Men, the Patriarchy Is Killing Us
The limitations of masculinity are what cause men To suffer
When men’s rights activists debate feminists, the first point they bring up is the ridiculously high suicide rate for men in America.
In 2019, males accounted for nearly 80% of the 47,511 suicide deaths in the U.S., and suicide was the eighth leading cause of death for men over the age of 10. I think the men’s rights activists are on to something but I don’t think they know what they're actually on to.
Most men’s rights activists don’t care about men’s mental health and well-being but use these topics as a gotcha when debating women’s oppression under the patriarchy. However, they’re like broken clocks: right twice a day.
I don’t think the state of men’s mental health in America is proof that women’s suffering under the patriarchy isn’t valid. In no way is this article meant to undermine the experiences and oppression faced by women in our society.
What I think the state of men’s mental health does validate is that many men are victims of gender norms, heteronormativity, and restricting of individual expression due to the limited ways men are allowed to perform masculinity under the patriarchy.
What I am arguing in this article is that most men are victims of the patriarchy, too.
What I am arguing is that patriarchy is a social system with norms that are oppressive to women, children, non-binary people, and most men. By addressing the widespread suffering the patriarchy causes, we can have a more productive movement in destroying it.
Real men kill themselves in silence
What’s striking about our study is the conspicuous absence of standard psychiatric markers of suicidality among a large number of males of all ages who die by suicide
Mark Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said in a statement that his 2022 UCLA study found over 60% of male suicide victims in America had no documented mental health conditions.
So it would seem that men's suicides are impulsive and are the emotional reaction to one traumatic event. Combined with widespread access to alcohol and guns in America, men impulsively kill themselves without any sign of deteriorating mental health issues.
I think this theory is idiotic. A 2014 meta-analysis by The Military Research Consortium concluded that impulsivity has little association with suicide and, though the act itself can be triggered by an incident, the ideation of suicide comes from a long process of forethought.
Men are conditioned by patriarchal gender norms to suffer in silence. From the time we are born to the time that we die, speaking on our pain is usually met with dismissal, mockery, or lessons that “being a man” means that you “suck it up” and “don’t let them see you cry”.
This conditioning teaches young boys that asking for help or speaking about their well-being is contrary to how men are supposed to perform masculinity. Because of this stigma around weakness and masculinity, men are more unlikely to seek physical or mental health experts when suffering.
It’s less that these men kill themselves impulsively without any mental health issues but more because men’s mental health goes untreated due to the stigmatization of men who seek help appearing to be weak.
If you need an example of the stigma around men’s mental health, consider this: The United States Pentagon refuses to give veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder the Purple Heart because PTSD isn’t viewed by the US military as an actual injury. Meanwhile, 17 veterans kill themselves a day.
Real Men Don’t Have Emotions
Part of the reason why so many men suffer in isolation is not only because men aren’t just socialized to not communicate their suffering but also because men are taught not to communicate their emotions at all.
There’s a patriarchal gender stereotype that men are rational and women are emotional.
Women are negatively affected by this stereotype which was in full effect during the 2016 election when 13% of Americans feared that Hillary Clinton was too emotional to become president of the United States. Then ironically elected the most emotionally immature president in recent history.
On the other side of that coin, men suffer from the norm that masculinity means repressing emotions. Men are socialized from childhood to believe that any expression of emotion is a sign of weakness and runs contrary to the idea of masculinity that society projects onto them.
This societal pressure to be emotionless robots explains the rise among masculine circles in the worship of philosophies such as stoicism and Buddhism — because these philosophies attempt to help the individual over their human emotions for rational clarity.
Inevitably, when these attempts fail because — as Stanford Neurologist Robert Sapolsky explains in his book “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” — humans can’t separate their behavior and thoughts from their emotions because all actions are originally triggered by emotions.
Therefore, this loss of control of their emotions causes men to express the only emotion that isn’t viewed as a threat to their masculinity, anger. Men suppress all their other emotions and trauma and then, when overwhelmed, release it in a fit of anger causing suffering to others and themselves.
This is why men are responsible for the vast majority of acts of violence against others and themselves. The combination of the masculine push to appear strong and self-reliant combined with the social acceptance of men demonstrating anger creates this perfect cocktail of masculine violence.
So how do we get out of this?
Understanding that you don’t want to be a real man
It starts by changing our ideas of individualization in our culture and accepting that the archetype of masculinity that is pushed in a contemporary patriarchal society isn’t a healthy one, and more importantly, it’s unachievable.
Therefore we need to break the individualized perception of masculinity and address the problem as a collective with shared experiences. Which is done by talking and communicating with one another about our human experiences.
We need to create a society where men are allowed to be vulnerable without it being an attack on their masculinity. Men need to embrace their weaknesses and shortcomings to communicate their suffering with others.
Men also need to accept that other men shouldn’t have to live up to the traditional gender normative approach to masculinity. And use this rejection of tradition as an opportunity to reimagine masculinity in a way that’s more inclusive and communicative and gives men more freedom in determining the presentation of masculinity that most appeals to them.
Which starts with communicating and being vulnerable to each other. Breaking gender norms is hard, but that’s the only way to progress to a more beneficial society. As a masculine community, we have to make room and be open to the idea of masculinity being fluid and changing.
I think that conversation can start with learning from queer men. Trans-men, gay men, and bi-men all have to operate in a world where their reality of masculinity doesn’t come close to conforming with traditional gender norms in the same way that straight cis-men’s masculinity does. Therefore their communities have had a much longer time to redefine masculinity in a way that is healthier and more open to change.
At the end of the day, that is the goal: to redefine masculinity. That starts with being open to change. So why not learn from the community that has already been doing that?
