"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
private hells
"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.
The second poster’s story so clearly shows why a man’s partner being their only emotional support is devastating to both people in the relationship, yet this idea is still so insidiously pervasive in our society. No one wins.
I am mid thirties male and getting divorced. Making friends as an adult is so hard. Even going to things I like, doesn't guarantee I'll click with anyone there really.
I remember something similar to this when my mom died 15 years ago. Lots of aunt's and friends reaching out to my sister to support her, traveling across the country to visit. I don't think I ever even got a note.
But I do have the thing where I probably wouldn't have cared either, if not for watching the support my sister got, it never would have occurred to me someone could do those things. And I know those people aren't my actual friends, so I really had zero expectations from them. I think it was more the insult on top of injury that bothered me. "Not only do we not care, but we're going to show you what we would be doing if we did care."
I never took this as a boy/girl thing though. I never fit in in life, still to this day. Just sorta expected.
my condolences
How did "grieve different" become don't grieve at all? I'd be willing to bet that if men started grieving exactly like women, they still wouldn't get the support they need.
Even worse, we'd probably get made fun of
I just watched Netflix anime 'Blue Eye Samurai.' Highly recommended. There's a scene where a princess is talking to the madam of a notorious bordello that specializes in the unusual. The madam goes on and on about how weak and fragile men are, how they need their egos massaged and need to feel supported.
After reading the post, I realized that this is a pretty common trope in fiction; sex workers talking about how most of their clients are only there because they need something that their jobs/families/communities deny them.
Just a thought.
It's not just a thing in fiction either; I've seen plenty of threads and discussions over the years where real-life sex workers have essentially been saying the same thing. A lot of men are lonely.
That's what's amazing to me. Everyone knows about it, but it's treated like a big secret.
Even in Japanese love hotels, I've heard it's common for men to book someone and just..cuddle for a while. Fall asleep being held. I don't have to live it to believe it.
Gotta love that even the very emotional "men have feelings and need support too" post ends with "treat them as wretched because they are wretched." Absolutely fucking tonedeaf to bring that type of negativity and derogatory generalization about men to this context. Big "not all men, but..." energy
Now you're reading it incorrectly: it is "treat [wretched people] as wretched because [wretched people] are wretched", not "treat [men] as wretched because [men] are wretched "
I don't read it that way. For me they argue that you should take a different view on wretched people and not blame their personality on their gender.
It's less that the statement is false. But more that the statement is being made at all.
It's like writing a post about how people are too quick to dismiss women as being overemotional, and someone commenting on it by saying
I'm not saying you have to be nice to or defend hysterical women, but don't treat them as crazy just because they are women. Treat them as crazy because they are crazy.
It's just bringing up a stereotype that acts as an excuse to deny men empathy, in the same way as mine does to dismiss women.
I don't disagree with the general message of "Judge people for who they are", but the way it's written is tone death at best.
Maybe the circle they're in is just pretty misandrist so it needs saying. But it just seems unnecessary to me.
Ah, fuck it. We’re supposed to suffer in silence. We’re men. Man up, guys! Grit your teeth and bear it! (/s)
No one checks on me and that’s fine. I don’t really need people to check on me like I’m fragile. I fight my own battles; always have, always will. But for those who do need the more frequent check-ins, they should absolutely have them and should be able to ask for them without fear of ridicule or mockery.
The fact that, statistically speaking, no one cares about lonely folk is pretty discouraging, but you can’t force people to care. And even if you could, it wouldn’t be worthwhile or heartfelt. I sure as hell don’t want people to feel like they have to give a shit.
Stay strong, gents. It’s not weak to ask for help if you need it, even from internet strangers.
I remember when I was having a really rough time at work. My boss was pressuring me into leaving due to repeated underperformance, and I was working well into the night and all of my weekends, for a solid year and a half.
One day I came back from work fully dejected, feeling like a useless sack of dumb crap. My roommate asked me what was up and why we never hang out.
I told him that it was all just a bit too much. His reaction: "man up, or quit." The automatic lack of sympathy stunned me a little, though he might have been right that I really should have just quit. (Full story: I didn't, it did get better, and I even turned some of my detractors into friends, but it was a long road, and I definitely have an unhealthy relationship with work.)
International Men's Day -- 19th of November.
https://internationalmensday.com/
Talk to each other. Don't let someone go through their life alone.
Yesterday I had a comment from a woman friend along the line of "my daughter says you're always serious but nice. You should work on that". She didn't think of asking me why I am always serious...
I used to be all feminism when I was younger. Now I have two kids, I realized man do a sht ton of things without being recognized. It's always that "you are the man, you are supposed to do it" kind of thing. But when it's the other way around like when I asked the ladies what about their "women duties", it's all excuse and argument. It can suck balls being a responsible man.
You can be both a feminist and recognize that men have major struggles too, they're not mutually exclusive
Also, isn't that still under the umbrella of feminism? Feminism isn't "only women rule". Recognizing gender stereotypes affecting men's mental health sounds very much like a feminist thing.
I felt very much the same way when I was trying to figure out what was going on and what I believed. What I ultimately landed on is that feminism is really the only game in town when it comes to identifying what is actually happening. I found Bell Hooks' The Will To Change immensely useful in sorting it out -- it's not men vs women, it's the patriarchy vs all of us. One thing she wrote in that book that really resonated with me, and is basically what this post is about, is something along the lines of "the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of men is the destruction of their own emotional selves."
As a military veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, this shit hits home. I've seen men break down and men who push it down until it is safe to let the feelings come out. Both are common, but for men you have to be able to keep the emotions in during a crisis situation. The men and women who are unable to do that pose risks of sudden suicide or uncontrollable behavior. Everyone has to let them out, that is extremely important.
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