Real Men Get Rejected, Too
They’re “overconforming” to common, if exaggerated, notions of masculinity. They’re doing a five-star rendition of what they think manhood requires.
.. As a father, the most obvious way to address this is by example: Take off your mask. Don’t shame your son. Treat women well. From a list by the actress Nicole Stamp come more concrete recommendations: Don’t use gendered insults; don’t call her “sweetie”; and when other guys demean women, tell them to knock it off.
.. if you don’t talk to your children, he argues, they’re left to absorb norms from, most likely, pornography. And what boys learn from porn is that men must dominate and that women like it that way — neither of which is necessarily true.
.. many men’s need for self-aggrandizement, for confirmation about our prowess — what he called the “narcissism of male desire” — shows just how fragile the construct of manhood can be. He blames this on the shaming that goes into making men “manly.” It produces brittle people in constant need of shoring up.
.. men are also hurt by their concepts of masculinity.
.. Rewiring male sexuality shouldn’t be seen as another attack on beleaguered men — the Trumpian interpretation — but as a step toward their own emancipation. As the educator Tony Porter says, “My liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.”
.. He has his 16-year-old son read lots of young adult novels. The idea is to expose boys to a language for talking about feelings — to help make them “relationally and emotionally literate.”
.. we need to teach boys to handle rejection with grace. Tell them about the time the girl you were smitten with dumped you for that guitarist
.. Teach them that good men handle the hurt and confusion of being rebuffed without lashing out
.. what’s remarkable about human males compared with our great ape relatives isn’t our violent nature but the amount of time we spend helping with children and how well we cooperate with others.
Some anthropologists argue that during the Paleolithic — the long stretch of time during which evolution shaped us roughly into what we are today — men and women probably had egalitarian relationships.