how to have the full range of their feelings, and be secure enough in themselves to do so, even in environments that are more toxic to them.
Admittedly, my solution to this statement is to point out that what a Real Man is and does is built on sand rather than anything firm, and that it is highly dependent on the acceptance of one's peers rather than any kind of objective anything. Which makes it into one of those problems that follows the idea of "It always seems impossible until it is done." So long as there are enough men who believe in the old model and try to make others do the same, it doesn't look like there's a lot of progress, but once there's a critical mass of men who have decided to abandon that model and do something else, something better, for themselves, and to teach that to other men and boys, then that same shifting sand will work in favor of producing something better, and hopefully, something that's actually built on something firm and not misogynistic, that allows for a greater expression of what it means to be a man. (And maybe when that shift has happened and there's enough of a firm idea in place that's expansive and emotive and not stunted only to a small range of expressions, I might consider whether it's worth seeing if there's now a space in being a man for me.)
#20: "Real Men Don't Cry So Easily."
There is a lot to be said (and has been said) about the stilted, stunted acceptable emotional range for boys and men. Anger, rage, and those emotional states that lead themselves to internal and interpersonal violence are generally lauded, especially if that violent response is because the man or boy was protecting something from an external force, whether that threat is real or stylized, in the way that sport is. Sensitive, nurturing, and hurting emotional states are generally supposed to be private, if they are allowed to exist at all, and a man who expressed emotions outside the accepted bounds usually has their masculinity and heterosexuality questioned or challenged, with the expectation that such a challenge will be handled with an appropriately manly amount and form of violence. The process by which boys are fashioned and crafted into weapons and then loosed onto the world.
As you may have determined from some of the earlier entries in this particular series, or possibly just from hanging around here long enough, even as a child, I was prone to a full range of emotions, and I'm sure that at least some of them were Big Feelings that spill out through a child's emotional regulation system through the sheer virtue of being too big. And others might have been Big Feelings that spilled out because my emotional regulation systems weren't quite able to handle it, and that it wouldn't have been such a problem in a more neurotypical child with better regulation. For me, most of the feelings didn't manifest in anger, thankfully. Frustration was common, yes, but also so was the kind of thing that might be euphemistically called being a "sensitive child," because even in the early ages, remember, the pattern is being established that mistakes are the opportunity to make fun of the smart kid. (A person who would eventually be a fellow anime enthusiast would illuminate for me that I was giving off arrogance as an attitude, or what I was giving off was being interpreted as arrogance. This was after the spot where he and I had a tangle, and while there were no punches thrown, I did let him use his own momentum to put his forehead into a fire extinguisher holder. I certainly wanted to get out of there, but younger-me would have argued that if someone is interpreting my attitude as arrogance, it's because I've already had enough people making fun of me for being the person that I am that my attitude has shifted toward "almost none of you are people who are worthwhile to interact with." With time and experience and a few more perspectives informing me, I realize that was a myopic attitude, but I also don't think that child was wrong, from their own perspective.)
Most plainly, I cried a lot. About a lot of things. Things like "oh, no, I almost accidentally hit someone else with my baseball pitch, I didn't mean that." (The underlying being "and now they're going to hate me or someone will make fun of me for being imperfect.") Or "I have done the thing you have told me to and asked these people to stop making fun of me for being the person I am. They haven't stopped. What do I do now?" Some of them may very well have been "I didn't do as well as I wanted on this assignent or exam, my future is potentially ruined from this." (It wasn't, but perfectionism is a bitch.) And some of that was from my own belief of "Well, nobody thinks of me as an attractive person, so I can look forward to being alone while everyone else is having relationships." And a fair amount of "I'm trying to do this thing that I am learning how to do, and it is not going the way that you said it should, and I am not understanding what the trick is, or I cannot replicate the thing accurately enough, and this makes me a failure at something that I should be able to do, and do well." And, while there was rarely an explicit judgment about being a "crybaby" from adults around me (much more so from peers who were interested in throwing as much ammunition as they could in that specific situation), the adults around me were ill-equipped to find a solution, or even an understanding, and a fair few of them were attitudinally judgmental about whether this was appropriately masculine behavior. And that combined with a lot of other attitudinally and explicit judgments about my masculinity, like not being all that great at sport or physical fitness stuff, and not having a relationship, or even an obvious crush, or the relative who asked me once whether I was worried about having a lack of chest hair (I wasn't, not really, but that was because I was in one of the phases where I didn't give a rat's ass about whether anyone found me properly manly or not.). Or even the positive judgments, like going to my senior prom without a date (where the assistant principal, as one of the chaperones, seemed to approve of the idea of "going stag") or the way that someone else got razzed about having been "rejected by [me]" when I was able to block a shot from them in P.E. basketball affairs. (Which may not have been approval, per se, as much as questioning someone else's masculinity that the nerd was able to do something better than them in that moment.)
