Off the Beaten Path: What Makes Men Feel Like They’ve Failed in Their Manhood?
Introduction
I’ve recently been reading a community discussion on transgenderism (the feeling that one’s body is not the “correct” sex), autogynephilia (the sexual attraction to oneself) and the relationship of these things to anime, or Japanese cartoons.
While there are a slew of things to unpack here, I don’t want to chase every rabbit I find, but instead focus on my particular prey: What’s the specific thing that makes growing boys and young men feel like they are not masculine, and would be “better” as girls?
To be clear, foremost, I’d like to say that I do in fact believe that there is a true psychological disorder, a gender dysphoria, in which a man or woman feels psychologically compelled to believe that they are in the “wrong” body. I don’t believe that the popular solution is a good one, but that’s neither here nor there. I think that gender dysphoria can be caused by different things, including sexual molestation, manipulation and things of this nature.
That said, I think it can be incited by non-abusive things too, specifically ennui, lethargy, malaise, a lack of bankable skills, poor social skills, no obligations or responsibilities, and no prospects for the future. The type of dysphoria caused by these things is likely not the same as the kind that makes someone confused about why he doesn’t have breasts or a vagina.
Let me try to paint you a picture, here.
The Inciting Incident
What drove me to make this article is another article I was reading, entitled Masculinity, anime, and gender dysphoria, written by someone attributing himself the title of “that Wizard guy,” in which the author attempts to explain the perplexing but apparent connection between male-to-female transsexuals, and anime. It’s obvious that this author has a strong anti-masculinity stance, and considers the problems that men face to be men’s fault. Actually, I agree with that, but for different reasons. In fact, completely opposite reasons. Here’s the upshot:
The author of the article has just finished describing how a young boy might watch various anime cartoons, in particular ones that depict young girls being cute and enjoying life in an idealized, hyper-feminine fashion that is appealing in its sincerity and warmness:
The boy who had repressed positive, life-affirming emotions his whole life has finally found salvation through his cute anime girls who show him how to live life to its fullest. How to be a cheerful person radiating all kinds of love and joy. It’s not merely a superficial attachment. It can be experienced as a very deep, sincere feeling, which finally pulls him out of a life-long depression.
Note that the author suggests that the boy had “repressed positive, life-affirming emotions his whole life.” This is the crux of the argument: Young boys are told that they can’t be like girls, and girls are represented by kindness, sincerity, honesty, friendship, generosity, beauty, et cetera. It is the author’s apparent opinion that men teach their children to suppress all of their nicer, softer emotions and desires so as not to be “sissies,” and after unnaturally doing this for years, an outlet in the form of this anime is discovered. The author goes on.
This is why the boy begins to feel not just regular discomfort with his body, which he finds ugly according to conventional beauty norms; rather, the mere maleness of his body starts to feel like a profound contradiction with what he finally finds within himself. The boy still being brainwashed by masculine ideology, the body causes extreme cognitive dissonance and distress, because it’s connected in his mind with the polar opposite of his newly found true and inner self. If I’m a cute, soft, cheerful girl on the inside, he thinks, how could I possibly have a manly body like this? How creepy, disgusting, and plain ridiculous would I look behaving like the cute girl that I am on the inside, when I’m going through all the motions with this male body? [emphasis mine]
So what we see here is, I think, the major flaw in the author’s theory, and the primary catalyst for my writing of this article. As a man, and furthermore a man who has experienced this kind of gender dysphoria (and autogynephilia I’m a little ashamed to admit) I believe I have a better theory than the notion that men are teaching their sons to suppress their emotions and act like mindless, aggressive automatons. You can discern by my language that I’m unimpressed with this author’s theory, to say the least. This kind of reductionist conclusion would be as absurd as me suggesting that women should, “Stop teaching their daughters that frilly dresses and crying at every available opportunity are the path to femininity.” If your best guess at why men have problems is founded on the most absurd and uncharitable stereotypes, then of course your conclusion will be flawed.
So that said, here’s my own theory, based partly on experience.
