Post by Jaga on Jan 13, 2019 22:32:37 GMT -7
Guys, what do you think about it? I believe that men deserve the same care as women and minorities. Too many commit suicide or live on the margin of the society. I also believe that there is a time for traditional gender roles to go away.
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-traditional-masculinity-hurts-the-men-who-believe-in-it-most/2019/01/12/22d2518a-14fd-11e9-90a8-136fa44b80ba_story.html?utm_term=.dfe6f809864e
How ‘traditional masculinity’ hurts the men who believe in it most
My grandfather is traditionally masculine in most senses of the word: He was a soldier, then a bait-shop owner, then a garbage collector; he rose before dawn most days of his life and I never heard him complain about it. He raised six good kids, he tells funny one-liners, he’s an expert fisherman. He once refused over-the-counter pain meds even while at death’s door.
I’ve been thinking about him lately, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.
More than a decade ago, the American Psychological Association released a set of guidelines for treating women and girls:
....
What the largest psychological organization in the United States had never done was release guidelines for treating men.
...
“Everybody has beliefs about how men should behave,” says Ronald Levant, who was the APA president when the guidelines were initially conceived, and who has worked on them ever since. “We found incredible evidence that the extent to which men strongly endorse those beliefs, it’s strongly associated with negative outcomes.” The more men cling to rigid views of masculinity, the more likely they are to be depressed, or disdainful, or lonely.
...
I covered a men’s rights activist conference a few years ago: Several dozen men — white men, mostly — had flown to a Detroit suburb to talk about how they felt men were under attack. Worse, they said, nobody was paying attention to their suffering.
Some of the men were, as we’d say, “toxic,” (one kept telling me to make him a sandwich, then saying he was joking, then telling me again — ham and cheese on wheat, b----). But a lot of them were just sad. They talked about male suicide rates, male depression, male isolation. They talked, in other words, about a lot of the information included in the new APA guidelines. They were desperate, begging, for someone to pay attention and find a solution.
Most of them, however, were sure the correct solution would have something to do with fixing women. As soon as women would stop taking their jobs, they wouldn’t be depressed anymore. As soon as women would stop categorizing sexual attention as harassment, they wouldn’t be lonely anymore.
...
What’s difficult about the APA’s guidelines is that they ask us to wrestle with a complicated idea: that in a society in which gender roles have historically been rigid — and that rigidity has placed the lion’s share of power in the hands of one of the genders — it’s possible for the rulers to be harmed right along with the ruled. But that’s what bad systems do. They mess up everyone.
...
I told him about my grandfather. How much I loved and respected him. How most everyone who met him respected him. How our family stories centered on him being a good provider and a good man. But also — how I couldn’t remember anyone asking my grandfather how he felt about that. Whether he would have preferred a different life. Whether he had ever felt trapped in the one he had.
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-traditional-masculinity-hurts-the-men-who-believe-in-it-most/2019/01/12/22d2518a-14fd-11e9-90a8-136fa44b80ba_story.html?utm_term=.dfe6f809864e
How ‘traditional masculinity’ hurts the men who believe in it most
My grandfather is traditionally masculine in most senses of the word: He was a soldier, then a bait-shop owner, then a garbage collector; he rose before dawn most days of his life and I never heard him complain about it. He raised six good kids, he tells funny one-liners, he’s an expert fisherman. He once refused over-the-counter pain meds even while at death’s door.
I’ve been thinking about him lately, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.
More than a decade ago, the American Psychological Association released a set of guidelines for treating women and girls:
....
What the largest psychological organization in the United States had never done was release guidelines for treating men.
...
“Everybody has beliefs about how men should behave,” says Ronald Levant, who was the APA president when the guidelines were initially conceived, and who has worked on them ever since. “We found incredible evidence that the extent to which men strongly endorse those beliefs, it’s strongly associated with negative outcomes.” The more men cling to rigid views of masculinity, the more likely they are to be depressed, or disdainful, or lonely.
...
I covered a men’s rights activist conference a few years ago: Several dozen men — white men, mostly — had flown to a Detroit suburb to talk about how they felt men were under attack. Worse, they said, nobody was paying attention to their suffering.
Some of the men were, as we’d say, “toxic,” (one kept telling me to make him a sandwich, then saying he was joking, then telling me again — ham and cheese on wheat, b----). But a lot of them were just sad. They talked about male suicide rates, male depression, male isolation. They talked, in other words, about a lot of the information included in the new APA guidelines. They were desperate, begging, for someone to pay attention and find a solution.
Most of them, however, were sure the correct solution would have something to do with fixing women. As soon as women would stop taking their jobs, they wouldn’t be depressed anymore. As soon as women would stop categorizing sexual attention as harassment, they wouldn’t be lonely anymore.
...
What’s difficult about the APA’s guidelines is that they ask us to wrestle with a complicated idea: that in a society in which gender roles have historically been rigid — and that rigidity has placed the lion’s share of power in the hands of one of the genders — it’s possible for the rulers to be harmed right along with the ruled. But that’s what bad systems do. They mess up everyone.
...
I told him about my grandfather. How much I loved and respected him. How most everyone who met him respected him. How our family stories centered on him being a good provider and a good man. But also — how I couldn’t remember anyone asking my grandfather how he felt about that. Whether he would have preferred a different life. Whether he had ever felt trapped in the one he had.