Masculinity Mondays: 24

 

(Image shows a white, bare-chested man bound in rope, photographed against an atmospheric backdrop to give the impression of smoke underwater)

One of the main elements of toxicity associated with masculinity is the way negative experiences are handled.  Very often, when men experience a setback, disappointment, or frustration, they respond with disproportionate anger, usually directed at entirely the wrong person/people.

The accusation is two-fold; firstly, that women don't behave like this, and therefore, secondly, that men are only acting out in this way to "remind women what they want to do to women".

Firstly - women absolutely do do this; it manifests as "rage cleaning", which often involves other peoples' possessions being damaged or thrown out, or as passive aggression. 

Secondly, the misdirected anger is actually what men feel towards ourselves, but the mindfuck of patriarchy is that accepting that you feel something "bad" means accepting that you are bad, and "bad" doesn't just mean "not good" - it means "undeserving of success" - and success is the measure by which men are judged as worthy of being included in leadership, in relationships, and in connected society.

When something that brings negative feelings happens to women, they tend to be more aware of whether or not the event is connected to something they have done or failed to do,  because women have an extensive history of freedom from responsibility.  Men, having far longer been held responsible for outcomes in every conceivable setting, tend to assume that "X happened because I did/failed to do Y"; the "I am a man, and therefore this is my responsibility/my fault" is the default for men, and therefore when things go "wrong", and we can't see how we can "fix it", the anger we feel towards ourselves becomes overwhelming.  

This is why therapy needs to work on recruiting more men as therapists, and, in the meantime, understanding that it is not appropriate to simply assume that "men need to be made to understand things the way women do", rather than recognising that men have a fundamentally different cognitive perspective than women, and that we process things in a different way as a biopsychological default; insisting that "men just need to learn to process things the way women do" is as harmful as the 1980s' attitude that "if women want to be in leadership, they have to do leadership exactly the same way men do" was.  If you wouldn't tell a racially marginalised person that they "just needed to learn to process things the way white people do", you shouldn't be telling men that they need to be "more feminine" in the way they engage with and process situations.  If therapy could accept that men are different to women, and deserve to be engaged with as we are, then therapy would absolutely be something I'd consider essential for men, not "to teach men how to behave", but rather to prevent the behaviour in the first place,  by helping men understand that they are not responsible for everything that happens, and they can just have the feelings they have about something, without the added narliness of feeling they "need to fix" both the experience and the feeling/s.

Strong feelings aren't toxic in and of themselves - they're just feelings, and when there isn't an obvious action that can be taken to resolve the trigger for the feelings, it's often better to just let the feelings play out - but to do that in private, so that you actually fully process the feelings, rather than, through misdirected crash-outs, make other people responsible for them.

Feeling something that overwhelms you isn't failure.
Making someone else handle that feeling for you, when they have not consented to support you through co-regulation facilitation, is the failure.

Yesterday, I found out that none of the people I'd invited to celebrate my birthday were going to make it. Not even my longest-standing friend, who I've run with for almost 25yrs.

I had a lot of very intense feelings about that, amplified by the fact that birthdays never actually being about me is a significant aspect of difficult experiences from childhood - not "trauma", but definitely "a thing which sometimes still trips me up, even as an adult" - and therefore basically all of the small number of people I feel I have any connection with other than my wife not being able to show up on what feels like a high-impact birthday, because of the life experience I've had, and the current situations I'm in, very much triggers those childhood feelings of "no one actually thinks I'm worth putting first, not even for one day."

I was extremely upset - but I did not take that out on my friends, nor did I try and pretend I wasn't upset; I let the feelings of hurt, anger, and sadness play out, even though they wiped out most of yesterday, and left me actually still feeling unwell today. (That's another difficulty for men learning how to effectively handle emotions - women often feel more comfortable taking time out "for personal reasons" - men have been raised with an insistence that we compartmentalise; many employers are very focused with their male staff on "You leave your personal problems at the door when you come to work" - while telling women the same thing results in accusations of misogyny.

And yes...I still feel upset. Not as violently upset as I was yesterday, but still as deeply upset.  I honestly don't think I'll ever bother arranging any future events for birthdays, because this isn't the first time this has happened.

Men and the Mental Load

Men also carry mental loads. Society doesn't like taking that idea seriously, and will point to "man on sofa scrolling on his phone while his wife is literally drowning under the mental load!"  Women like to snarl about "How come he  just gets to go and nap?! How can he even sleep while there's all this to deal with?!" - breaking cycles of abuse includes the abuse that insists that rest is something you "earn" by "doing all the work", rather than the thing you need in order to get the work done.

Social media is littered with women presenting laundry lists of "my mental load", almost as though it's a badge of honour, and yawping that "And this is as well as holding down a full time job!"

Okay. Let's play.

Just today, my "mental load list" looks like:
1. Did the rolls my wife said she'd take out of the freezer last night actually get taken out of the freezer? Oh, surprise surprise, no, they didn't. Right, they're out of the freezer now.

