I am still digesting this piece and I imagine I will be for a long time to come. I felt a profound sense of unease while reading it. The Life of an American Boy at 17 is part one in a series on Growing Up in America Today featured in the latest issue of Esquire. While not marketed as a piece on toxic masculinity, it aligns alarmingly well.
Another of my recent reads was: Want to End Mass Shootings? Start with Toxic Masculinity. A large piece of text quoted in the middle read: “Toxic masculinity and gun violence are fruits of the same legacy,” and it made my head and my heart hurt.
The Esquire piece features statistics, “America’s Boys By The Numbers,” about a variety of topics from suicide to screen-time. These stats along with the boy whose narrated story is featured in the article help to paint a picture of boyhood — and I don’t like what I see. This picture is abundantly clear: we have a problem. Even PIXAR has joined in illustrating “the problem” with their new short film, Purl, about toxic masculinity in the workplace.
“The problem” is that boys are stuck, held to an antiquated and narrow gender role that leaves little room for discovering and expressing a wide range of essential human emotions and values stoic strength and power over all else. Some say I’m being dramatic. I say, check out the New York Times article The Boys Are not All Right by Michael Ian Black. He defines “the problem” as:
“America’s boys are broken. And it’s killing us.
The brokenness of the country’s boys stands in contrast to its girls, who still face an abundance of obstacles but go into the world increasingly well equipped to take them on.
The past 50 years have redefined what it means to be female in America. Girls today are told that they can do anything, be anyone. They’ve absorbed the message: They’re outperforming boys in school at every level. But it isn’t just about performance. To be a girl today is to be the beneficiary of decades of conversation about the complexities of womanhood, its many forms and expressions.
Boys, though, have been left behind. No commensurate movement has emerged to help them navigate toward a full expression of their gender. It’s no longer enough to “be a man” — we no longer even know what that means.
Too many boys are trapped in the same suffocating, outdated model of masculinity, where manhood is measured in strength, where there is no way to be vulnerable without being emasculated, where manliness is about having power over others. They are trapped, and they don’t even have the language to talk about how they feel about being trapped, because the language that exists to discuss the full range of human emotion is still viewed as sensitive and feminine.”
President Obama recently spoke at event celebrating the fifth anniversary of the non-profit My Brother’s Keeper Alliance. He and Golden State Warrior Stephen Curry encouraged the audience of young African-American men to focus on their own self-confidence as the path to true success in life. The pair discussed the “evolving role of men in society and cautioned against falling into old ‘stereotypes’ of what being a man means. To demonstrate his point, Obama introduced himself to the audience as ‘Michelle’s husband,’ referring to his wife of 27 years, Michelle Obama. He then introduced the NBA star as ‘Ayesha’s husband’.” (Read more about this in: Barack Obama Manages to Work in a Michelle Obama Compliment in a Discussion About ‘Being a Man.‘)
Obama says men can “feel we have to compensate by exaggerating stereotypical ways men are supposed to act. And that’s a trap.”
The evolving role Obama referred to and the fact that everyone from Pixar to moms like me are having conversations about toxic masculinity gives me some sense of hope that we can create meaningful change — we must, our boys are counting are on us.
Click here to check out “They Are Counting On Us – Part One.”
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