The Fragile Man
I wear this black T-shirt relatively often to accompany my Californian baggy dickies and demolished Off-White Reeboks. This particular T-shirt was a gift from my mother, a Native American studies professor at UC Riverside. On the back, far out of reach of my normal gaze, it reads in Big Blue Letters “Rematriate the Land.” I had almost forgotten about this seemingly benign phrase, almost commonplace in the streets of North Oakland and Berkeley, where I grew up. That was until yesterday, when my cousin from New York asked me what it meant.
“Does it mean we ought to make the place we live matriarchal again?” he asked. Not exactly, but that is the general idea. My cousin is a 16-year-old blond boy and talented musician who plays football. But he approached this proclamation with anxious doubt. And so do I. The two of us, both raised in Democratic households and both with brilliant sisters, have been surrounded by rhetoric of this sort our entire lives. “I don’t know,” I said, “it’s some leftist group my mom is a part of.” In walked my father, a chronic political junky.
The conversation that followed was one between three men of three different ages, in three different places in life, about the role of men in the world.
My father, like many liberal men of means, advocated strongly that power should be given to women, that men routinely objectify women more than just sexually, but in board meetings and at family dinner tables—preventing women from sharing their thoughts and wisdom. He was right.
My Cousin, like many 16-year-old boys, was upset. He opened up to my father and me in a moment of vulnerability. He felt that when 16-year-old boys are told to take a back seat, after being told their entire life that not only should they be leaders and have strong careers, but that if they didn’t, they were unsuccessful men, it estranges them from their communities. That when women and authority figures tell him he shouldn’t go into politics, because men have fucked up the world, or he shouldn’t get attention and applause, because men have been getting applauded for the past two millennia while women have been forced to the sidelines, he is crushed. That insecurity, which all 16-year-olds have, that fear about his own future path, festers into anger and frustration. He was right, too.
I understood that frustration all too well. Just last week, I saw an Interview with former President Obama on MSNBC in which he said something I have been saying for the past 6 years since I was a sophomore in high school and saw an intelligent, funny, white male friend, raised in a liberal family, become a QAnon nut job and religious evangelical. Obama said he thinks that in the service of leveling the playing field and bringing girls up, which is the just thing to do, we have neglected the role of boys, and that neglect may have been a mistake.
According to the Pew Research Center, about 70 % of white men voted for Donald Trump, a swing from 2016 and 2020, mostly from young weight men. A man vehemently tearing apart American democracy, who has declared war on science and academia, who has divested from clean energy programs and given free rein for oil companies to wreck America’s nature, who is an egomaniac who has befouled the white house by spending tax money to turn it into his personal palace, complete with a Gladiatorial arena, solid gold upholstery and ball room, just to name a few of his many failings. In other words, these men voted against their interests, and even against what they thought a few years ago. Why?
I would argue it is because of their feelings of aimlessness, resentment, and insecurity, all of which stem from the lack of a new path in the left-wing, democratic culture. These men, whether they be 16 and completely unsure about what their life will bring or 55 and struggling to provide for a family, don’t know where to turn. Even if they don’t want to be sexist and join Trump’s mob, there is no alternative path for them. They can’t take a back seat. They don’t even have a seat at all yet. Women in Oakland and New York are, at least on the surface level, applauded for going into male dominated fields, they are taking on the challenge of paving the way for women in STEM, in medicine, in law, in business, in leadership. At the same time, there is little shame in a woman staying home; that is the fault of a patriarchal world, and they deserve respect—women do much unrecognized labor in the home. In my experience, it is the exact opposite for men. Men in STEM, in medicine, in business, are dismissed as another drop in the bucket or even shamed for perpetuating gender norms. This is especially true of Law and Business, but also of almost all other lucrative careers. Yet men are still expected to provide financially. Men are still expected (by men and women alike) to pay for the first date, to buy girls drinks at the bar, to be able to support a family, to be physically capable of violently defending themselves and the women around them. I feel all those pressures all the time. Yet I also can’t pursue any of the classic careers because that would be falling into gender norms. So should I be a stay-at-home dad? Or what about a teacher? Things I could maybe excel at, but that would not provide me with pride in my community, in myself, as a man.
There is no clear path for insecure men to be successful men in the real world. So these men turn to the right, to “traditional” and sexist values, and they vote for Trump.
So many women I know, and liberal men (especially those who are established in their careers and have earned financial stability and the respect of the world), argue emphatically that the men (and women) who turned to Trump because they couldn’t stomach feminism are suffering from “Male Fragility.” They should “suck it up,” as my dad said. Women have been suffering under the patriarchy for centuries; men need to realize how hard it is to be a woman who lives in our patriarchal world. All that is true and yet beside the point.
When we call one of these men who votes for Trump, or even those like myself or my cousin who don’t, but who are upset, that they are being “Fragile,” we are betraying ourselves and violently pushing allies away. Fragile is a tricky word when it comes to masculinity. In this context, it means that these men are not manly enough, that they are weak. So when we use the term male fragility, we are attempting to shame men, who are already upset about being shamed, by using the very gender norms which we are attempting to defeat!
The term not only pushes these men, who deserve empathy, attention, and most importantly, a pathway to security, but also perpetuates the gender norms that the left wing is supposed to be against. Is it not ok for a man to be vulnerable, or have feelings, or struggle with being lost? Or should they tough it up like they have been told their whole lives?
It is time for us to stop pushing men and boys away and neglecting them. If we want to make the world a better place, if we want to fight against the patriarchy that plagues the world, we need to find a place for men because they are not going anywhere. Men and boys, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc, are all part of this nation and this world, and they deserve a path; they need a path.
It is time for the world to start asking important questions about masculinity and time for men to start asking them out loud. What should it mean to be a man? Sex is a reality (sorry Judith Butler), even if not a binary one, and men and women both deserve to be proud of who they are. They deserve to be proud of their bodies, their physicality, and the way they go through the world. But the old ways of curating that pride are over. I hope that my mother, my sisters, my father, my cousin, America as a whole, and the globe can begin to strive together for a different and better way to be a man.
I don’t know what that way will be, but I am looking forward to discovering it.