2. Getting the rolls out destabilised the freezer Jenga. I now need to make sure everything is restacked, so that if my wife goes to the freezer, she doesn't yell and swear in surprise because something overbalanced and fell out. (We can only afford a small cube freezer with a fridge-style door. It's not effective, but it's what we have.)

3. I have to keep one eye on the clock, even though I'm feeling extremely unwell, and trying to get this blog up, because my wife needs to be out of the house by a certain time to get to an appointment, and her ADHD includes time blindness, which means even while she's actively getting on with getting ready, she can struggle to hold on to the passage of time, and what that means about her punctuality.

4. I'm trying to predict when I'll next need to go grocery shopping, and when I can do that around the work commitments I have for my paid job this week - I should do it today, really, but I'm feeling far too unwell.

5. I'm trying to work out how to get a check up opticians' appointment where they actually take on board the fact that I know about my sight loss conditions, and don't refer me to the hospital, who then get snitty with me because there's no point to me being there.  I feel like I need stronger glasses, but I don't know if that's even something that would be effective at this point.

6. This leads to a panic state about how the fuck I'm going to keep earning the one income that has to support both me and my wife if "stronger glasses" aren't going to be the answer, and it's just that the two degenerative sight loss conditions have...degenerated past the point where anything can help, and it's only going to get worse from here.

7. My mother will be expecting me to get in touch with her about meeting up for my birthday. This is the woman who tried to kill me, but has spent the past fifteen years insisting firstly that it never happened at all, and latterly that "You know I was poorly back then, I couldn't help it" (she has the same psychiatric condition I do - I've never had anyone tell me I tried to kill them...If I did, I'd apologise, even if I didn't remember it.)

8. I need to order roofing material to banjax-fix the roof insurance won't pay to repair. But I can't afford to do that this month, because I have to pay for accommodation so my wife can attend an event which could be productive in networking terms for her.  I'm trying to figure out when I will be able to afford the roofing material, before the end of summer, and the onset of England's predictable downpours.   That's causing me anxiety about whether I'll be able to afford to order it before the weather changes.

9. I'm feeling stressed out about the work demands I have this week. Honestly? I need to take some time completely off, but, being freelance, I can't afford to do that.

10. I can't see a time when I'll be able to get to a monthly social event which is pretty much the only contact with people beyond my wife and my boss I have around work, and it's looking like the organiser is planning a move at some point to a different area, and I don't know if I'll be able to afford to get to that area.

11. I know I need to get at least two more freelance contracts, of at least a year each, but I have no idea how to actually do that, beyond cold pitches and applications to the 0.5% of advertised jobs that are freelance, a skills match, and don't require onsite attendance in London.

12. What the fuck am I going to do if Reform get in in 2029? (Currently, the answer is: kill myself and my wife, because I can't see a way to survive the damage they'll try and do generally, and the focused harm they'll try and inflict on disabled people, especially those for whom work is either not possible (my wife) or a running struggle to keep hold of (me.)  I don't want to die, but I don't have the kind of support network to survive them.

13. The house needs cleaning. I'm genuinely too unwell right now, my wife is dealing with having to back and forth for medical appointments, I'll be working all this week...when the hell are either of us going to have the energy/feel well enough, and have the time, to get to it?

14. I really need to sort the yard out. But I have no idea what to do with any of it.

Fourteen items on a "mental load" list...and it's not even 2.30pm yet. And none of them are things other people are actually completely capable of handling, but I've decided "it's quicker if I do it"/"they don't do it right"/"I might not be a good person if I don't do this for them".

Some of them are trivial, and easily resolved - but so are many of the items women are listing: "I need to pack my kids' PE kit" - well, do that then. Or teach your kids to pack their own kit.  "I should text my friend" - do it, or forget about it.

If we're going to claim women should get "more consideration" at work "because of the mental load", we actually need to just start asking everyone "What else do you have to handle, outside of this job? How much support/money do you have with that?" (My wife's support when she is able to support, and not a fucking lot, in my case.)

This is a really big case for making BDSM mainstream.

Not the 50 Shades type (which is actually abuse dressed up as a Consensual Non-Consent dynamic...which require fully informed consent, and do include ongoing awareness of boundaries, even when those boundaries are pushed.)

Not the Ann Summers "tee-hee, he likes to spank me, aren't we naughty?!" type.

The type a lot of people pearl-clutch about. The type with roles and rules. The type where people are deliberately hurt, but never harmed. The type where people surrender control, and where they take it.

I've been a Sadist for almost 20yrs.  That's how I get focus when I feel distracted by the whirl of things that feel out of my control. It's gender-affirming for me.

Recently, I've started exploring Pup space - which feels like it's going to be a good way for me to handle times of extreme overwhelm, as well as a way for my wife to indulge her more Dominant side as my Handler.

BDSM gives rules and routines for handling stress and strong emotions. It forces people to identify their feelings, and remain in control of those feelings as they work through them.

If we stopped treating like "adult naughty time", and started treating it "as an adult space for emotional regulation", I can't help but feel things would improve considerably across society.