What does healthy masculinity look like?

What if what we’re searching for is actually something we've had all along?

If you’re reading this newsletter, I assume that like me you don’t vibe with the cartoon representations of the “traditionally masculine,” status-obsessed, power-hungry “alpha males” who dominate YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and other regions of the “manosphere.”

But what’s the alternative? What should men be aspiring to these days? What does “positive” or “healthy” masculinity look like?

These are the questions I get the most when I tell men about this newsletter and my work as a therapist. My honest answer is that I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out myself. The best I can come up with after doing this work for a few years is that what we’re searching for is actually something men had in the past. Both within our lifetimes when we were boys and long before.

Research shows that infant boys are actually more emotionally expressive than infant girls.

Something happens in early childhood when boys get messages from parents and other adults that it’s safer to stop expressing how we feel. The emotions get stuffed away—but they don’t disappear forever. Research on adults has revealed that men are just as emotional as women. One study even suggests that we may be more emotional during romantic breakups. We just don’t express our emotions as openly—except for anger and aggression, when the dam breaks from holding everything in for so long. (By the way, women are just as angry as men. They’ve just been socialized to control it more effectively.) Messages about men being “naturally” less emotional and always in control keep us from expressing vulnerable feelings as much as women, who get messages that they are “naturally” more emotional.

What’s really blown me away has been learning that those messages are incorrect. I grew up hearing that “men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” That men are tougher and less emotional because in prehistoric times cavemen were hunters, warriors, and protectors. That women are meant to care for kids and family members because women back then spent their time in caves doing just that.

As research on prehistoric societies has advanced, these myths are being debunked. It turns out that as many as half of prehistoric humans who were big game hunters could have been biologically female. There appears to be little to no differences in the gender roles of the time. Women back then were likely not continually pregnant. Even the idea that there are two distinct genders—"the gender binary”—is only a few hundred years old. "What we take as de facto gender roles today ... do not characterize our ancestors,” anthropology professor Sarah Lacy told Phys.org last year. “We were a very egalitarian species for millions of years.”

Then, on top of that, I’ve been learning that not only are the messages boys and men receive about masculinity incorrect, but they were also invented to serve a purpose.

It’s not a coincidence that the “alpha males” on YouTube—and politicians like Donald Trump—want men to aspire to so-called “traditional masculinity.” The belief that men are naturally less emotional (and therefore women are more nurturing) is only a few hundred years old. It emerged in the early days of capitalism to fix a crisis caused by a world-altering shift in the organization of society. The new capitalist class in Western Europe first tried to force peasants—men, women, and children—to work long, grueling hours in their farms and factories. With no one to care for the home and raise children—which prior to capitalism was handled by sharing these duties communally—this new working class wasn’t able to produce enough workers for the fast-growing economy.

“The result was a crisis of [care work,] which prompted a public outcry and campaigns for ‘protective legislation,’” in the words of political philosopher Nancy Fraser. “Recasting [care work] as the province of women within the private family, [capitalism] invented the new, bourgeois imaginary of domesticity.” Working-class women were forced to stay at home to do unpaid household labor, while men were forced to focus on supporting the family by making money outside the home.

That’s where our “traditional” ideas about gender roles come from. They are a relatively recent invention and were initially meant to support and justify the rapid growth of capitalism. Then, over the last few hundred years, they were exported around the world by the British and American empires. From the Americas to Africa, indigenous societies were forced by colonization to adopt these “traditional” gender roles. Most indigenous peoples in what are now the Americas raised children collectively. Before the British colonized the Yoruba people in what is now known as Nigeria, Yoruba women held leadership positions and owned land. “Women could be at the same time rulers, mothers, children, priests, and occupy any position in social structures, depending on their situational status,” writes Nigerian scholar Oyeronke Oyewumi. “The imposition of the European economic system led to [women’s] exclusion from the public sphere. Women were forced into the household and became dependent on men.”

Like I said, there’s a reason politicians and influencers want men to aspire to being the emotionally detached, “self-made” man who protects and provides for his family. The same reason they want women to focus on less important, “feminine” tasks, like raising the kids. They want to hoard economic and political power. They want skyrocketing economic inequality to continue. They want as many subservient workers as possible, with household labor being privatized and going unpaid. If women continue to enter the workforce—which they’ve been doing for decades—the rich and powerful don’t want to have to pay more in taxes to fund health care, education, welfare, and other programs that care for people. They also want men and women to be at odds with each other—to think we’re very different—rather than seeing that we’re on the same team in a game that’s rigged against all of us who work for a living.

I get why going back to a “simpler” time is compelling.

Selling the idea to men that we need to go back “traditional” gender roles is good for politics and business. Men are craving purpose. We’re lost in a rapidly shifting economy with more and more women entering the workforce. We’re dying for a story for what to do and who to be.

But there’s no going back. And it never was all that simple—or great—anyway. Just like it did for our fathers and grandfathers, “traditional masculinity” limits our humanity. It ties our self-worth to productivity. It makes us look down on women and other people with marginalized gender expressions. It makes us lonely, less healthy, and less fulfilled.

That’s why I think figuring out how to be a man today is less about inventing something new and more about reclaiming what has been taken from us. Maybe we should think about the healthy, positive masculinity we are looking for as being like the sun. We don’t have to strive for it—it’s always already been there. We just have to remove the clouds, the made-up ideas about “traditional masculinity” that we’ve been sold. Maybe what we’re looking for isn’t masculinity, but humanity.

---

Now, a question for the comments below: What does positive masculinity look like to you?

(P.S. If you become a paid subscriber for $5/month, you’ll get my weekly Friday Q&A posts about improving you relationships and friendships, plus the warm feeling of supporting my writing.)