First of all, it’s complicated. I normally hate anyone who says anything is complicated because it usually means that someone is about to conceal something simple behind a lot of false complexity, but in fact, in this instance, I believe that it’s not any single thing that causes the issue of men feeling that they should become women, that they’d “be better” as women; and furthermore, this may only describe one particular form of gender dysphoria. In any case, here it goes:
It begins with Father’s and Mother’s teaching. You are a boy, you are a man. You have certain responsibilities and obligations. I was never taught, “Boys don’t cry.” In fact, while my father is what I consider to be a nearly ideal masculine man, and might have raised us in more or less that fashion, my mother refused to allow us to be treated like children who should have no opinion. She was insistent that we have a voice, that we feel that our feelings and thoughts mattered. I think this was a good thing on her part. The issue is that my father was not particularly. . . patient, I suppose, and he didn’t engage with us as much as he, I’m seeing in retrospect, should have. I played ball with him maybe a couple of times growing up. He rarely taught us anything useful, rarely put the hammer in our hands, my and my brother’s, and forced us to learn, to do, to create or repair. Instead we watched him do it from afar, and rather than become masculine—that is, become useful in the sorts of ways that men are built for—we instead watched him be masculine, and ultimately I believe this instilled a small, pernicious seed: He was something that we were not.
On that note, Louis L’Amour is an old novelist, a storyteller in the truest sense, and in his books the children, during the Wild West period in, I think, the mid 1800s, were always pining for adulthood. The boys, in particular, were always testing their strength, wrestling, trying to make loops with a length of rope, taking care of horses, trying to make a penny or two doing little jobs here and there. One young man, a full adult but early in his adult years, was challenged at one point on his manhood, and he flexed his bicep. “Who can say I’m not a man?” In other words, he had labored hard, and the muscle was a sign of that.
The point I’m making is twofold: One, that manhood is doing, and thereby being. It’s not about suppressing one’s emotions or acting “tough”; it was about providing, caring, working, doing what needs to be done in the capacity that you can do it. Secondly, and more importantly for now, it’s that there was a time when kids were always looking forward to being an adult, and that represented responsibility and respect. Kids didn’t want to be considered kids. They didn’t want to be thought of as children, as weak, as incapable or incompetent or immature. Growing up, you might recall conversations in the school hallway about what maturity means. Perhaps you made a joke and you were told you were immature because of it. I recall thinking, during a conversation like this as a child, “Being silly sometimes doesn’t automatically mean you’re not mature.” There were always those who were trying so hard to be adults that they forgot to learn what adulthood is. Me? I never was trying to be an adult, and I didn’t figure out how to do it until I was nearly 25.
So what happened next? I became a teenager. I was home-schooled, thus stunting some of my social development, which I’m sure contributed, but perhaps not in the way you think. Let’s keep going. I got my GED at a fairly young age, younger than most graduate high school. I got my first job, as a lifeguard, at 14, which thinking back sounds a little absurd. A fourteen year old lifeguard? So what else contributed to my feelings of inadequacy? because indeed that’s what I’m describing here: Feelings of inadequacy. And what made me feel inadequate? I was fat. I felt that I was never meant to be fat, that it didn’t fit me. I’m sure others have thought the same. I was weak. I had no real muscle mass. Next to other men I felt weak and irrelevant, foolish even: Incapable, inept, bumbling, feckless. Next to women I felt even more doddering, brutish in only the most slovenly ways, at best a goofy jester, beneath their contempt. I didn’t possess any of the qualities that I associated with masculinity.
Some years later I went to college, but I hadn’t really learned how to study. I took too many classes at once, floundered, gave up, and then was quietly asked to not return at the end of the semester because I had not applied myself. It’s difficult for me to write these words. I have since then developed greatly as a person, and discussed this with little emotional response, but writing it here, as if it were a memoir, has caused it to take on a different tone whose resonance is ringing a particular emotional bell within me.
So I had failed, again it seemed. I was not handy around the house. I was weak. I was fat, and therefore unattractive. I had no prospects in life, not for a job, and consequently not for a house and property. At home I sat on the computer all day, playing video games or chatting online. I was going nowhere, and I knew it, and this didn’t make me feel like a failure as a person, but a failure as a man. Specifically, as a man. I felt out of place and bloated in my own body.
Now there is a more embarrassing aspect of all of this. If the above were all there was, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so complicated, as I’d expressed earlier, but there is one more thing.
