One issue that has always been important to me is Men’s Health and Toxic Masculinity. The first time I experienced the whole effect of Toxic Masculinity occurred two years ago while I was employed as an RA at my university. I was a female living on an exclusively male floor. One girl, thirty-five boys.
Now, this may seem completely unprecedented, weird, and even dangerous. But let me start this by saying that I loved my floor and the young men on it unconditionally, and there was never a time I felt unsafe on that floor. I felt like Wendy and the lost boys, or one big sister with an army of little brothers.
This also meant that when they hurt, I hurt. And they hurt a lot.
Western society and culture had framed the male human as being the breadwinner, the strong ones. This makes it incredibly hard to show emotions or feelings for young men, specifically bad ones. This hyper-masculine culture creates an unsafe and harmful environment for men and boys to be able to express themselves in healthy manners for fear of being seen as feminine.
While reading, I was introduced to The Sambia, a people who live in Papua New Guinea (Heine, 15). Their view on masculinity marks an almost haunting resemblance to that of Canada’s, with a much more extreme method of addressing the matter. The Sambia believe that women’s wombs contaminate their sons in utero, making femaleness innate and maleness something that must be cultivated (Heine, 15). For the Sambia, in order for young men to develop their masculinity properly, they must go through extensive initiation procedures in order to allow them to become men (Heine, 15).
However, there is a very key component of the Sambian rituals that differ so vastly from that of Western Culture, to many of us reading it would be seen as alarming. Unlike in Western Culture, where homosexuality is viewed as “unmanly” or “feminine”. Homosexuality in Sambian culture is not only revered and accepted, it is ritualized in the performance of fellatio on one another to increase manliness (Heine, 16-17). While I won’t go into the actual detailed process of this, it is a ritual almost all members of Western culture would positively balk at.
Moving back to my experience with my floor (my boys). There were many who self-medicated and participated in risky and destructive behaviour because it “wasn’t manly” to show their emotions, such as crying over bad tests, being homesick, etc. While the consequences and ritualizing of masculinity in the Western world is nowhere near the level seen in the Sambian people. The fear of being unmanly or feminine is very real in both cultures and is seen as something that must be avoided at all costs.
This case study was a perfect illustration of the basis of cultural psychology as I understand it. While as human beings, almost all of us are subjected to the same cognitive processes and psychological matters. It is fascinating to see how they change in different parts of the world. For example, the encouragement of homosexual acts to improve masculinity would never been seen as an option in the Western world. Yet it is common sense to the Sambian.
I found myself repeatedly going back to chapter one after reading this, because I did not fully realize myself how ignorant I was to the study of cultural psychology until I was introduced to the concept of WEIRD. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010b). Because so many of those selected to participate in cultural studies where of the same or very similar cultures, the views we must look at mainly consist of a very narrow and unique group (Heine, 23). Furthermore, I refer to the idea of the Sambian culture as Toxic Masculinity because based on my culture and world views I feel it is. That doesn’t mean the Sambian people feel this way at all, and there could be many that disagree with me. Because our cultures and views are different.
So, to me, my boys having someone they could come talk to, cry to, vent to at two or three in the morning was important to me to allow them to feel safe as men to address these concerns. But to someone of the Sambian people, I would only be further contaminating them and making it impossible for them to ever be viewed or respected as men.
I will probably go back to this chapter again because each time I read it I notice something different that gets my attention. But the comparison between Western ideas of masculinity and those of the Sambian were something I had to comment on. So similar, yet so different.
