“Men have feelings too. No, not just hippies.”
“Grilling Animal Meat. Aromatherapy. The Way a Man Would Do It.”
“Pooping. Meditation. The Way a Man Would Do It.”
These were some of the messages I saw bedecked on signs advertising the website “ManTherapy.org,” a website set up to provide Colorado men with referrals to mental health professionals around the state. Last weekend, I attended a work-related conference in Montrose, Colorado, a community in the state’s Western Slope region. Throughout the pavilion where the event was held, there were numerous signs advertising the ManTherapy.org website, so many that they blended into one another. I spoke to a woman who was distributing pamphlets for the website, and she explained that it was begun in 2009 in response to the growing incidence of suicides on Colorado’s Western Slope, in particular the disproportionately high suicide rate among middle-aged men in this region, who are twice as likely to commit suicide as the statewide average.
I understand this argument. And I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree that men who are struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts deserve support and professional help. But the ManTherapy.org approach is precisely the wrong way to go about providing it. And until we can move beyond these hoary, antiquated, sexist stereotypes, we won’t be able to make any genuine progress on male mental health issues.
The argument for the ManTherapy approach is simple. As Jarrod T. Hindman, director of the Colorado Office of Suicide Prevention, explains, “Sexual dysfunction is an affront to men’s manhood, and I think mental illness and having depression also are seen as a sign of weakness that conflicts with being manly in the social ecology.” In other words, masculinity is defined in American culture by both sexual virility and an inability to feel a wide range of emotions. Timothy Lomas sums up this particular conception of masculinity thus:
All four of these stereotypes are particularly dominant on Colorado’s conservative Western Slope. Let us examine them one by one. Firstly, “a concern with success and status.” Karen Levad, executive director of the Western Colorado Suicide Prevention Foundation, believes that suicide rates are rising on the Western Slope because this region has not fully recovered economically from the recession. In the conservative culture of the region, men internalize the idea that self-worth is defined by their ability to provide for their families financially — and when they are unable to do this, they feel depressed, dislocated, and worthless. Studies repeatedly find that suicide rates among men are more closely tied to economic conditions than suicide rates among women, almost certainly because of the harmful stereotype that men must be financial providers or else they are failing as men. In Mesa County, the most populous county on the Western Slope, the unemployment rate has not dropped below 7.9% since February 2009 – substantially higher than the state average.
Secondly, “risk-taking behaviors.” Data shows that rates of binge drinking and alcoholism in Colorado significantly exceed the national average, with particularly high rates in rural counties. The Mesa County Coroner’s Office has identified high rates of alcoholism in the county as one of the many reasons behind the county’s high suicide rates. As for unsafe sex, the rate of sexually active adults on the Western Slope using an effective method of birth control consistently lags the behind statewide average. The Western Slope similarly shows a higher than statewide average rate of various kinds of violence, ranging from child maltreatment to school bullying. And perhaps most importantly, Western Colorado has among the nation’s highest rates of gun ownership — and research repeatedly shows that rates of gun ownership are one of the strongest predictors of suicide rates.
The third and fourth masculine stereotypes, a lack of emotional expressiveness and an emphasis on self-reliance and independence, go hand in hand. While these characteristics are harder to quantify with data, psychologists believe that these mindsets are particularly dominant in rural regions of Colorado. Jarrod T. Hindman, director of the Colorado Office of Suicide Prevention, believes that “Colorado’s ethos of rugged individualism” is partly to blame for high suicide rates, with an “insistence on ‘picking ourselves up by our boot straps’ instead of asking for help.” Karen Levad, executive director of the Western Colorado Suicide Prevention Foundation, argues that “the stigma among hearty Westerners toward acknowledging suicidal thoughts and mental illness” contribute to high rates of suicide in the region. And Dr. Robert Fetsch, professor of human development at Colorado State University, argues that in rural Colorado there is a particularly prevalent “John Wayne mentality,” telling men to, “Do it alone. Cowboy it up. Don’t be a sissy.”
In light of these stereotypes, it seems apparent that one of the key problems leading to high suicide rates in Western Colorado is this culture of toxic masculinity. Western Colorado men live in a culture that tells them that they have to be the main financial providers for their families, that they should not show emotion or ask for help, and that they should prove their manhood by engaging in risky behaviors like unsafe sex, alcoholism, and owning guns. All of these factors are correlated with higher rates of suicide. Anyone looking at this data has to conclude that the only way to reduce suicide in these regions is to fight against this toxic masculinity. Instead, the state of Colorado invested $400,000 in a campaign that reinforces these very stereotypes.
