Blueprints and Bond Flicks

I asked GPT for this one. Worked out better than expected.

Twenty thousand genes make me human. One hundred make me male. And though our floor plans are nearly identical — except for contrasting sections within the elevation views — I’ve never thought of myself as anything other than different from a woman. Indeed, four or five year old me once filed a complaint with Mom after my cousin braided my hair because I was a boy and boys don’t wear braids (though I had to have seen it — braided men’s hairstyles predate Snoop, Rick James, and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade [which I just learned]).

My reaction was in line with research suggesting children around that age start to incorporate gender into their identity, often quite strictly. So began my journey from Transformers to James Bond flicks, with stops at the arcade, the weight room, centerfield, and the pony car dealership. But if genetics draws our blueprints, psychology builds our framework, and like genetics, research suggests males and females are mostly similar. The biggest differences researchers have found are in throwing velocity, throwing distance, attitudes toward casual relationships, and incidences of masturbation. They’ve also found a moderate but reliable difference in physical aggression.

Most of us aren’t researchers. We don’t survey structure, we appraise interior design. Not only are we good at noticing speech patterns, hair, makeup, clothes, hobbies, education, food, and more, we are lay essentializers, imbuing the smallest differences with deep meaning. Sometimes this is a useful shortcut. Other times it’s a trap. Such is the case with masculinity.

Masculinity and femininity mostly result from shared beliefs and norms which vary wildly across cultures and are subject to change. But four to eight characteristics have been designated first as traditional (as if they alone painted a complete picture of who a man is) and later as toxic. These characteristics are sometimes blamed for mental health problems and antisocial behavior in men.

Advocates of the idea that masculinity is problematic tend to point to statistics showing that approximately 90% of murders are committed by men and approximately 80% of suicides are completed by men to bolster their argument. However, the argument rests on a shaky foundation: despite being a hallmark of newscasts, both are exceedingly rare. Both are also subject to confounding factors. In the United States, 99.97% of men don’t commit a murder or complete a suicide (approximately 96.8% don’t commit any crime at all), nearly 50% of homicide perpetrators were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the offense (and, apparently, so were 47 – 48% of victims), and there is an association between alcohol use and suicide. If traditional masculinity and the men with the strongest beliefs about masculinity (29% of men, according to one study) were the sole cause of these deaths, one would expect more deaths directly linked to masculinity and fewer to alcohol.

Imagine being on the other side of this conversation. Imagine repeatedly hearing part of your identity — an essential part — isn’t just wrong, but malignant. You might ignore it, but as men feel emotions just as strongly as women (even if we are less expressive), your well-being might decrease as a result. In some cases, it might be enough to leave a friendship. This, at a time when sixteen percent of Americans report feeling lonely or isolated all the time and we could probably use more friends.

Meanwhile, some studies cited by those arguing traditional masculinity is harmful are flawed. One found a relationship between conformity to masculine norms and risky behaviors but uses a sample of men that may not reflect the general population of men. It also fails to state what proportion of men in the sample held traditional masculine beliefs. In another, researchers stated men with strong traditional male beliefs were less likely to seek preventive healthcare but found only a six point difference between men with strong traditional male beliefs and those with more moderate beliefs (71% and 77% respectively) when asking who sought preventive healthcare in the prior year.

Critiques of masculinity are usually well-intentioned. No one wants men to hurt themselves or others, especially if it can be prevented. But if a positive masculinity is to be added to positive psychology, it should be built on a similar foundation as positive psychology: the recognition that helping people through mental health challenges and improving one’s well-being are two different things. It should account for the fact most men are neither violent nor antisocial. And it should account for all the ways men are different from and similar to women (who make up fifty percent of the James Bond audience [which I also just learned]), which means working fully with a man’s sense of who he is rather than asking him to excavate his masculinity.