Looking in the Mirror at What it Means to be a Man

I often feel like I straddle a line in masculinity. I grew up in the age of getting called names if you cried in front of other people and with the idea that men should be almost stoic save for when they win or lose the big game or retire from a sport. I was told as a kid that if I was going to cry, I should go to my room and do it in private and so the number of people on this planet who have seen me cry is pretty damn small. Feelings were something that you had and sort of dealt with on your own. They were YOUR feelings and so you figured out what they meant and what to do with them. You could either sit with them alone, or you could move on and pretend they did not exist. I think for most men in my age bracket the latter is the most common way we have handled our feelings. It is certainly not only men who have that built in response, but the way men were shown what emotional expressions were valid meant you could either be happy or you could be angry. The problem with that is there are so many other emotions that we just ignored and attempted to pretend were not ours to deal with, or we would shove them into one of the “acceptable” feelings. However, this has resulted in men (specifically heterosexual men in heterosexual relationships) leaning on their partners for every feeling they have. As bell hooks wrote about, many men only show that vulnerability with their partners just before or just after being physically intimate. That is a whole lot of heavy lifting to put on someone in general, even more so when you consider the forum in which it takes place.

So then, what does it even mean to be a man? There is a part of me that wants to use a line from a song called “Now You’re a Man” by the creators of South Park. That song is comedic in nature but does highlight some of the ways we, as men, see our value in what we do or how we define ourselves. The messaging many of us grew up with is that as men we are defined by the work we do, the achievements we tally, or by the woman we are with. Again, generationally speaking we grew up with the notion of “Happy Wife, Happy Life” or “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy”. Basing the household’s emotional well-being off of one person is a really toxic idea and one that moves us away from partnership. We may have the expectation of “providing” for the household but going back to hooks, we can see that there is still often no room for our emotions in a relationship. There can become an expectation that the “man of the house” does not have much in the way of emotional needs because that is not the role neatly defined for them along gender roles. That is less of a judgment of the women and more a symptom of the society we all learn from. This leads to men becoming more and more isolated because we never nurtured the social connections, and our relationships remain at a surface level, so we do not ask too much of anyone with our feelings. This just complicates the entire chain of things, as our family does not get the emotional investment from us, and we do not get an emotional investment anywhere because we simply don’t know how to get it.

One of my favorite albums from the last few years is the latest from Kendrick Lamar which is an excellent account of his reckoning with his own trauma and upbringing and has multiple tracks that I think can resonate with a wide array of listeners. The closing track “Mirror” is one of my favorites though, because he culminates all the hard work he has done with the realization he can’t change anyone. He can be accountable for his actions and choices but moreover he can do the hard introspective work to free his partner and his children from the pain he carries. The last bit of the preceding song before “Mirror” his partner and his daughter speak about how he has broken a generational curse and thank him for doing so.  To me, that is what being a man entails. It is confronting the things that hinder us from being the best version of ourselves and make us fall short as partners and parents. He has confronted all the pain and hurt and the shitty coping skills he assembled earlier in life and is standing bare but in control fully for the first time. THAT is the masculinity we should strive for.

As men our power comes not from changing the world in a broad way, none of us has that power nor ability. Our power and our impact come when we work in the places we live, specifically with our family and immediate community. If each one of us dealt with the hurt we carry and learned to foster emotionally healthy relationships, we could build a world where our kids would have less to overcome, and our partners would carry less emotional pain on our behalf. We could model healthy relationships and how to show up for the people we care, letting them know how loved they are. Instead, we have been sold a version of manhood that is weaker and less impactful on the world, one where we destroy rather than build. That is not the world I want for my kids, not one of violence and pain. Hell, that is not even the world I want for me. Like Kendrick, we should worry less about saving the world and more about building ours. We can make a huge difference showing up for our kids, being involved with them, and loving them. The same holds true for our partners, and we should choose partners who allow us to be ourselves, who do not expect us to be someone different and who value our emotions and our authenticity. Together, we can build great things, but if we go through the world utterly alone, we will expend all of our energy tearing down others’ creations and making sure their sandcastle does not survive because we did not bother building our own.