So, I want to draw attention to something with this, which is how unnecessarily hostile and cruel the concept of "fragile masculinity" is.
So I'm sure most of you know what fragile masculinity is, but I'm going to define it anyway for rhetorical purposes. Fragile masculinity is the concept that masculinity as an identity status is precarious, which causes anxiety in men as they seek to reaffirm their masculinity constantly. But the problem with the way this concept has historically been engaged with, is that said engagement has been done in the most grotesquely insulting manner possible.
Fragile masculinity is a form of systemic, omnipresent abuse that starts when men are children. It starts with mothers beating you for crying and devolves into actual death and rape threats (or just straight up murder and rape) as you get older. Yes men are often the ones that will straight up fight you for not conforming, but this is the lens through which men experience all abuse, and getting brutalized by another man is much rarer than the million and one micro aggressions men experience every day.
Fragile masculinity is how male victims are silenced and exploited. Fragile masculinity is how the prison system can get away with basically just being a torture chamber for men. Fragile masculinity is why men are terrified of being too conscious of the true nature of the issues facing them. Fragile masculinity is how nations exploit underprivileged men as disposable labor and sources of violence.
And instead of seeing this as an utter tragedy that has been inflicted on men by an abusive system, the number one way "fragile masculinity" as a term is used is as an insult to call men fragile.
Like do you understand how incomprehensibly evil society has to be, that upon realizing literally every man alive is riddled with insecurity and anxiety, that the entire patriarchal system is sustained by the psychological, physical, and sexual torture of boys, everyone's first fucking instinct was "how do I use this to control and hurt men harder." Their first, instinctual reaction to hearing men are suffering is anger and hate.
Like guess what, all that fucked up shit women go through? That also makes them insecure. And the same people that mock men for it endlessly have zero fucking issue crying nuance and grace and context when women act on that insecurity.
Virgin shaming is how men are psychologically tortured into being obsessed with sex. Not because they need it to feel abusive power and control, but because they are not fucking safe unless they act like rabid sex crazed animals.
I know this. I know this from experience. I remember growing up, and realizing as a teenager that I was not ready for not interested in a relationship. And you would have thought I'd said I didn't want to breath and had plans to murder my family. I was not simply made fun of. I was threatened repeatedly with actual fucking rape and sexual assault. Whether it was men claiming that they would get me alone with a prostitute and force me to have sex with her, or women insinuating that they would rape me until I liked it.
But then on top of that, I was also threatened with the "predator" label. Because it made more sense to people that I was lying in some kind of ploy to get access to women so I could rape them than for a man to want to take things slow.
And that's another, critical part of fragile masculinity. Men are not threatened with womanhood. They're threatened with being seen as a predator and a failure. If transphobia has taught us anything, it's that patriarchy, despite it's predilection for punishing deviations from gender norms with cries of "sissy" and "manish", does not actually have a threshold where it will see you as anything other than what you were assigned otherwise at birth.
If radical feminism and proud misandrists have taught us anything, it's that they can and will keep using fragile masculinity as a club to dehumanize, discriminate, advocate for violence against, etc, men but especially men who do not conform to patriarchal narratives.
Men are threatened with a bottomless abyss that involves cutting off access to resources both necessary and extraneous, social isolation, mocking, humiliation, rape myths, psychological abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and more that has nothing to do with misogyny.
The way you fix fragile masculinity is you let go of those paths patriarchy makes available to you, to hurt or control men. It is not okay just because you're venting your anger at some Manosphere asshole or the orange in chief. You do not hurt them by doing this. You empower them. Because the patriarchy is literally propped up on men hearing you scream about weak chins and testosterone poisoning. It's the same concept as no matter how much you hate Kristi Noem, you only empower the patriarchy by calling her a whore. Drag her ass for being a fascist dog killer, but not for being a woman.
For patriarchy to end, men have to heal from the wounds inflicted on them. Healing does not happen in isolation, and it cannot happen under assault. You have to be able to look at a man with insecurities, and see those insecurities as something to have empathy for, not a weakness you can attack.
Fragile masculinity will never get better until people (both men and women) stop acting like chuds who see weakness as an opportunity to be a bully.
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