Take the first poster, which reads, “Men have feelings too. No, not just hippies.” While this poster is ostensibly designed to combat the pernicious, dangerous stereotype that only weak or effeminate men display emotion, it actually reinforces this very stereotype. By drawing a line between “hippies,” men who are stereotypically perceived as passive and unmanly, and other men, this poster just reinforces the idea that emotions are not masculine. Or take the second poster, which reads, “Grilling Animal Meat. Aromatherapy. The Way a Man Would Do It.” This poster argues that “men,” who are understood to mean manly, masculine men, partake in activities like grilling meat, not “feminine” activities such as aromatherapy. The third poster, which reads, “Pooping. Meditation. The Way a Man Would Do It,” draws a similar distinction between “masculine men” and the activity of meditation. These posters may ostensibly be an attempt to convince men to seek mental help, but they merely serve to reinforce the stereotype that therapeutic activities are not masculine. After all, if “grilling animal meat” is the way a man participates in aromatherapy, then what does that make a man who genuinely enjoys aromatherapy?
This topic hits close to home for me. I’m not a particularly masculine man, at least not in the stereotypical way that it is defined. I don’t enjoy grilling animal meat. I don’t watch or play any kind of competitive sport. I dreaded gym class more than any other time of the day. I’ve always had an easier time making friends with women than with men. In high school, I wrote bad Sylvia Plath-inspired poetry about my feelings. I’ve attended Buddhist meditation circles on multiple occasions, and I never equated them with pooping. I’ve always been deeply sensitive and emotional. When I see this poster, I think about the kind of men who would have beaten me up in high school. I’m fairly sure that if I had been presented with these posters in high school, when I was struggling with bouts of depression so deep that I felt like I would never emerge from them, they would have made me more depressed. They would have reminded me of just how far away I was from being socially acceptable as a man, and made me despair of ever fulfilling the expectations society placed upon me. It is not an exaggeration to say that these posters would have me more suicidal, not less.
In 2014, our culture was confronted with a particularly horrific example of what happens when toxic masculinity is allowed free reign. Twenty-two year-old Elliot Rodger went on a shooting rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara, killing six people and wounding thirteen others before committing suicide. In his twisted, misogynistic, warped “manifesto,” Rodger claimed that he committed this horrific act because of his inability to find a girlfriend or to lose his virginity, and his resulting hatred of all women. This is a particularly awful and misogynistic act, and by all means most of the men who internalize gender stereotypes would never commit such a horrific men. But it is nonetheless not hard to see the connection between the attitudes Rodger internalized and the masculine stereotypes cited above. Like other men, Rodger made an explicit link between his manhood, sexuality, and violence — and so when he saw himself as a sexual failure, he believed he had to prove his manhood through physical violence. Like other men, Rodger was obsessed with his social status, and when he perceived himself as a social failure, he believed he had to assert his dominance through physical violence. And like other men, Rodger did not believe he could seek psychological help for his problems, so he bottled up his emotions until they became too intense to bear. Rodger is a tragic example of what can happen when men internalize the irredeemably sexist mindset of traditional masculinity.
To be clear, I am not arguing that the Coloradans responsible for the “ManTherapy” campaign are in any way responsible for Rodger’s violent rampage. I have no doubt that they were all every bit as legitimately horrified by that event as any other feeling human being was. But we nonetheless cannot ignore the link between stereotypical masculinity, psychological problems, and violence — violence that can be directed at oneself or at others. I want men to be able to seek help when they feel depressed or upset. I want men to be able to feel weak, to be able to feel like they aren’t in control, without feeling themselves lesser beings. And I want men to give up the idea that they have to be the sole financial providers, in order that we may permit families to make their own decisions about who will work and who will take care of the home and the children, and our political system may finally act to resolve the persistent wage gap between men and women. I want people to have the freedom to feel the way they feel, regardless of what society says about their gender roles. And I do not believe we can get there until we tear down these noxious masculine stereotypes that lead to violence, self-hatred, patriarchy, and sexism. A campaign against toxic masculinity? That would be a truly radical mental health campaign.
So in that spirit, I’d like to propose an alternate caption for a poster. “People have feelings, too. Because we’re people.”
