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Check on your male friends to see if they need help
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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"Men are victims of the patriarchy too" is an incredibly powerful message that I wish more men understood.
"You're gay if you don't like football", "you're wasting your life if you don't want to get married and have kids", "you'll never find a husband if you don't wear makeup", "you're not a real man if you cry". The patriarchy is sexist to everyone, and that's why everyone should give a shit.
When I found out the patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I lost interest.
It's like when you talk to a small business owner. They'll talk about how the banks and big companies screw them left and right, but they'll also tell you that they think they'll end up Bill Gates. Same delusion
Heads up, the message you're replying to was a joke from the Barbie movie.
The amount of people who didn't understand the whole thing about ken in that movie was scary.
No shit! I wanted to cry for him. I GOT him.
And my fiancé did weep a little during "the speech".
That movie hit hard. I'd love a man version of that speech, but it would have been wildly out-of-place, and I wouldn't have wanted America Ferrera's rant to have been watered down by a "both sides" thing.
"What are your thoughts on the "Barbie" movie?", would be a great dating site question for any of us. Weed out the assholes in a hurry.
I find it interesting that, under a post on how men and, even more often, women, ignore men's mental health, you feel the need to specify that it's the men that lack understanding of the problem.
In conversations I've had around this I've found that women get this immediately, even if they hadn't considered it before. But men tend to be very resistant to the idea.
Keep in mind, just because someone "gets it" that guys can need emotional support, it doesn't mean they have deprogrammed themselves from the patriarchy.
In the very story in the post, the wife said she repeatedly brought it up to others and they (including women) still didn't ACTUALLY provide support to her husband.
If anything, "resisting the idea" sounds an awful lot like "not wanting to set yourself up for disappointment".
I hate this way of putting it, especially because it puts the blame on a single gender. It's not JUST men who shoehorn people into gender roles, we all do it.
It's off putting to me and I tend to dismiss the entire thing because it basically says that men being bad also hurts men. Had it said that men also are victims of gender roles I would immediately agree, and I can't imagine that I'm the only one who feels this way.
That's why it's so important to specify that men are victims of patriarchy, not victims of men. Everyone, regardless of gender, has an environmental tendency to reinforce the societal structure that we label "Patriarchy", as you say (and I/many agree), but there's far more to it than the idea of "men first women second". The idea behind the phrase is not "everyone vs. men" but rather "everyone vs. harmful but deeply engrained social construct".
Then why use the label "Patriarchy"? It has a very specific meaning that I don't feel applies to many western societies and definitely not to the sociatal structure and norms that we happen to live in, regardless of who is in charge. I think we agree on everything but the term.
Because it still puts men on top in most ways, even while it hurts them too.
And it definitely applies to all western societies.
You can see it in this very story. "Men are strong, they don't need help. Women are weak and emotional, that's why they need support." Yeah, it's devastating for men in this situation, but it's the same logic which makes people say men are natural leaders or whatever.
because those gender roles are largely decided by men
As a father who is very involved in my kids’ life, I feel this frequently. At the start of each school year I submit my contact info as the primary contact info and yet sometimes emails will circulate among the class moms anyway. Or I’ll get a text from another kid’s mom asking for my wife’s number so they can plan something.
When we started making friends with parents of my kid, all the moms in the group created a chat group which they still use to this day. The dads didn’t make one because that’s just not a thing you do, and I wasn’t invited to the moms group, even though I knew them at least as well as she did, and I am the extrovert and my wife is the introvert. So I frequently feel lonely and isolated (I also WFH) and my wife is socially overwhelmed.
Yes I could just buck the system and try to get the dads to have a group, or have my wife add me into the moms group, or similar things in other areas of life. But that’s the point: any time I do that I’ll be going against the grain.