The prospect of getting a woman, and especially getting the kind of woman I wanted, was dismal. Looking back, it’s obvious that I in no way made myself appealing to women, and I did realize that at some point and took steps to improve, although I’d suggest that the simple desire to be a better person in general was the main impetus for those improvements. Prior to that, however, my thoughts were compounded: I could never get a woman. Part of that was my fault, as I’d failed to live up to manhood in any capacity, that being another bitter consideration. Finally, even if I could get a woman, she would not be the type of woman I wanted. Women were too masculine, too confrontational, too slutty (that was my thinking) and too brutish, demanding and lacking the softness and femininity for which I longed.
We reach the final of a menagerie of issues that stack one upon another to create a tumultuous, confused, frustrated and miserable individual, and to make this point I’d like to quote again Mr. Wizard, whom I hope doesn’t mind if I use his middle name:
This is why the boy begins to feel not just regular discomfort with his body, which he finds ugly according to conventional beauty norms; rather, the mere maleness of his body starts to feel like a profound contradiction with what he finally finds within himself.
[Emphasis mine]
Forgive my repetition, but this is important to me, and I admit that it makes my blood boil to read this: It’s not “conventional beauty norms” alone that cause a boy to find his seemingly inadequate body disgusting, and not the belief that positive emotions are reserved for females: It’s that he believes women hate men.
I admit that this seems like a logical leap, but it was certainly my experience. I know that it’s been discussed to death, but if you watch television you see commercial after commercial showing the male being a bumbling idiot, rescued by his wife’s mundane heroics and superior knowledge. If you listen to the vast number of feminists on twitter and, at the time it was popular, tumblr, and if you suck at engaging with women (or if you suck at engaging with everyone in general, I might add) you could begin to develop the belief that women hate men, that men are disgusting, hairy, apish brutes. It’s not entirely logical: Sure, you’ll think to yourself, if I were 6’2’’ and 180lbs of raw muscle, then fine, but other than that. . . . I’m just an overweight, disgusting male. There is nothing lovely about men. A woman just has to exist and she’s loved. As long as she isn’t 100lbs overweight she’s seen positively by everyone, whereas I feel some kinship with femininity, I’m like a woman, only I’m this obese monster. If only I were a woman.
Naturally, this is a disservice to women, this thinking, but it comes from bitterness and a feeling of worthlessness. It doesn’t excuse a man’s continued languishing in worthlessness, or heaven forbid he become violent. Ultimately, there is a lot of compounding factors, as I mentioned. Any one, individually, would likely not penetrate the psyche, would be a shrugged shoulder or a curious thought. Together, however, they are like books: A book’s weight is trivial. Stack ten thick volumes together and it’s astounding how the weight adds up. Then try holding them for the next decade.
Yeah.
Put It Together
Put these things together, and what do you get? Well, I wasn’t a man, and women weren’t women. Shoot, I’d make a better woman than women do. In fact, I think I will.
Writing this now, I’m struck by a compassion to women, Western women in particular, as they have been encouraged and bullied to think a certain way themselves, whether or not it’s contrary to their natures as individuals. Rather than this resulting in them languishing in loneliness in their young age, it seems to result more in them languishing in loneliness in their old age. With their ten cats. Not a significantly better fate than the men’s: Both have become something that they can never fully revert from due to an inundation with bad theories about the nature of men and women.
In any case, the issue, as I see it, is not one of emotional repression. It’s not even one of necessarily believing oneself to be a woman, or overtly feminine. I was entirely aware of my masculine features that made my “femininity” a farce, but I generally chalked up my failure to look like an actual female to my weight, or perhaps my unattractiveness in general. I did not consider myself to be particularly masculine. What an irony that later, when I came to accept my masculinity, I’d realize that I indeed did have masculine features, and I would learn to glory in them: Bigger chest, broader shoulders, great muscle mass and a hairy body are things I now celebrate as masculine traits. I’m conscious and appreciative of my maleness, not only in and of itself, but in contrast to femininity. I also now have a girlfriend who herself had to come to terms with, and now greatly appreciates, her own nature: her femininity.
