The past few years have been awash with viral headlines about how men aren’t having a good time. “Dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise”, a direct line from George Matos’ 2022 Psychology Today article about “lonely, single men”, has basically become a feminist meme, as if to say, “Yes, finally women are learning their worth!!”
It’s challenging to discuss issues of suicide, physically dangerous jobs, loneliness/being single, educational outcomes, etc. among men, because even doing so conjures an image of the “men’s right activist”—a terminally-online dude who spends his free time on Reddit forums rehearsing rebuttals to pop feminist talking points, who more often than not simply hates women. Rather than the conversation being “Masculinity is in crisis, therefore let’s hear men out on it and change society in a way that meets men’s needs while also aligning with the long-term goals of feminism”, the conversation is “Masculinity is in crisis, so we must go backward in time to when women had fewer rights”.
The mere premise makes our eyes roll; some guys can’t get a date, so we should stop letting women having credit cards? The state of popular discourse is incredibly frustrating, to the point where we don’t even want to engage with the question of male loneliness at all.
And yet, we must face this issue head on, in a pro-feminist and open-minded way. I’ve written before about the ways that feminism needs men (women need more men to be feminist, and also we need men’s perspectives to sharpen our feminist analysis), but I seldom write about my own experience as a man. As a trans woman, this is a particularly vulnerable topic; our former manhood is often wielded against us as a weapon by transphobes to claim that we can never be women, so most of us shy away from ever acknowledging our past. Still, I contend that if you want to understand what’s going on with gender, ask a trans person; we’ve seen gender from multiple angles, so we have a much better sense of the whole. So today, readers, I’ll be visiting that vulnerable place and dusting off the tome of my past, all to verify for you that, yes, men are having a bad time; their emotional needs aren’t being met, they feel pressure to conform to incredibly high standards, and they’ve lost their place in a changing world.
Here’s the big secret: Masculinity has always been in crisis. “Crisis” is a core feature of masculinity, not a recent change.
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