The Masks of Masculinity
‘I didn’t know the cost of entering a song — was to lose your way back.’― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds
‘Body, they blame you for all things and they seek in the body what does not live in the body.’ — Ilya Kaminsky
At the root of traditional or dominant masculinity is invulnerability. Male invulnerability: to always prevail, to maintain a strength impermeable to sadness and sorrow. To be invincible and indestructible, never soft, broken, or cracking. To consistently represent the direct opposite of the ‘feminine’ — nurturing, tender, emotional, soft, graceful, flowing. To be ‘hard’, ‘tough’, ‘stacked’, ‘ripped’, in our emotional and physical bodies. To be superior, ‘on top of it’, in control.
Under dominant masculinity it is not enough to simply be a man; manhood is something to constantly demonstrate. The proof of manhood lies in power, in ‘success’, in imposition, in violence, in conquest — of women, of prestige, of work, of recognition, of adventure.
How have we learned to be? What is ours and what is imposed? What inheritances do we confuse as our own?
The philosopher Simone Weil noted that ‘culture is the formation of attention’. Men are encouraged through societal pressures from our earliest memories to take notice of ‘real men’, and pay attention to these mandates of masculinity.
We end up embodying them and failing to meet their impossible expectations. Our bodies carry the weight of shame, the eroding weight of not being enough. Our hearts carry pain, coarsened and mishandled through strategies of silence or aggression.
Some of the most devastating ideologies of our time feed from the legacies of the fountain of invulnerability. Climate denialism sees ecosystems and our living planet as invulnerable, immune to the violence of our relationships towards them. As the COVID-19 pandemic unravels across the world, various different studies have found that men are less likely to wear face masks or adopt social distance practices, seeing them as uncool or signs of vulnerability.
Among the many shadows — and privileges—cast by patriarchy is silence. Dense, male silence over what matters. Silence over the constant, everyday violence committed by men. Silence over personal pain. Groups of male friends, close over decades, who may have never breached the thresholds of intimacy.
Silences of men with themselves. For decades, I’ve swallowed those silences: about my own insecurities, about an eating disorder I struggled with for many years, about my shame over my body, about my pride and grandiosity, about my complicity in acquiescing to violence around me. I’ve increasingly realised how invulnerability has taught me, deep to the core, that having needs is weakness. And in trying to unearth these silences, I’ve come up against the bounds of male circles — the awkwardness of opening up, the inexperience of ritualising tenderness and vulnerability.
It is our role as those identifying as men to invest in breaking these silences, consistently. To express what dominant masculinities tell us is inexpressible. To soften the hard, urgently inviting each other towards tender unburdenings and compassionate accountabilities. The work of confronting violence committed by men implies men doing the difficult care work of holding space to demand more of themselves and other men. As many feminist activists have stressed, the work is not for men to occupy existing feminist spaces, but rather to make male-dominated spaces increasingly feminist.
The route towards intimacy
There are so many inheritances to shed, wounds to heal, and future violences to dissolve. Nourishing healthy or transformative masculinities offers the possibility of obtaining a lighter way of being in the world, through responsibility. Men after all, are the beneficiaries of a system that also degrades and imprisons men, closing them off from their essence and plurality. As psychotherapist Terrence Real reminds, ultimately ‘the route out of patriarchy is the route towards intimacy.’
Men, especially white cisgender and heterosexual men, have the privilege in many contexts too of unpacking and reimagining themselves in liberatory environments opened up by others. Anti-racist, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements have risked all to defend their dignity and open emancipatory space in our societies. They have paved the way for the multiplicities we can be. We owe it to their courage and commitment to freedom, to respectfully listen and radically challenge ourselves.
The horizons are vast. Invulnerability is monochrome, defined by obstinate closure to the world; vulnerability is plural, vibrant, open, and possible. Cishetero men need to wake up to colors and retrain our eyes to see. For those men on the sidelines, it’s time to acknowledge those before us and now, and dance in the shifting tides.
With gratitude to Maria Faciolince and Nathan Thanki for their comments on early versions of this piece.