I’m tempted to say that what made me come around and become a better person was getting a job and socializing, but I’d been doing that for years. I think it might have been getting a job and actually keeping my own money. The first job I ever had where I was allowed to keep every dime I earned (unless an emergency came up) was the same job where I started making friends, saving money and developing myself as a person. I bought my first car, got my driver’s license and experienced the freedom and responsibilities that come with a job. I think, at least in some ways, that it was gaining independence and, perhaps more significantly, responsibilities, that changed me.
Fortunately, I didn’t have a “support group” encouraging me to transition, or suggesting that, yes, I probably was a girl. Looking at the bill of goods that so many young men have been sold, I can be grateful in the simple fact that I’m physically alright. I haven’t been mutilated or chemically altered in some irreversible fashion. It’s a boon whose very existence is a tragedy, and it is not one that every young man has.
Obviously, yielding and “becoming a woman” is not the answer, and that Mr. Wizard Guy and I agree on. Neither is “embracing one’s feminine side,” as he seems to be suggesting, the answer. I think what a lot of feminists would like to say is that masculinity isn’t real, or is a bad thing, or at least all of our conceptions of it—strength, perseverance, the giving and expectation of earned respect, being a provider—are incorrect or toxic or ruinous.
It was not being expected to be something I didn’t want to be that drove me to despair, nor was it overbearing expectations: No one was harder on me than I was on myself, yet—and this is key—I made no effort to become the man that I wanted to be. I lamented my weakness, but did not even attempt to drive that weakness out. I’ll be the first to say that this was, in no insignificant part, a fault of my parents. I was home-schooled, but not socialized in other ways; I was given school smarts, but taught nothing practical; I was given no responsibilities for my first thirteen years of life, and then much was thrust upon me, and in my confusion I withdrew, carefully counted and coveted my failures, mistakes and miseries, and then I was too old for parents to help, had no friends, and such friends that I might have had were helpless to assist as I had whipped up internally a frothing madness. The overflow was a poison to relationships, and to my own mind.
Escaping the Fate
So, what do I recommend? I’m no expert, obviously, but I’ve at least been there. Like so many of us, in so many areas of life, the change occurred slowly, and then all at once, and now it’s been so long I barely recall what it was specifically that fixed the issue. There were numerous coinciding factors, though, and taken together, I think the solution is fairly simple:
Improve yourself.
Get a job. Tear yourself from those leaching from you, or from whom you’re leaching. Begin to work out, have a regiment and goals in that regard. Do cardio. I used to be able to jog only thirty seconds before having to stop. I used the Zombies! Run app for the phone and built up to being capable of jogging for over forty minutes straight. I went from being utterly weak to lifting 100lbs on the weight machine, and I’m sure I could do even more now. I used to be able to do no pull-ups, and worked my way up to doing eleven consecutive pull-ups without kipping. I was broke, and now have almost seven-thousand dollars in savings.
If you’re bad with people, then talk to people and work on your people skills. Listen to the person to whom you’re talking, care about the other person. It might seem fake, you might feel like you’re pretending, but what you have to remember is that not every engagement is about you. What would even be the point of that? To use everyone else as a tool for you to entertain yourself? When you socialize you are socializing, you are interacting with other humans who also have feelings and goals and ideas and if you treat them like props who should act like you expect them to act, then you’re hurting both them and yourself. They will cast you out, rightfully so, and you will use that as an excuse to withdraw further and feel miserable and special.
Here’s another one: You are not precious or special, and you don’t need to be. Whoever told you that it was important to be special was an idiot. Being a normal, boring 9-5 guy who takes care of his family is a noble thing. If you want to be special though, then find ways that are possible, ways that are possible for you. If you want to learn a martial art there are plenty of schools in every state to teach it. These days we have the internet so you could likely learn a good bit using that. If you know that you’re not the type to really learn martial arts then become a really good jogger, or go to a trade school and become a plumber, A/C repairman or a welder. If you’ve always wanted to write or draw, then start learning. Start at the fundamental basics and build your way up.
Save yourself by not thinking so much, and instead doing. An idle mind is the devil’s workshop. It’s pernicious. It will destroy you. Stop thinking. Start doing, anything. People talk about how we need another war. This isn’t pining for the death of the young or for destructive conflict. It’s a wish for something to do. We are all too busy thinking, thinking and thinking, in a stalemate, inert, boiling, frothing and running over. Stop thinking.
Start doing. It’s the only way to save yourself, and others from you.
