Masculinity

Looking forward to your response. This comes with my gratitude to Greg Coates who sourced this it and graciously allows me to share it with you here —-

“For most boys, the achievement of masculine identity is not an acquisition so much as a disavowal.

“When researchers asked girls and women to define what it means to be feminine, the girls answered with positive language–to be compassionate, to be connected, to care about others.

“Boys and men, on the other hand, when asked to define masculinity, responded with double negatives. Boys and men do not talk about being strong so much as about not being weak. They do not list independence so much as not being dependent. They do not speak about being close to their fathers so much as about pulling away from their mothers.

“In short, being a man generally means not being a woman. As a result, boys’ acquisition of gender is a negative achievement. Their developing sense of their own masculinity is not, as in other forms of identity development, a steady movement towards something valued, so much as a repulsion from something devalued.

“Masculine identity development turns out to be not a process of development at all but, rather, a process of elimination–a successive unfolding of loss. Along with whatever genetic proclivities one might inherit, it is this loss that lays the foundation for depression later in men’s lives.” [Terrence Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression]

—- How do you respond? Looking forward to hearing from you, any of the usual platforms.