The problem with saying, “Men are trash”.
I have had men I do not know try to follow me home. One guy in particular followed me for 15 minutes while pleasuring himself in the middle of the day on a high street. When I told some of my girlfriends this, all 5 of them had experienced the same thing— my story was nothing special or unusual. Another time on my way home one evening a random man pushed me so hard in the chest I nearly fell over. When I looked up at him it was clear he was looking for a fight, something he could win and 17 year old me by myself on my way home fit the bill. I looked the man in the face held his gaze but said nothing because everything in his energy was begging me to give him an excuse to hit me. So my silence in that moment possibly got me home safe.
These are the more extreme examples of toxic masculinity, the types when you tell your male friends about them they’re shocked and don’t see themselves or any man they (think) they know in them. But then there are the day-to-day things, with the men that you love or the men that you work with or have to engage with in one manner or another.
I’ve worked with men who identify as feminist and liberal but have thought nothing of trying to press up against me in a lift. I’ve worked with men who have made sexual innuendos about me during group work discussions for workshops for children. Of course I was the only woman in that scenario and every guy there laughed at the idea of a warm up game where every one passes between my legs. I’ve had men who identify as liberal and feminist make up things about me that were untrue in order to manipulate the way people perceived me and to soothe their own threatened and bruised egos.
I despise the phrase women are “strong” largely because for the most part, we have no choice but to be. There is no courage of choice in this matter, we are not strong because we choose to be we are strong because if we fall apart often, there is no one to catch us or emotionally hold space for us. And men mistake this as strength instead of recognising it as resilience against the strain on our backs mostly caused by their brokenness. And we women are used to it, we watched our mothers carry that strain and we are socialised to aspire to that kind of “strength” that tolerates, normalises and accepts the dysfunction of men and often rebrands it love.
I say all this as preface to say that I fully understand why women say, “men are trash”, every woman is within her right to feel that way, however, there is also a larger part of me that deeply disagrees. I think the phrase “men are trash” is pain disguising itself as truth.
Men are not trash they are dysfunctional, each one on varying different levels but they are all conditioned by the ideals of toxic masculinity —just as women are too but in a different way. To say men are trash is to say they are of no use, no worth or purpose and I do not believe that neither will I co-sign that. Their dysfunction disappoints because the truth is that we want and need them to show up better in the world. I would argue that when we say, “Men are trash”, we mean to say, “Your brokenness breaks me”. It is an acknowledgement that they are deeply dysfunctional but this truth is spoken through the voice of our pain but the voice of pain only has wisdom when you can identify it and own it as pain and not as truth.
Toxic masculinity is the oppression of men through the oppression of women and one of the insidious ways this culture is perpetuated and kept alive is through language. Language subtly conditions and frames our perspective.
We can see this in the way discussions about rape focus on how women can avoid being raped instead of how men must not rape. It’s in the way men are never held accountable for their behaviour because “boys will be boys”. And so I think that, “Men are trash”, is just another phrase in that pile. It is a wreck-less statement and diverts from genuine conversations on healing.
Men are socialised to hate and oppress the feminine within themselves and the feminine they perceive in the world. Men are conditioned culturally, socially, and through the reinforcement of media on how to look at the female body. How to only see it as a thing of pleasure and desire which is why some are offended by a mother breastfeeding, the female body is so deeply oversexulized in the minds they cannot ever see outside the context of sex.
Boys are taught to attach and define their sense of self to owning and dominating things and so the most acceptable way to be a man is to dominate. There is no power in softness; there is no power in owning how you feel. Alpha has come to mean one who dominates without feeling instead of one who leads his community with feeling. The idea or image of the alpha male has been distorted and demonised to the degree that there are few examples of what it means to lead as a man with a healthy sense of self.
Ultimately, I think what the “men are trash” phrase maybe wants to do but fails to, is to challenge men to hold themselves and each other accountable for their own healing. The excuses of struggling to say how you feel or whatever else is no longer good enough. If you see a problem, establish spaces for yourself and other men to deal with them. Men need to own that masculine energy is failing to show up healthily in the world and that is largely their responsibility to fix.
It has become cool and acceptable to be mean, callous and down right disrespectful in the name of “woke”. Social media has given social justice a great platform to voice things and trigger conversations that would otherwise be ignored, but it has also created new ways in which we can perform our sense of “wokeness” without having to look at ourselves and have real conversations about what it means to heal, and what that looks like as a process or how we even begin to progress towards that.
I often see things that make me question if the goal is even healing or are we so at home with our pain now that we just love the song of it? Has the story of the wound become our power?
Instead of “men are trash”, I prefer to say, men are dysfunctional. I try my best, though I fall short at times, but I try my best to align my actions with that which brings healing to me and others. Saying, “men are trash” does not heal me, in fact, it wounds me because I do not want that to be true. I want whole men. Kind men. Emotionally open and available men. Wise men. Men who own up to their short comings. Men with healthy egos. Men who are strong so that you don’t always have to be. Men who honour their words. Men with integrity. Men who spend as much time building their inner selves as they do trying to build wealth or ideas of success. Men who gather other men together and charge them with the responsibility of doing better.
This doesn’t convey many other aspect I’d like to discuss on the topic but, its a long post init so, just drop me a message and we can have a chat maybe?
