Western masculinity as Chinese foot binding

I wanted to double-check my understanding of the origins of calling therapists and psychiatrists “shrinks” or “head shrinkers.” Quora says it refers to the tribal custom, which required opening up the heads and scooping out the insides for shrinking. I’d always heard it was because unhappy people go to therapy and have big egos, which need to be shrunk so we can get well.

I think we’re all correct.

Anyway, as a years-long regular therapy-goer and someone who makes her living primarily from publishing my unedited thoughts and posting pictures of my ass, it should not come as a shock to my babies to learn that I absolutely love thinking about myself. My therapist has actually admitted that, even among people who go to therapy, my propensity for “self-reflection” is unusual.

So as interested as I clearly am in bottom-half men and boys and their well-being, I’m even more interested in why I care about them so damn much.

One reason hit me while I was playing Bubbles Empire Champions and listening to Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by

Ruth Whippman

(ongoing review thread here while walking on my treadmill. (ADHD? me?)

In Chapter 6, a boy tells Whippman that incel forums are the only place he feels zero pressure to perform masculinity.

It reminded me of an article I read a million years ago (maybe it was just a post) about “pro-ana” forums. The author, a recovering anorexic herself, argued that the empathy, shared understanding, and community these forums offered were actually harm reduction for many girls and women.

What if, I thought, there’s an analogy here?

The author seemed to be saying that for every girl who learns how to effectively starve herself to death on Tumblr, another hundred feel their anguish and alienation abate enough to do what they must to live to see another day. I must have thought the argument was counterintuitive enough to be interesting, but, once explained, made enough sense to be likely enough to be true.

After all, not eating isn’t that hard to dope out. What takes a village is finding mere existence extremely painful and wanting to keep doing it anyway.

Perhaps it’s equally possible that for every man who’s inspired by 4chan to shoot someone, a hundred feel their anguish and alienation abate enough to do what they must to live to see another day. Murder also doesn’t take a village to figure out. But loneliness factors into suicide. Men and boys are both more lonely than girls and women and also much more likely to kill themselves.

(After this analogy occurred to me, it occurred to me how unintentionally gendered it is. On average, men/boys deal with their pain differently than women/girls. Women and girls tend to turn discomfort inward. Men and boys are more prone to make their pain everyone else’s problem. Participants in both kinds of forums are more suicidal than the average person. But, unlike the (mostly, but not entirely, female) anorexics, the mostly, but not entirely, male)

incels too-frequently also kill other people. Men are also, on average, more likely to use more violent means to kill themselves than women. And it’s hard to imagine a much less violent method than starving oneself to death.)

And then, probably because I had just read Freddie de Boer’s Who "Neurodiversity" Left Behind, the thought struck me: Isn’t masculinity a kind of disability?

The only place these men feel like they can safely show vulnerability is an incel forum. Other self-described incels are the only people with whom these men feel safe discussing their feelings. They have no one else in their lives with whom they feel like they can talk about their uncomfortable, un-masculine feelings. This is where they can admit that they feel unwanted, unattractive, rejected, worthless, mocked, denigrated, and unimportant. This is where they don’t feel the need to pretend to be confident, self-assured, attractive, and well-liked. They can be their disappointed, resentful, depressed selves.

The social and biological research is extremely clear, and getting clearer by the day, that social connection is a non-negotiable for human flourishing. We all need it to survive. By any reasonable definition, a person who depends on 4chan to begin to alleviate their deep loneliness is profoundly disabled.

Then I immediately argued against my own conclusion. Isn’t disability something a person is born with?

Chinese foot binding occurred to me as a counterexample.

source

This practice requires breaking the bones in a girl’s feet, leaving her unable to walk without pain for the rest of her life. Chinese girls weren’t born like that. But there’s no reality in which this isn’t a disability that adults chose to inflict. Same for FGM.

Given all this, I’m having trouble avoiding the conclusion that masculinity is a form of male emotional mutilation. It’s Western connection binding.

Earlier in the book, Whippman wrote about a boy who struggled to compliment another boy for listening intently, showing empathy, revealing his own insecurities, and otherwise doing what closeness requires. This boy could not simply say that his friend was performing femininity. He knew, instinctively, that describing his friend as anything other than very masculine would be to horribly insult him.

Boys learn very early that they must choose. They can accept the loneliness of masculinity or take the risk of performing femininity. They can accept their alienation or try for intimacy, knowing it may lead not only to rejection anyway, but also mockery and even violence.

It’s a literal double bind.

Perhaps the worst of it is that masculinity, like severe Autism, is a disability that prevents the afflicted from being able to identify and describe their suffering.

As de Boer pointed out, high-functioning, privileged, non-disabled Autists have come to dominate discussions of Autism. They’ve shouted down and ostracised the people who would otherwise like to advocate for and speak on behalf of the people with Autism so disabling that they literally cannot speak for themselves.

In this way, being the mother of a severely Autistic child feels analogous to writing about boys and men raised under patriarchy. I think Whippman and I and a lot of feminist writers are trying to name and describe the pain masculinity prevents boys and men from being able to name and describe themselves. And I’m genuinely sorry that I do it awkwardly and insultingly sometimes (maybe all the time). But I also think done is better than perfect. “Do it scared,” as my mother told me, many times.

I’m doing it anyway because I think it’s interesting and because I really hope that one day very soon we can start to look at masculinity in the same way we look at foot binding or cutting off people’s clits. Let me do what I can to hasten the day we realize it’s all the same superstitious, barbarous cruelty created and maintained primarily to justify a fundamentally malign social hierarchy.

[After publishing, I realized that this post really only makes sense when you understand my definition of masculinity, as articulated in The New York Times is lowkey anti-gender and Abolishing gender is not transphobic!]