The reinvention of a ‘real man’

March 22, 2022

WN: In our work with men who harm their intimate partners, in the MCCBC End Abuse Home Improvement Program for men (click on the above), we spend an entire evening (usually week 13 of 15–tonight is week 13 with that topic) to talk about how we men are generally socialized. We indicate the most profoundly difficult part of growing into manhood is very simple: we do not have modelled or encouraged sharing our feelings. One little saying we use goes:

In many cultures it takes a real man to not act like “a real man” according to those cultures.

Men have feelings. And they need sharing as much as women. But we are so often short-changed in North American culture–and wider afield.

excerpts:

— In BUFFALO, Wyoming

Bill Hawley believes too many men are unwilling or unable to talk about their feelings, and he approaches each day as an opportunity to show them how.

“There’s my smile,” he says to a leathered cowboy in the rural northeast Wyoming town where he lives.

“I could cry right now thinking about how beautiful your heart is,” he says to a middle-aged male friend at work.

“After our conversation last week, your words came back to me several times,” he tells an elderly military veteran in a camouflage vest. “Make of that what you will, but it meant something to me.”

On paper, Bill is the “prevention specialist” for the public health department in Johnson County, a plains-to-peaks frontier tract in Wyoming that is nearly the size of Connecticut but has a population of 8,600 residents. His official mandate is to connect people who struggle with alcohol and drug abuse, tobacco addiction, and suicidal impulses to the state’s limited social service programs. Part bureaucrat, part counselor, much of Bill’s life revolves around Zoom calls and subcommittees, government acronyms and grant applications.

But his mission extends beyond the drab county building on Klondike Drive where he works. One Wyoming man at a time, he hopes to till soil for a new kind of American masculinity.

His approach is at once radical and entirely routine.

It often begins with a simple question.

“How are you feeling?” Bill asks the man in camouflage, who lives in the Wyoming Veterans’ Home, which Bill visits several times a week. Bill recently convinced him to quit smoking cigarettes.

…

Here in cowboy country, the backdrop and birthplace of countless American myths, Bill knows “real men” are meant to be stoic and tough. But in a time when there are so many competing visions of masculinity — across America and even across Wyoming — Bill is questioning what a real man is anyway.

Often, what he sees in American men is despair.

Across the United States, men accounted for 79 percent of suicide deaths in 2020, according to a Washington Post analysis of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also shows Wyoming has the highest rate of suicide deaths per capita in the country. A majority of suicide deaths involve firearms, of which there are plenty in Wyoming, and alcohol or drugs are often a factor. Among sociologists, the Mountain West is nicknamed “The Suicide Belt.”

More and more, theories about the gender gap in suicides are focused on the potential pitfalls of masculinity itself.

The data also contains a sociological mystery even the experts are unsure how to explain fully: Of the 45,979 people who died by suicide in the United States in 2020, about 70 percent were White men, who are just 30 percent of the country’s overall population. That makes White men the highest-risk group for suicide in the country, especially in middle age, even as they are overrepresented in positions of power and stature in the United States. The rate that has steadily climbed over the past 20 years.

Some clinical researchers and suicidologists are now asking whether there is something particular about White American masculinity worth interrogating further. The implications are significant: On average, there are more than twice as many deaths by suicide than by homicide each year in the United States.

ere in cowboy country, the backdrop and birthplace of countless American myths, Bill knows “real men” are meant to be stoic and tough. But in a time when there are so many competing visions of masculinity — across America and even across Wyoming — Bill is questioning what a real man is anyway.

Often, what he sees in American men is despair.

Across the United States, men accounted for 79 percent of suicide deaths in 2020, according to a Washington Post analysis of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also shows Wyoming has the highest rate of suicide deaths per capita in the country. A majority of suicide deaths involve firearms, of which there are plenty in Wyoming, and alcohol or drugs are often a factor. Among sociologists, the Mountain West is nicknamed “The Suicide Belt.”

More and more, theories about the gender gap in suicides are focused on the potential pitfalls of masculinity itself.

The data also contains a sociological mystery even the experts are unsure how to explain fully: Of the 45,979 people who died by suicide in the United States in 2020, about 70 percent were White men, who are just 30 percent of the country’s overall population. That makes White men the highest-risk group for suicide in the country, especially in middle age, even as they are overrepresented in positions of power and stature in the United States. The rate that has steadily climbed over the past 20 years.

Some clinical researchers and suicidologists are now asking whether there is something particular about White American masculinity worth interrogating further. The implications are significant: On average, there are more than twice as many deaths by suicide than by homicide each year in the United States.

…

Bill is just a man living in America in 2022, one of 162 million, caught between old standards for American masculinity and a new world where such ideas are in rapid flux. Here he sees an opportunity — to help men be better to others by helping them be better to themselves.

If the myth of the American cowboy was forged in frontier towns like this one, why can’t it be broken apart and put back together here as well?

…

The capability for suicide is fostered by a habituation to pain and violence, say academics and clinicians, and then facilitated by a technical knowledge of how to use lethal weapons. Research shows that men on average develop a higher capability for suicide than women in part because they are socialized into it. And even though women are likelier to attempt suicide, at least in the United States, men are likelier to die from it because they often choose more lethal means, firearms instead of pills.

Fears of not belonging and of becoming a burden are often at the core of suicide attempts by men, according to leading suicide experts, and mental health challenges can intensify these factors. Men are often more resistant than women to seeking help with their mental health, experts say, because non-anger based emotions are considered feminine.

…

Because of politics, Bill says, he struggles with how to talk about the high suicide rates among White men in particular. He is aware of how it might sound to ask that the conversation around suicide prevention center on White male despair, because White men still exert more power and influence over the country’s politics, corporations, academic institutions and trade organizations. Yet White men are twice as likely to kill themselves as Black and Latino men.

Researchers say that access to lethal means is a major factor in suicide. About 60 percent of gun owners in America are men, according to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center. And gun ownership in the United States is not only gendered but also highly racialized. About half of all White men in the country own guns, compared to about a quarter of Black and Latino men.

And there are also all the factors that come before the crisis point. One theory circulating among social scientists holds that White men have fewer collective histories of persecution that can rationalize poor life outcomes, which worsens their humiliation at unrealized ambitions. Another theory points to research showing Black and Latino people have more social “togetherness” within their families and communities than White people, which could foster a greater sense of belonging.

“The cowboy-up mentality is part of why you don’t say something,” Ozzie said toward the end of a recent visit. “You can have a story, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t burp it out.”

“It’s all about relating to people,” Bill added.

“You know, you can’t actually pick yourself up by your bootstraps, that was actually a joke,” Jeremiah interjected suddenly. “And now we use it as our slogan.”

Please click on: Reinvention Of A ‘Real Man’