Does Anyone Give a F*ck About Men?
It's a Man's World, and now that world is changing rapidly
A couple of years ago, while watching a Chris Rock Special on Netflix, the comedian made a joke that rang both funny and personally triggering. What did he say? Well, according to Rock, while women have it much harder than men, “Only the elderly, women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally. Men are only loved on the condition that they can provide something.” Rock's comment was funny, but he’s getting at something that I would argue every man has felt. Society may give us the ability to be privileged, pay us more, and acknowledge our rights much faster than women, but the “perks” of manhood come with a huge cost. Our humanity.
The social contract to receive the benefits of manhood isn’t cheap. It requires many of us to embrace the idea that we shouldn’t feel any emotions, and instead suck up any pain that could exist. It requires us to be the ultimate providers, regardless of the circumstances. And if we cannot provide or fulfill the duties that we have been assigned, that failure lands directly on us. In recent years, men have begun to push back against these ideas. Some have identified patriarchy as the harmful tool that creates these standards. Still, for every man who goes to therapy and begins to do the work to decolonize his mind, ten more find unhealthy outlets that do nothing more than feed their growing hurt and anger.
The “Men's Rights” movement doesn’t just exist because a group of men wanted to organize their shitty behaviors on a larger scale. The movement and its many leaders are speaking to a group of people who feel ostracized and ignored. For all of the social capital that men are believed to have, many of us feel like we have no agency. As the world changes, and we all try to shift from the evils of patriarchy, society is not doing enough of the work to bring men along. In some cases, we are pushing them away. With that current vacuum, influencers like Andrew Tate and groups like Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) are grabbing their attention instead.
Check out this post from one of my favorite writers on here.
These bad actors are giving men unhealthy tools to thrive in a world that believes men are nothing but unfeeling machines that only express themselves through sex and violence. This world tells us that sex must be with a woman, and if for some reason we're not interested in it, then something is wrong with us. This manifests in the way we and men respond to the world around us.
Think about it: countless generations of men were sexually violated as young boys, yet they believe it was consensual. I am one of those men. Thirty years have passed, and I still struggle to accept that what happened to me wasn't consensual; it couldn’t be. I know many men with similar experiences, but society told them they should have enjoyed it. Instead of processing what happened, they brag about it or suppress the memory.
For example, during an interview with VladTv, comedian DeRay Davis shared a story of how he was sexually violated. In the interview, DeRay describes two women who were friends of his mom making him give them oral sex when he was 11 years old. If this had involved a woman, we would all be mortified. Instead, the host laughed. What happened to DeRay is why it took me 30 years to acknowledge what happened to me; it’s also why a lot of men will never open up about the harm they have experienced.
Whenever the topic of what society can do to help men comes up, people get upset, especially women, and I get it. Women have had to suffer the consequences of a broken system that prioritizes toxic masculinity. They should not also be tasked with solving a crisis they did not create. I don’t want to put that responsibility on women, but I do want more sisters to understand that the path to breaking the cycle is through partnership, not ostracization. The goal of this essay isn’t to upset my readers, or to start a debate about who is the “most oppressed.” my goal is to ring the alarm, men are struggling, we want to be better, we want your help, but it feels like the world would rather give us a blueprint for how to function, and then punish us for trying to live up to it. If something doesn’t provide, we will all suffer for this.
Stories of SA of young boys always horrify me, and you are right, it is especially horrid because they are pushed to be 'proud' of it or think 'it's no big deal' so the processing can't even properly happen. It's a massive societal failure that needs correcting for sure.
I also think there are way more women than the internet would have you believe who are very much here for letting men be appreciated just for existing, for not insisting men need to bottle up every emotion or 'always be the strong one', for giving men space to gain the emotional intelligence we should have guided them to learn while they were kids.
It is such a weird situation, because it is definitely the patriarchy that created this problem. The whole gist of the patriarchy is 'we are strong and capable, you are weak and irrational and frail, so we will do the important things.' But of course that premise, which puts men in the positions of power, also now demands them to perform up to this position. So if a woman accepts the premise of the patriarchy - yeah ok, I am weak and feeble, you are strong and capable - it is only normal she then expect you to, like.... be that? Alright, let's see it! Where is the providing? Where is the protecting?
These two things are fundamentally at odds with each other - if we accept that yes, men too are human beings, men too can be scared, or not know what to do, or feel pressure, or not always be up to the task of carrying everything on their shoulders - we are automatically admitting that the main premise of the patriarchy is basically bogus. So the prison is self-made.
But that of course does not mean that a) some women don't buy into it - loads of women have supported the patriarchy historically, otherwise it would not have survived, and b) that a lot of women are not out here very much willing to accept a new arrangement that gives more equality to both sides. We stop being called the feeble-minded emotional irrational ones all the time, and you guys get to show emotion and sensitivity without immediately being whipped for it.
People think the patriarchy protects Men, but it does not. Patriarchy protects Masculinity. And any man who fails to perform said masculinity to some imaginary standard is trampled underfoot just as quickly as a woman, or a queer person, or anyone else deemed non-conforming. Patriarchy has never been for the benefit of all men. It has always only been for the protection of the privilege of a select group of privileged men. Which is why today we have so many people feeling extremely betrayed and let down by the world even though the patriarchy is still effectively everywhere. They think they're being screwed by the fact that women learned to wear pants and go to work and say 'fuck off' to guys they don't want to talk to. But they're not. They're being screwed by that select privileged few, who never cared about anyone else but themselves.
By and large I don’t think we’ve ever lived in a world that promotes a healthy relationship between men and women. If it weren’t for sexual attraction, it’s not clear to me that men and women even like each other as people. Our roles have been carved out since the beginning of time. Straying away from those roles has brought about a tension that has never gone away. I think men have to go through a similar self actualization process that women have gone through. For men however it’s a focus on their emotional development, whereas women wanted to understand their efficacy outside the home and apart from being someone’s wife. Men need to understand who they are outside of being a provider and protector. Perhaps once we strip away how we’ve been socialized, we can finally see each other and actually get along.