Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

Look, I’m a feminist who grew up feminist without thinking about it. I was raised by my grandmother, who’d divorced her abusive husband in the early 70s. I know strong women. And I know that many girls are raised to be Strong Women, and that is good given our cultural context, but it is an awful burden to bear the deep costs of strength.

As a gay queer person who understands the weight of the expectations of both genders, having never identified with the male expectations placed on me, I sought out femininity only to find it equally restrictive.

Y’all… Gender roles are a mess, both of them. ‘What it means to be a woman,’ ‘what it means to be a man’: this is garbage! We don’t have to live like this.

And I know it feels ridiculous to write about the problems of being a man when we’ve all been conditioned to think being a man is the best you could be, but at least hear me out. (And yes, we do raise girls to think men are the best because we raise our girls to be men’s equals rather than, eg, to be the bar that men must meet.) This is especially important for women, but men reading this will find some of their struggles recognized here.

First of all, I notice that many feminists haven’t fully thought through the facts of toxic masculinity. The way men have learned to be in the world, what they’ve learned as socially acceptable, is what is toxic. Men are being poisoned, they are not intentionally poisoning themselves. We don’t blame children for their upbringing, but that upbringing is absolutely worth discussion.

It is only making things worse to blame men for what they were told were the components of being a Man, as if these were innate aspects of half of our species. They have been sold a series of expectations every bit as stringent and destructive as those placed on women. Step back for a moment and sit with that level of confusion: being who you’ve been told you have to be earns you the ire of people calling themselves feminists. Yeah, you’d disdain feminists, too.

An underlying but crucial problem is that a basic tenet of masculinity is to never ‘succumb’ to emotions, which leaves aggression as the only response.

Most men have the emotional intelligence of a toddler. That is the pure truth; I am not being rude or sarcastic. Most men do not have any emotional knowledge of themselves because it would be ‘womanly’ and so identify them as ‘gay.’

Why? What is so awful about being mistaken for gay? Well it wasn’t just girls that the boys around me were using to build a contrastive sense of themselves; it was me, the obviously gay kid. “The Gay One,” as they’d refer to me, as if it were my name. Being a manly boy meant being the opposite of me. It was all but discussed. “No homo” is a fairly late iteration of that.

And yet while he is expected to perform an emotionless existence, expected to break hearts and hurt others without regard for them, he knows inside himself something is wrong. No man is born wanting to be the bad guy.

And why don’t men want to be the Bad Guy? Because they know that hurting people is not right, but they can’t reconcile what they’ve been conditioned to do with what they want to believe of themselves. In doing what they’re told they should, they become what no person wants to be. It is an impossible situation.

I am not asking victims to feel bad for their abusers, but it is essential for everyone, abused, abuser and witness alike, that we recognize the sources of abuse. Why is it that so many men end up perpetrating domestic violence, and why isn’t this changing?

Men aren’t even able to process this contradiction inside themselves: the act of processing emotions, let alone acknowledging them, is regarded as unmanly.

This frustration and anger is a real issue: this is a cumulative trauma seemingly self-inflicted—until it’s remembered that a man who doesn’t meet the expectations of his gender risks the fate to which he’s condemned gay men. He would be risking the worst fate: communal rejection. We are a social species. No one of us has ever been born a loner. Isolatating individuals isolate for the burden of trauma. The lone wolf is a grieving man without any clue how to grieve his traumas. But no one wants isolation without need of it; and even then no one wants to be isolated (rejected) even if they are isolating themselves.

We cannot move forward until we address the inadvertent labeling of men as toxic rather than the kind of person they’ve been raised to become.

We need a feminism that is post-feminism. And I know what I’m saying, so I know why your blood pressure went up so high an airliner just grazed it.

Let’s for one second put ourselves to the side. Take up the position of a male human who has been told in actions and by pop culture what he must become if he wants to belong. Every human child has that one goal of total belonging above all (it is the base of the pyramid of needs, if you like), so they take in the expectations placed on them as conditions of belonging.

But he can’t really think this through because part of manliness is denying himself the cognitive training every human not only deserves but requires. Have you ever been angry but couldn’t figure out why? Didn’t that make you angrier? Sad without knowing why? Didn’t that make you sadder?

But here’s a twist: this male human learns that crying is girly, wimpy, queer. So sadness is out for him. Only rage is ok. Men are aggressive, right? “It’s in their nature!” Spoiler alert: aggression is not inherent, it is a learned outlet.

Meanwhile he’s trying to find a wife, because that’s what makes a boy into a man. Everything tells him that. And so that man needs money, which means subjecting himself to exploitation, which means distance from his wife and his children and his home. It is exhausting and infuriating simultaneously, but the exhaustion drives every other thought from his mind. But then he isn’t able to “provide for his family” on his own income, so his wife has to work, and that humiliates him because he’s been told he is the ‘bread-winner,’ but he can’t quite understand it, and he’s so exhausted he can’t begin to muck through it all in his head, and he feels like a wimp for even having muck to muck through.

Though wildly simplistic, and despite the innumerable intricacies of each real life, this is a good enough broad template for our empathy exercise.

But then, stewing in his rage without being able to understand what’s happening or even allowing himself the supposed luxury of wondering at it, here come women saying they have it so horrible (and they do) and all men are responsible (collectively, and they are not) because all men are bad (collectively, and they are not). And if a man gets caught up in something and dies, he probably knows as he’s dying that no one will mourn him as much as people would mourn the loss of women or children. Does he count at all? But certain women are telling him he’s the only one who counts and the world is his, but he’s only ever known exploitation under capitalist systems and nothing feels like his own.

He has never been able to think about gender as a performance separate from biological anatomy—and despite the state of feminism, neither have most women, when even many scholars can’t quite get it.

He has never really thought consciously about being a man, he just does what is expected of him. But somehow he’s a bad person for it? Can you imagine that confusion?

And yeah he might very well feel threatened because on top of it all, capitalists exploit our biological sex and our genders against us as well to divide us: capitalists tell the men they so happily exploit that those exploited men really have power because they’re men. And it makes our male human feel acknowledged and appreciated, and that is so vanishingly rare in his life. But now here come these folks calling themselves feminists telling him he’s “toxic” and he’s “bad,” because he can’t distinguish between his gender performance and himself anymore than most feminists.

But a man is only a human being. His performance of himself as a man is what we need to be thinking about, not the man himself.

Masculinity is toxic. The performance expected of a “real man” is what is toxic. No man is born toxic. He learns to perform a toxic gender role because his community, the television, everything, told him that’s what he had to do to belong.

We need a post-feminism inclusive of reimagined masculinities. We need to be able to speak to male humans performing a toxic conception of themselves, to be able to separate them from the masks they put on. We need to be able to get to a place where humans are humans first. Whatever anatomy, whatever ‘gender’ if there even remains such a concept, a human is a human is a human. When we can recognize that, we’ll be on the right track.

This post on Reddit is horrifying. But it’s honest. This mess is killing everyone. We all deserve better.