On Masculinity: Why Men and Women Need to be Friends

Last night, I watched a very powerful documentary, The Mask You Live In, dealing with how our society defines masculinity and the impact this has on the boys and young men who grow up into it. I will admit, some elements of the film resonated a bit too close to home for me. For instance, the film discusses the pressure that boys are put under to exhibit athleticism. I remember being the unathletic kid in elementary school, the one who would probably rather go off and read a book than be forced to play kickball or dodgeball. Not surprisingly, I was usually the last boy picked for a team in gym class, often even behind many of the girls in the class.

Perhaps it was this lack of athleticism, and a general perceived lack of physical ability, that by the fourth grade led some of my male classmates to develop the idea that I was gay. It wasn’t true, of course, but I decided to play into it, acting or pretending like I was and at times doing so to creep out my friends. To some extent it was all in good fun, and it was something that passed quickly, but the memory of this still bothers me to this day.

The film also described how boys are taught from an early age that they should not express emotion, especially around other boys. I can say that this is true from personal experience. Growing up, through middle school and into high school, almost all of the friends that I had were guys. When we hung out together, however, we almost never talked about ourselves, how we were feeling, or anything that might be bothering us. Instead, we would play wiffle ball in the backyard or video games in the basement or stroll over to the park to play basketball. We talked about innocuous topics like sports or maybe even school; to talk about anything deeper would have been strange, and I don’t think was ever seriously considered.

When young men can only interact with other young men under this mask of masculinity, they are not given the appropriate outlet for their feelings, their emotions, their loneliness. The only real emotion they are allowed to express is anger. The consequence of this, of course, is destructive, even violent behavior. Men may try to cope with these issues through using drugs, consuming copious amounts of alcohol, and engaging in reckless and risky behavior. (These are activities that I saw more than my fair share of once I went off to college.) With unfortunate regularity, men commit sexual assault, domestic abuse, and even deadly acts like homicide and suicide; the most extreme cases may resort to mass murder.

As this documentary shows, media does little to curb this problem. Movies and television commonly depict male characters who exhibit aggressive and violent behavior. Video games allow young men to take on the role of these characters. Media, in other words, has normalized violence to such an extent that many if not most young men are almost completely desensitized to violence. They may believe, in fact, that violence is how men are supposed to deal with conflict; indeed, that it is the only possible way.

This fact was driven home for me a few years ago when I was working with summer school students who were on the verge of entering high school. The vast majority of these students were boys, many of whom lived in neighborhoods where gang activity was prevalent. (Young people, especially young men, often turn to gang life as a way of feeling a sense of belonging.) Even at a young age, these kids had learned what they could and could not wear, what they could and could not have on themselves, where they could and could not walk, and who they could and could not associate with. For them, it was a matter of everyday survival. Although my job was to teach them tools to use to resolve conflicts, I was forced to ask myself what I could possibly teach young people who’ve grown up in environments where the only way of dealing with conflict was through violence.

There is something else that boys and young men are taught that also has very grave effects on society: that they can’t be friends with girls. Think about the extent to which boys and girls are segregated from a very young age. I remember how in elementary school the girls and boys had to sit at separate lunch tables. In gym class the guys would be on one side playing basketball while the girls would be on the other side jumping rope or playing some other game. My main social activity outside of school was Cub Scouts (and later Boy Scouts), which was made up solely of other boys. As I mentioned above, even into high school virtually all of my friends were guys, a fact made even starker by the reality that I never had a girlfriend. It was not until probably my junior year of high school that I had friends who were girls, but even then these were not particularly close; we almost never hung out outside of school.

The fact is that most men simply do not know how to relate to women outside of a romantic or sexual context. This is for at least three reasons: men believe that they are in some way superior to women; men have been taught that they are inherently very different from women, with little common ground; and men have grown up learning to sexualize and objectify women. These points are the product of the forces of socialization (family, school, church, media, and peer groups), reinforced by gender segregation (both voluntary and enforced).

Think about it this way: only in the last 30 years or so has it been seriously considered that men and women could have relationships outside of a romantic/sexual context. Prior to recent decades, men rarely interacted with a non-familial woman unless he was courting her. Women were simply not present in the school, or the workplace, or the social circle. However, as this began to change, men reacted in the only way they apparently knew how: by making undesired sexual advances on their new female classmates and colleagues. The idea of having purely professional, collegial, or even friendly relationships with women was simply too foreign, and unfortunately little has changed in our culture in that regard. Perhaps this provides some guidance as to why there is still such a prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, on college campuses, and in institutions like the US military and even the US Senate.

