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19. What does it mean to be a man?

I recently watched the 2015 documentary entitled The Mask You Live In by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. It starts with a quote by George Orwell, tying up together what I've researched: "He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it." As I have previously mentioned, patriarchalism is not a good system to either women or men, and ultimately to society as a whole. It imprisons people in cultural straitjackets of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity, hence creating distance between men and women. Each sex is surely different, we should celebrate and respect their differences. On the other hand, as human beings, men and women have much more in common than not. Female or male, each of us carries feminine and masculine traits, which complement and strengthen one another. Feminine is not better than masculine or vice-versa, they're simply different.

What does it mean to be a man then?

The Mask You Live In summons up educators, sociologists, psychologists and activists to explore that. It also interviews boys, teenagers and men from different backgrounds, who interestingly enough have all internalized the same concepts: they're not supposed to cry and express emotions such as pain and sadness, they need to be tough, assertive and successful. All of them hid their insecurities, which often provoked muted feelings of depression.

That is well illustrated in the film through an exercise conducted by educator Ashanti Branch at the Freemont High School with a group of male teens. On a paper sheet with a mask drawn on it, the teens wrote the qualities they projected to the world. On the back of the sheet, the feelings they held in every day. The mask bore words like happy, outgoing, funny, kind. The back of the sheet, sadness, pain, fear, anger.

"A lot of our students don't know how to take the mask off," says Branch. Such difficulty, according to psychologist Dr. Niobe Way, results from early conditioning. Boys make a direct link between having friends and mental health, and they tell her if they didn't have someone to talk to about their secrets and personal lives, they'd go crazy. Until the age of 14, boys are enthusiastic about their friendships with other boys.

From 15 to 17, though, the language shifts and they talk about struggling in their friendships, feeling betrayed by other boys, wanting to have intimate friendships and not knowing how to find them. "They really buy into a culture that doesn't value what we've feminized: relationships, emotions, empathy, all these critical things. So boys begin to devalue their relational parts to themselves, their relational needs and desires," says Way.

She adds that for many boys the loss of intimacy in their friendships make them feel very lonely and isolated. "They enter into a culture of masculinity that makes a bizarre equation that male intimacy has to be about sexuality: a straight guy has no desire for male intimacy. We don't do that with women, we do that with men. Exactly at the age we begin to hear the emotional language disappear from boys narratives in the national data, that's exactly the age that boys begin to have 5 times the rate of suicide as girls."

As for male depression, psychologist Dr. William Pollack explains that depressed boys initially tend to act out and become aggressive, so their behavior is interpreted as a conduct problem. Before the common signs of depression—such as apathy and remoteness—surface, a young male may have turned suicidal and no one has noticed it. Often, alcohol or drugs are used to either loosen up the mask or relief pain.

The male construct

Coach and former NFL player Joe Ehrmann, also interviewed in the documentary, shares his earliest memory of his father teaching him to throw jabs and punches, and advising: "Be a man. Stop with the tears, stop with the emotions. If you're going to be a man in this world, you better learn how to dominate and control people and circumstances." Ehrmann recalls how that left him with a tremendous shame. "I left the room with tears running down my eyes, just feeling I wasn't quite man enough."