Straight men who infantilize women’s friendships have no fucking survival instinct. Like my uncle is always making fun of and rolling his eyes at my aunt’s friend lunches and telephone dates with her lady friends, teasing her like she’s a gossipy teenage girl in high school drama. And my aunt just laughs about it but I know for a fact that if it wasn’t for her best friend K, she would have probably set him on fire by now.Â
Like straight men are capable of maybe a quarter of the indepth emotional labor and support women do for each other. Like men can literally have one friend named Bob that they go fishing with once a year and still be content for life. Then they think it’s cute and girlish that their wives have these long term, integrated, emotionally intense relationships with women but like…LOL, it’s not because men don’t need those kinds of relationships, it’s just that they get it all from their wives while offering peanuts in return. PEANUTS.
Like if your woman is on the phone for 2 hours with her friend and you think that’s childish of her, just know that she spent half of that time getting the support that you should be giving her (but are incapable of) and the rest lamenting what a giant fucking baby manchild you are.
This is how homophobia and misogyny hurts men: it makes these kinds of in-depth, deeply emotionally invested friendships a feminine thing to do, and therefore unmanly (and un-straight) for men to do. Men are brought up to shy away from cultivating these kinds of deep and platonic friendships with other men. Because, you know, if you talk to your male friends all the time and hang out with them and cry in front of them and hug all the time and lean on each other (emotionally and physically) when you need support, it makes you gay and womanly. Which is, apparently, the worst thing you can be.
I’ve read articles and personal stories about and by men, talking about experiences they’ve had that have shown them how painfully out of touch they are with their own emotions and their own ability to open up and connect with people, including themselves.
I worry about men a lot. I worry about the number of men who find themselves incapable of providing emotional support for their friends, their significant others, and themselves, all because of how they’ve been raised to bury and ignore their more vulnerable emotions and tactile tendencies because they’ve been taught that this kind of closeness has to be stamped out at all costs.
Studies have shown that this sort of emotional shallowness is a leading factor in why men are more likely to be violent, to drown their sorrows in drug and alcohol abuse, and to successfully commit suicide.
They throw all their eggs in one basket with a significant other, or at times a parent, and when problems arise in that relationship, because they have no other relationships to speak of, they quickly turn to destruction.
This is why I often give out advice that people need to expand on their relationships. You literally CAN’T have it all hinge on a single person, it is a horrific idea and it will destroy you and the things and people you love. You HAVE to have relationships with other people.
Anyone with any mental health issue can tell you that the inability to talk it out, the lack of having someone to turn to, makes things go careening downhill, faster than we can catch them back.
Somehow this is considered an acceptable way of being for men, and their lashing out is “just how men are”. It’s more masculine to shoot yourself than to take medication. It’s more masculine to beat your partners than to have a conversation with them. It’s more masculine to bottle everything up until it erupts and people die, than it is to simply ask for help.
And people want to blame women and feminism for it, for “making men afraid”, or simply try to list the likelihood of surviving suicide and avoiding drug abuse as “female privilege” or something that is a nature-given trick of “biological sex”, rather than address the very serious issue of toxic masculinity and extreme, self-destructive hatred of being perceived as anything like women.
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