We Cannot Ignore Our Boys (and Men)

What being a boy mom, a gender studies teacher, and a martial arts practitioner has taught me.

Being a man is hard.

Hear me out.

I’m a feminist and I know very intimately the hardships women go through, but being the mom of three boys (two of them now big strapping men) and being married to a man, has made me realize so many things, the first of them being, that being a man is hard. Add to that my insights from being part of the martial arts community in the Philippines, and I have learned a lot about testosterone.

Testosterone. The hormone that gets your blood pumping. The hormone that makes you compete and to be at your best. The hormone that every warrior, litigator, and fighter (in whatever aspect of one’s profession) needs. I have a deep respect for testosterone and what it can do. In fact, as a jiujitisu practitioner, I know that I have more testosterone than most women, and my beauty secret (I can’t believe I am telling you this) is that I need to pluck out hairs from my chin regularly, because of too much testosterone in my body.

And yet, a world that is controlled by testosterone is a brutal one. The constant hierarchies and proving oneself and hiding one’s weakness and planning victory and learning from defeat can be exhausting, and it can frequently be brutal to be in that game all the time. And that’s for those who are good at it. Unfortunately, what it does for men (and women and everyone else) who can’t hack this testosterone-fueled environment is that this environment can be very destructive, especially in some places that are too dog-eat-dog/kill-or-be-killed/violence as a regulator environment. People can be bullied, belittled, hurt, and filled with shame and self-loathing in such an environment.

In fact, in so many testosterone-fueled environments, men are not allowed to be weak, to be vulnerable, to be emotional, or even to learn certain things, like the humanities and the arts (which I think is ridiculous, since no one can be more macho than E. Hemingway or E. Garcellano). Unfortunately, for women who are too testosterone-driven, even they believe these patriarchal notions of what it means to be a man, which is why they don’t allow their menfolk (sons, husbands, whatever) to express themselves in a healthy manner, and instead, also bully, belittle, hurt, and shame their boys or men.

From my gender studies, I have found out that in a patriarchal society, the only emotions that are allowed are anger and lust. Everything else is weakness, including love and sorrow. Instead, all of these other emotions are often buried, and supposedly forgotten, but the truth is that they fester and grow, if you don’t have someone safe to talk to about them. And increasingly, in a patriarchal world, with patriarchal women, someone “safe” is getting harder and harder to find.

In my experience, the best regulated males I know have the following: the testosterone to get things done, the emotional regulation to control it, and the openness and rationality that will make it healthy. I think testosterone is like fire. Wield it smartly and you can build whole civilizations with it. Wield it destructively and you can raze everything to the ground.

What is astonishing is that this whole system of thinking, the whole way of looking at the world, has been ignored for so long. It is only now, when we see a wholly different, much more woman-hating version of it rise, that people are starting to think we have to do something about it.

Only after the TV show “Adolescence” are people thinking of talking to boys about misogyny. And for most people, talking about this is very strange. As my students wrote, after I discussed Incel Culture with them in class, it has been ignored for such a long time, and yet it is so important to open a discussion about this, because this culture already has deep influences in our young men. As one of my students said, older people (like me) often just ignore it, and they don’t know that this is already how some of their children think, because of the internet.

We have to help our boys. We have to help our men. Patriarchy, especially in the extremely harmful version that is rising now, harms everyone. Even those who think that they are on top.

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

It is a shame that in some places, gender studies is now a banned subject for papers and university courses, because what we need today, is more discussions like this, instead of less.