This was before the manosphere took off online, for situating yourself temporally, but not so far in the past that there weren't ads for male enhancement products being broadcast with professional sports, or the set of advertisements with a character called "Smilin' Bob" whose perpetual smile was due to the fact that his family situation was very much improved through his taking of an erectile dysfunction drug which allowed him to feel manlier and to satisfy his wife sexually in the way that heterosexuality insists he should. (To wit, if his penis is erect, and he puts it in his wife in the way he wants to, then she is satisfied and happy with him, pay no attention at all to any of that stuff that says it's More Complicated to satisfy a partner than just sticking it in and pumping.) And then, as much as now, the airwaves were saturated with programming that spoken admiringly of men taking revenge, going on violent sprees, being police or military persons who shot obvious bad guys first, and then had sympathetic co-workers (and sometimes bosses) when they were being investigated for their use of force, in those situations where they actually were investigated for use of force. The era where Homer Simpson and Al Bundy, instead of being the parodic exaggerations they were (and that Archie Bunker had been before them), were seen as role models and men who had managed to succeed in at least some way in fighting the world where women were taking over.
Not that women were supposed to be allowed into the halls of power: then, as now, Hillary Clinton and her masculine forms of dress were a frequent punching bag, and opinion was divided about whether Bill's dalliance with the intern was because his wife was too ugly to want to be with or whether because Bill was the President and the power that he had was meant to be wielded, so he shouldn't feel bad or remorseful at doing what any other man would have done in his situation. The other criticism, of course, was that if we let women into roles of power, they would start ruling based on their feelings rather than the facts, and the government would shut down or be ungovernmable in a crisis if the President were menstruating. Throughout all of this misogyny, there was the clear understanding that men who behaved in womanish ways, whether that was caring about being fashionable, or expressing emotions that suggested vulnerability, care, or sadness, were not to be considered Real Men. This is also an era where the way that someone signified they thought you were not a Real Man was to accuse you of being gay, or that the action you were taking was gay. You were also supposed to be able to figure out whether the person who was saying this was meant it in a way kind of akin to "hey, man, XYZ," or whether this was someone who was calling your masculinity into question in such a way that meant there was going to be homophobic violence done to you if you didn't properly front so they would back off and you wouldn't be considered a "pussy" who deserved to have that homophobic violence done to you. (Or you didn't escalate to violence yourself over the perceived slight as a way of claiming the top ground in masculinity and put the onus on the accuser to defend their own masculinity. It's a fucked-up system, okay?)
And, even though I knew it was shit then, and I know it's shit now, it's still kind of there in my head? Like, I still have to perform that kind of macho bullshit every now and then, because sometimes you go along to be the guy because otherwise the salespeople won't tell you what you need to know. Or sometimes I need to be the guy because it makes things work easier and other guys won't be terrible to someone perceived as a woman if she's got a guy with her. Or sometimes I need to do it because someone said the men's room looks terrible and I'm the closest thing to a man that's there. Or because there's someone who's being a misogynist ass and needs to have someone he'll respect explain something to him in very small words before turning him back over to the knowledgeable person that he was dismissing before. Because there are still enough adherents who haven't decided for themselves that this idea is shit and they're not going to do anything to keep bringing it into existence, and they're going to do a better job mentoring the next generation so that the men can talk about their feelings and have feelings in the full range of possibilities. And that such things will be considered acceptable, possibly even manly, to express some amount of vulnerability. Even if it's only to each other, it will make a good start to the process of helping the boys turn out to be better men, rather than weapons, or people who need professional help so that they can remember how to have the full range of their feelings, and be secure enough in themselves to do so, even in environments that are more toxic to them.
Admittedly, my solution to this statement is to point out that what a Real Man is and does is built on sand rather than anything firm, and that it is highly dependent on the acceptance of one's peers rather than any kind of objective anything. Which makes it into one of those problems that follows the idea of "It always seems impossible until it is done." So long as there are enough men who believe in the old model and try to make others do the same, it doesn't look like there's a lot of progress, but once there's a critical mass of men who have decided to abandon that model and do something else, something better, for themselves, and to teach that to other men and boys, then that same shifting sand will work in favor of producing something better, and hopefully, something that's actually built on something firm and not misogynistic, that allows for a greater expression of what it means to be a man. (And maybe when that shift has happened and there's enough of a firm idea in place that's expansive and emotive and not stunted only to a small range of expressions, I might consider whether it's worth seeing if there's now a space in being a man for me.)
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Date: 2023-12-21 10:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-21 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-21 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-21 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-21 07:56 pm (UTC)Collected in 11 volumes, very good for people who enjoy classical piano music.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-22 03:33 am (UTC)I was called a crybaby a lot at home, and my anger/frustration at Lots Of Stuff (which basically developed into cptsd) was conveniently labeled "temper tantrums." And yet "there were no signs!" 🙄
(I do miss the social ability to act as protector for the other women in my life sometimes -- and not just from men, plenty of women in the Deep South are perfectly awful to women like my spouse who don't perform femininity to their satisfaction when a "man" isn't in the vicinity enforcing the candy-coated-hatred they call a social contract. Now cis people who accompany me in public interactions act as my protector ensuring good behavior from others...an odd inversion.)
It is sand, so so much. I hope more masculine leaning people can find each other and build something solid to support the full range of human emotions and desires for people who belong in that end of the binary. Imagine a future where both sisterhood and brotherhood are open and welcoming communities... one can dream.
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Date: 2023-12-22 07:47 pm (UTC)I would also like some amount of solidarity to show up for men and women so they can experience the fullest range of emotions, rather than emotions being put on the binary as well.