Society, especially through the media, has continued to sexualize women and objectify their bodies. So-called women’s professions like teaching, nursing, and secretarial work have been sexualized in the minds of men trying to rationalize a situation that to them otherwise lacks the appropriate context. Male-dominated subcultures (like professional football, video gaming, and the comic industry) have also hypersexualized females. Just look at the cheerleaders on the sideline of an NFL game, the models depicted in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, or the accentuated (and exposed) body parts on female video game and comic book characters.

Pornography is a large part of the problem too, as the documentary shows. A lot of porn portrays women as being either highly sexually aggressive or submissive toward men. When these images are present in the minds of young men, they go out into the world thinking that women are much more sexually aggressive or submissive than they actually are. Unfortunately, this gives birth to the idea that women are “asking for it”, that if they dress or act a certain way then they must want sex. A culture that constantly objectifies and sexualizes women creates a perception about their intentions that is almost universally completely and utterly false.

One of the most commonly held beliefs about men and women is that the idea of friendship between them is just a myth. If a man and a woman become friends, it is either because at least one of them wants romance or sex, or because at least one of them is not straight. However, this is simply not true (and again, I can vouch for this out of experience). As I’ve been getting at, this is the challenge:

Boys and girls form their own gender groups in elementary school. They learn their own ways of relating to each other. So when they do get together inspired by puberty, they see each other as dating partners because they’ve never really known each other as friends.

However, this is the reality (emphasis mine):

Platonic love does exist… “friendship attraction”, or a connection devoid of lust, is a bona fide type of bond that people experience. Distinguishing between romantic, sexual, and friendly feelings, however, can be exceedingly difficult. People don’t know what feelings are appropriate toward the opposite sex, unless they’re what our culture defines as appropriate. You know you love someone and enjoy them as a person, but not enough to date or marry them. What does this mean?

In other words, although it happens in practice, it is not yet culturally acceptable for a “regular guy” and a “regular girl” to be “just friends” because society has not come up with a label for it yet. The benefits, though, are enormous, especially for the male friend. “Close male-female friends are extremely emotionally supportive if they continuously examine their feelings, opinions and ideas. Males appreciate this because it tends not to be a part of their same-sex friendships”. Men who become friends with women thus are able to find the outlet to express their emotions that they had been previously lacking.

Growing up, I was always conscious of the fact that I wanted someone that I could talk to, that could support me emotionally and psychologically, that I could express my feelings to without judgment. I lacked that until I was well into college, and even then it has been difficult to escape the notions about being emotional that I have been ingrained with (I remember being told by my mother once that I was too emotional about things). To be honest, I don’t remember the last time I cried; now, even if I want to, I find it nearly physically impossible to do so. I still feel uncomfortable telling people when I’m feeling depressed, or anxious; it’s just not what I do, let alone what a guy does. I’m not supposed to burden other people with my problems. I’m supposed to suck it up and deal with it. In other words, I’m supposed to “be a man”.

I am grateful, though, to today have mentors and friends (almost all of whom are female) that are supportive of me. I’ve found that it has been in the presence of women, not men, that I have been given the opportunity and the space to voice my thoughts, to express my feelings, my anger, my frustration, and to seek guidance.

Yet it still feels weird, given what this culture has taught us. Is it strange for a guy to have women as his best friends? What do others think when they see me with a female friend? That we’re dating? And that if not, I must be gay? I don’t know, maybe I’m just too self-conscious, but I can just imagine that this is what people actually think.

To a certain extent, it pains me when my female friends tell me that I’m not like other guys, or that they wish other guys were like me. What that tells me is that other guys don’t know how to show respect to women. What that tells me is that other guys are too caught up in their own masculinity to be able to be sensitive or emotionally supportive toward women. What that tells me is that the only thing other guys can think about in relation to women is sex. This is what our culture and our society have done, and it makes me sick.

What we need to do, as a culture, as a society, is to stop promoting hypermasculinity as the standard of maleness, and to stop sexualizing and objectifying women. We need to stop normalizing violence in our media and in our communities, and to stop dehumanizing the victims of violence. We need to recognize that men and women are equals, that we are far more alike than we are apart. Perhaps above all, we need to promote and normalize positive images of the non-sexual, non-romantic, male-female relationship. Maybe then young men will start seeing women as classmates, colleagues, and friends in the way that they should.