I have struggled so hard with this. My child's school cannot seem to understand that I, the father, am the one who primarily takes care of my daughter. My wife and I have started to flat out refuse to give the school my wife's contact info, even as an "emergency contact", just to make them communicate with me. I did manage to make a bunch of faculty at her old school mad when I asked, publicly, why they felt the need to discriminate against me when trying to contact patents, and this had the unintended effect of making a bunch of other fathers in the group pop up and ask the same question. Now my daughter is old enough that she, herself, will call them out on it. Having a ten year old lose her shit and tell the teacher that she needs to contact the right parent is really funny, almost as funny as when they insisted on contacting my wife instead of me, again, to complain that my kid had yelled at them for not contacting me.
I deal with this also except my ex abandoned us to move states away. She will still get notifications via email or text that she forwarded to me because they have her information on file. They have her information because I was forced to provide divorce paperwork showing I had custody of the kids to enroll them in school. Wonder how many moms get asked for paperwork proving custody when they try enrolling their kids in school. It’s reduced over the last three years but the first couple were ridiculous. Finally have a mom of one kid and dad of another kid that recognize I’m a parent to my children. Everything is stupid though. Every doctors apt, school visit, dentist apt, hell even trips to the store. Some BS content like “where’s mom” or “oh you’re filling in today”. I’m so sick of it. I cope by telling myself that at least it would be worse if the love of my life died horrifically instead of going bananas and abandoning us and I had to deal with this shit. At some point I’m worried I’ll snap at people but I never want to say anything negative about her around the kids.
I'm not even a parent and this shit pisses me off.
Very similar. With our work schedules I end up spending more time with the kids than Mom does. My commute is much shorter and I can work from home a day or so a week. I feel like there is this whole network I am freezed out of.
Agreed.
My husband has had virtually no emotional support from anyone, so much so that he doesn't understand how to communicate any of his feelings.
"How do you feel?" "I don't know" "Can I do something to help?" "I don't know"
I definitely don't ignore his mental health but his lack of communication drives me up the pole. Often I have to just walk away out of frustration. I wish I understood how to get through to him without it making me want to bash my own skull against the wall. I think a big part of it is that he doesn't want to admit that he has any emotions at all
Yeah. That's real fun isn't it? And I really don't know. I'm luckier than most men, in that I have an understanding wife who doesn't use my emotions against me.
Therapy and/or an ADHD diagnosis (not joking, one symptom of neuroatypical people is the inability to identify emotions in themselves (like me lol)).
I think it's sadly one of those things that people don't understand until it happens to them. They'll leave other men to their private hells and when it's their turn they wonder why everyone has abandoned them like they did other men so many times before.
"Hanging on in quiet desperation...". Huh. That lyric always hit home, didn't know why. LOL, I'm not even English!
We have all learned through experience to shut the fuck up. I've dated, a lot in the past 35-years of adulthood. Know what happens when a woman sees you cry? Dumped. Every. Damned. Time. And none of them ever expressed that it was a problem. But after enough experience, even my dumb ass can draw a cause -> effect line. And some asshole will try to be kind and say, "She wasn't a good person anyway!" Whatever. I still got dumped, over and over again. STFU, both of us.
Hell, I'm getting married next week. Third time's a charm! Seriously, no woman has ever loved me so deeply. No woman has ever treated me so finely. I have never felt so comfortable, and more importantly, secure with a woman. It's all a bit hard to get my head around, honestly struggling to internalize it. But read on...
Last night I tried to tell her how much cracking stress I'm under this month.
"Oh! You are having second thoughts about marrying me?" (Her tone was "scared shitless", not "antagonistic".)
See what I mean guys? I should have just sucked it up. All I did was hurt her and gained nothing for my own mental health.
We gain nothing, and stand to lose everything, by showing weakness to our women. It's not their fault and I'm not condemning them. They're every bit the primates we are.
EDIT: She just came home from work and her first words were, "Are you still scared?" Damn what a woman. And how so very nice to be wrong this time.
Sounds like you finally found the right woman.
I knew he was the one when my husband (then boyfriend) cried in the theater when (spoiler alert) ET died. I wish more women had empathy for men's unique struggles, but some of us do exist.
After his best friend moved away, my husband gradually settled into this dynamic where I was his only emotional support. Meanwhile I actively nurtured friendships with several women in my life. When he died, I had a network of people checking on me. I shudder to think how he would have fared if the situation were reversed.
