The reasons are many: To demand that any human not feel or express pain is impossible. They are a source of enormous pain, isolation, and fear. The second thing it does is this-and here’s the great paradox I’ve written about for the past three decades: the very ideals that confer and represent power and privilege, are a death trap for men.And, when you don’t have power and privilege, you stoically accept your lot and don’t complain because obviously it’s you who are the problem, not the system. The ways we raise boys to be real men is basic training for a world of (relative) power and privilege. So, if you’re raised to be assertive, strong, and decisive, if you’re trained not to experience (let alone show) weakness or pain, you’re more able to lord over women or other men in the home, at work, in sports, in politics, in fights, and at war. They help individual men take advantage of enormous privileges that men as a group enjoy. Our contemporary ideas of manhood simultaneously do two things: First, they help individual men cement our roles at the top of social hierarchies.We might assume it is biological, we might think it comes from being male or female, but in truth, each culture makes it up. It’s as if we’ve all taken the same drug and walk around imagining that masculinity is real. That means that masculinity (like femininity) is a collective hallucination. It’s simply how we define manhood and how we define the relations of power among men and between men and women. It varies from culture to culture, era to era. There is no timeless definition of manhood. At least not in the way we think it exists. To answer the question, “what is good about masculinity?”, we need to remind ourselves that: You could get into a long debate about the many adjectives we’ve used to describe manhood in order to decide which are really the greatest characteristics of masculinity. Posted by Michael Kaufman on JanuApril 4, 2022
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