Have women ever considered what keeps men from doing better?

*Pastor voice* This has been on my heart for a while now.

Maybe you’ve heard some version of the following:

“The male loneliness crisis is self-inflicted.”

“Men should be lonelier.”

“Have heterosexual men ever considered how their behavior impacts their loneliness?”

“Do better.”

Here’s my question. Have women ever considered what might be keeping men from doing better?

I hadn’t. Not really. As recently as a year ago, I was part of the chorus telling men to act more like women.

Then, I read a lot more about men, masculinity, gender, and victim-blaming.

I grew up balls-deep in the worst kinds of Evangelical Christian churches. Even then, I was very bad at half-assing. I was a true believer.

My divorce changed me. In the midst of that, I fell in love with a half-Jewish atheist scientist from New York who questioned every one of my remaining religious beliefs. Free will, he told me, may not even exist. He gave me some much-needed epistemic humility about how much agency any person really has and thus how much anyone can ever really blame anyone else for anything.

The concept of personal responsibility, if not scientifically valid, is at least very useful in everyday life. However, one thing I like about the left is they tend to better understand context and nuance.

Good liberal feminists understand why victim-blaming, for instance, is actively harmful. We don’t ask women why they didn’t leave their abuser or report their rape because it’s mean and counterproductive. We understand why it’s problematic to reduce the gender pay gap, for example, to mere “personal choices.”

And yet, when it comes to men, all that nuance and context tends to go away and individual culpability re-enters the chat.

Allow me to bravely say that I think men, too, operate within contexts. Men, too, face constraints.

It’s true that being male confers agency. Maleness is power.

But that leaves out something that is easy for women to miss and for men to never consciously recognize.

Men are more free than women to be and do absolutely everything, except for whatever is feminine.

Men (and women) hit, mock, exclude, ignore, and even kill men who don’t “act like men.”

The phrase “boys don’t cry” is not a description of reality. It’s an exhortation. It’s a rule. Breaking it has consequences. Men don’t gay and trans bash for self-protection. They do it to punish men for “acting like women.” Femininity is only a flex for top-half men because men at the bottom are afraid if they’re not “hard” enough then tragedy will befall them.

Men tend to act horribly when something or someone makes them feel feminine because they, at their core, are afraid another man will kill them or women will reject them if they don’t demonstrate their masculinity.

“Issues like male violence — long at the top of the feminist agenda — don’t just harm a staggering number of women and children worldwide,”

Katie Jgln

recently wrote. “They harm men, too.” Actually, male violence hurts way more men than women, statistically speaking.

But when you ask men about this fear, as

Liz Plank

did in For the Love of Men, they have no idea what you’re talking about.

When you ask a man why he doesn’t act “better” – why he continues to perpetuate patriarchy, even when it’s obviously isolating him from his full spectrum of emotion, personhood, and social connection – it takes a long time, and a lot of courage and introspection, for him to even be able to identify the role gender plays in his behavior.

“Restrictions and biases that continue to limit half the world’s population in education, employment, and leadership also don’t just hold women back — they hold entire societies back, including the men in them,” Jgln wrote. “Not to mention the toll the rigid gender hierarchies upholding them take on men’s well-being.”

A man might say, “Because men don’t do X.” Why? “Because it’s important.” Okay, but why is it important for men and not for women?

At the end of the day, men act like trash for the same reason wives don’t leave their abusive husbands and rape survivors don’t report. They’re afraid.

Except men don’t even realize they’re afraid because fear is vulnerability which is… you guessed it. Feminine.

Men are terrified that women will reject or make fun of them. They’re afraid men will hurt them. They’re afraid of mommy’s disapproval and daddy’s belt. Very little of this fear is conscious. Sometimes it’s not really rational either. But it only takes one bully to instill terror. Even when he’s long gone, it’s hard to dislodge a fear you’re deathly afraid to even acknowledge.

The reason men don’t act better is that acting better means acting more like women and men will demonstrably go to very great lengths to avoid that.

And you know what? I don’t think men are wrong to be afraid. Violating norms is dangerous. People will punish you for it. I’ve had to learn that the hard way.

“Men will only break free from the masculinity trap when they have a safe alternative,” Plank wrote.

Asking men to defect from gender without doing anything to make it safer and easier for them to do so is like asking women to leave their abusers without doing anything to make doing that safer and easier. We don’t victim-blame survivors of IPV, rape, or masculinity because it’s cruel and counterproductive. So it is with survivors of hegemonic masculinity.

I don’t know how to make it safer for men to perform femininity. I think lowering overall rates of violence is important. I think decreasing the salience of gender, generally speaking, would be helpful. I think sex-positivity is essential.

I think organizing men to defect from gender en masse, rather than individually, is extremely important. Women defecting from gender individually did not work. There is safety in numbers. On-net, gender hurts most men to benefit a few. But women didn’t have power until we organized. Similarly, male defectors won’t have power until they have cohesion.

In the meantime, simply telling men to do better and blaming them for their own oppression without acknowledging the dangers and costs inherent to failing to perform hegemonic masculinity is not just pointless, but actively harmful.