Many friends and family asked me how they could help. I always replied that I wanted them to include my then-21-year-old son in their family plans occasionally, especially those who could provide a male role model. I asked male friends and relatives to check in on him occasionally and encourage him as he struggled through a deep depression to finish his degree. Only one person bothered. I am still angry about this.
We all need to be the change we want to see. Women need to be more aware and more accepting of men's emotions. Men need to work harder at forming and maintaining deep friendships. Look around and notice men in your circle who are struggling. Ask yourself how you can reach out to them.
Society is doing a crap job at creating ways for men to get support. So stop waiting for that to happen and do it yourself.
It sounds like you have enough self knowledge to begin to connect with your emotions. I suggest you tune your soon-to-be wife into this process, it sounds like she will be understanding when you get on the same page. Best of luck!
Yeah, the 99% of us have far more in common with each other than with the 1%. It's oligarchy through plutocracy, not patriarchy.
Ideals of masculinity aren't instilled in children by the 1%, they are perpetuated by parents and peers at a personal level.
Nah. It's just an attempt to steer the conversation back to women's issues. It's just less on the nose than "...And that's why you need feminism^TM^!"
I'm not quite sure what you're saying here? You don't think that the masculinity that gets taught to men is a problem for their mental health?
I'm saying it has the same energy as one of those insufferable Christians popping their heads into every conversation at all and saying "And that's why ya'll need Jesus^TM^."
Someone starts blabbering about the "patriarchy" in a discussion about men's issues, they're not contributing to the discussion. They don't genuinely care about the topic at hand. They've found an excuse to insert themselves into conversation.
I might really misunderstand what patriarchy means in this context. But I'm using the definition "a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it".
I don't see how this is relevant to the "masculinity that gets taught to men", as this idea is also perpetuated by women, so I don't see how having a matriarchal or neutral society would fix this.
It seems to be more the result of the expectation that men need to be providers and protectors, which can be an expectation regardless of if the society is patriarchal or matriarchal or neither.
Sorry if I'm being ignorant. I'm just trying to understand better
To my mind the central mechanism for systemic control by the patriarchy is enforcement of gender roles. Men should be like this, women should be like that. Of course there will be ideas of masculinity in any society, patriarchal or not, but I think the aggressive enforcement of those roles and punishment for deviation from them is specifically an aspect of patriarchal systems.
On top of that, given the systematic exclusion of men from child rearing, re teaching elementary school, babysitting, or even parenting while male is all but criminalized in the Western world so nearly no men serve in those roles, I'm left to question who is responsible for "the masculinity that gets taught to men."
Thanks for articulating that. I've always felt that the title for a phenomenon that oppresses people based on their gender shouldn't be named for one of them. It doesn't help anyone.
Men understand it already. It's the women who don't.
I don't find this to be true, in my experience. Most men I've discussed this with are very resistant to the idea.
Men do understand it. We live through it every day. It's the women who need to understand it. It's the women who seem to think that men have great lives and everything is given to them. That's not the case at all.
Men might understand that they are unhappy, but I don't think most men blame that on the cultural ideals of masculity that are pushed on them their whole lives. If most men do understand that, then why do they struggle so much to change? The common messaging in men's mental health is usually around telling men that it is ok to have feelings, ok to talk about them, ok to cry and show emotions. If men understand that they are being victimised by other men (and themselves) and the social pressures to conform, why is it so difficult to get those messages through to them?
And I mean, the fact that you feel the need throw blame on women here (who are also victimised by the same system) seems like you're not actually blaming the patriarchy?
You seem to conflate "men" and "patriarchy".
It's all very much a class war that gets masqueraded as a sex/political war
There can be more than one thing.
Maybe it is just that I have had a long day, but please explain how the wealth devide is causing people to feel like they need to conform to toxic gender roles.
The one track mind of communists
Well if there were any force in history with such a well-established power to affect change besides wealth we might build a second track.
!mensliberation@lemmy.ca
Most feminists don't even acknowledge this. Or they say even if men are victims, they deserve it for participating in the patriarchy.
Wrong, this is something almost universally acknowledged in feminist circles.