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Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams wrote, “Some people feel so bereft of clear family standards, so unsupervised and ignored by the adults around them, that in order to push themselves to grow up, they hold themselves to idealized criteria of behavior and feeling that they derive from the larger culture. These standards, because they’re abstract and not modeled by people known personally to the child, tend to be harsh and unbuffered by the humane sense of proportion.” This tendency is often associated with hypermasculinity, or calcified standards of manhood. So, boys often look to the heroic men of their surrounding culture to infer what’s expected of them.
While idealized criteria in themselves aren’t necessarily harmful, the fixation on them can be. Perfectionism is the belief that to be considered something, one has to be its best representative, meeting all of the available criteria. So, for example, to be smart, a student may believe they need to have a perfect grade point average. The underlying feeling is: If you aren’t the best, then you’re the worst. Therefore, a boy may erroneously come to believe that a man embodies not only specific values but every possible manifestation of them, always. He may think, “If I’m courageous, then I should be able to stand up for myself, stand up for others, know how to fight, know how to argue, and dominate in every way possible.” Here, the core value of courage is wrapped up in all-or-nothing thinking, where one limitation casts doubt on the belief that one possesses the trait at all.
Our male patients may struggle to accept their sexuality, their height, their weight (as in the case of muscle dysmorphia), their physical strength, their sensitivity, their general shyness, and even their own kindness. To many of them, these features disqualify them from masculinity. Many of them would label their traits as feminine, as though there were a clear divider between all human attributes. When challenged in treatment about who they believe they are, some are quick to list reasons why you should also believe they’re weak and/or incompetent. (But, they also tend to believe they can overcome all of their frailties, which, in large part, explains the rise of the so-called “manospehre”—the misogynistic yet popular hetero-male influencers.) Many of those younger male patients spend a good deal of their lives painstakingly working to prove their masculinity, which constitutes their highest value.
Again, what’s problematic isn’t the idealized criteria that make up what we consider to be manhood. Those patients may list courage, strength, leadership, temperance, resilience, decisiveness, humility, prudence, and, hopefully, compassion, which are qualities all of us should aspire to. The issue stems from one’s inability to fluidly move through them. A male patient, for instance, may bemoan not knowing how to fight while believing himself to be weak because he was repeatedly bullied for his size. He may say, “I was afraid to fight back because I was weak.” Fixated on his past, he may fail to note how courageous he was in speaking up for a colleague harassed at work or his strength in physically caring for his ailing partner. The belief of “I can’t fight” blinds him to the many ways in which he’s able to embody the values that comprise manhood to him. He can only see what he isn’t.
Movies and television, as well as boastful parents, can make it feel as though others are able to embody every facet of each value. In the past, most representations of men implied limitlessness. In treatment, male patients coming of age often recount heroic stories of their fathers while, maybe unsurprisingly, struggling to find any of their flaws. Even as I studied to become a therapist, a field that requires a great deal of vulnerability, I desperately wanted to remain hidden, especially because I believed I was inferior. I was a shy and sensitive child and, therefore, came to believe that meant I could never be man enough—introversion and passivity don’t exactly fit the Hollywood male stereotype. So, I pretended to be someone else, which is what a lot of our male patients do, too. They fear their own kindness, their own needs, their own sorrows, and their own fears, almost everything that makes them human.
Since I obviously couldn’t change anything about the way I was raised or how most of the male role models in my life influenced me, I resolved to try to find peace with my purportedly less masculine traits. I did so by outlining the values mentioned above, asking myself if I ever measured up. Was I ever courageous or strong? Did I need to exude physical strength to be taken seriously because of the gender I identified with? I can’t tell you what it means to actually embody a trait. How often does one need to be courageous to be considered courageous? Can one mostly act cowardly but still be considered courageous if they act bravely sometimes but rarely, yet in incredible ways? These aren’t questions I can definitively answer, but I stress that they’re worth considering.
Perfectionism and obsessiveness combine in an attempt to silence self-doubt, yet the reality is that doubt exists because there are no concrete answers, and we have misguided ways of creating them. What we think of as masculinity is not only largely an act, but it’s also simplistic. It traps us into ruminating on our limitations and comparing ourselves to mere narratives, which, to be fair, have some degree of truth to them. Those narratives, undoubtedly, fail to note all of the ways in which others failed to live up to their own standards. One can be, for example, courageous on one day and not another, just as one can be courageous in one way and not another.
