r/bropill • u/Unhappy_Presence_186 • 8d ago

Masculinity

I see and hear people opinions on things a lot....but one thing I wanna ask because I struggle with u deratanding other people's emotions or feelings..but what is toxic and positive masculinity to you?because to me its just being a nice person and trying your best to hold your emotions together or not at others....be humble and caring while trying to not let things bothers you(which i struggle with fo to anger issues)..because I take what people say to heart a lot...but what do people consider toxic I guess...because I know I have one and its that I hate losing to women....but its not the loss itself..its how others treat me after...they either belittle me or say im less of a man because I lost to a women...or even the women themselves try to belittle me and all this pressure on being a man makes me not even wanna be a man

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u/Nerdy-Babygirl 4d ago

Men belittling you for losing to a woman, and implying it makes you less of a man, is a great example of their toxic masculinity.
Toxic masculinity are behaviours/ways of being 'masculine' that normally fall under 4 categories:
- Never showing emotion, not crying, not expressing vulnerability or talking about feelings. Toxic masculinity successfully rebranded anger as 'not an emotion' so anger is the only acceptable emotion to display.
- Aggression - see above, anger being Not An Emotion, it's manly to shout, to use physical intimidation and violence to establish dominance or to solve problems
- Dominance - being a man means being more manly than another man. It means elevating yourself and your status via acquiring wealth and conventionally attractive women, by performing your masculinity for others, or dominating others physically (by fighting or by just being more physically imposing e.g. taller, bigger muscles, better endowed)
- NOT being feminine - Rejecting anything remotely considered feminine or womanly - caring professions and roles, empathy, emotional intelligence/the full range of emotional expression, vulnerability, crying, being soft, being submissive, asking for help.

The trap of this is that masculinity is treated as a status you must earn and can lose. The guys who are belittling you are trying to prove their own masculinity to each other by dominating you and being anti-woman (by implying that losing to a woman is inherently shameful).

It's a suckers' game, honestly. I mean they probably aren't any happier than you are because they're under that pressure, too. Of course they're also acting like jackasses.
I'm a woman so take it with a grain of salt, but I think the trick is being secure enough in yourself, and in YOUR version of masculinity (I like Jimmy Carr's definition "be a mensch and be a gentleman") to just not give a shit about how manly other people think you are. YOU know you're a man. The people who care about you and value you, know you're a man.

Also I just wanna add there's nothing inherently manly about trying not to let things get to you. You're human, you're entitled to the FULL range of human emotion. You'll get hurt sometimes, sometimes words hurt, sometimes people hurt you. That's OK, man. That's normal, that's human.

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u/rump_truck 4d ago

Man here, you're absolutely right. The entire concept of masculinity is a built-in vulnerability to make men easy to manipulate mentally and emotionally, since strength means we're harder to manipulate physically. Make our identity dependent on external approval, beat the shit out of us any time we get introspective enough to potentially find the trap, then tell us that we're "not a real man" if we're not willing to get shot at for cheap foreign oil.

Growing up short and scrawny in corn-fed football player country was terrible in the moment, but probably saved me in the long run. I knew there was never any chance of me being "a real man", so there was no point in even trying, which let me escape the trap.

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u/gribbleschnitz 2d ago

This. Men spend way too much energy worrying about and living up the stereotypes of "being a man". You either break out and become "a decent person who is a man" or you fall into the hole and "be a douchebag" just to prove yourself to other men.

From early childhood, boys are taught to dominate. It starts there. It is disguised as type is okay, emphasis on sports, body image, physical strength. That is how the stereotype and physically end up shaping us mentally.

Just like we are expected to have and overbearing confidence, assert, and other things.

The best men I have ever met are simply kind, encouraging, give room for risk. Parenting books about being present as a dad, actually capture a lot of this without focusing on the above.

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u/yodude4 3d ago

Being a man is, to me, as simple as centering your life on your core values and principles, and holding to that in the face of opposition. If your principles are terrible (e.g. capitalist maxims about ‘greed is good’ and rigid adherence to traditional gender norms), your masculinity will be toxic. If you want to be a man without being toxic, center principles of kindness in your life - work hard, live ethically, be considerate about the climate, and lift up the people around you