I wrote a formal review of The Man They Wanted Me to Be here, but, my source material for that review was a lot bigger and a lot messier and, well, not really a review at all. Sexton's book hit a bunch of issues and ideas that I have been thinking about and struggling to write about for several years now. (Not nearly long enough.) That bigger, messier first attempt at assessing Sexton's work ended up interacting much less with the question “Is this a book you should read?” and much more with the question “How does this help me understand toxic masculinity and through that understanding, help me help push the conversation about ending it forward?” Even though that process didn't fit in the format of a book review, I still think I hit on some important ideas through it, ideas that, at least to me, are important enough to make public, even if I don't have the resources at the moment to turn them into something worthy of the scrutiny of an editor and a publication.
But, that's what blogs are for, and, oh look, I happen to have my own blog series on my own blog about using books and reading to push the world a little closer to justice. Below is that bigger, messier attempt to better understand toxic masculinity through The Man They Wanted Me to Be and to find a way forward. It has been lightly edited for typos, mistakes, and shitty first draft prose. An edit or two I grabbed from the finished review. (Might also be interesting to other writers to compare the two versions, to see in this longer, messier version, where I'm trying to aim for the prose and construction of a review and where I miss badly.)
If it were a virus it would be an epidemic. If it were a foreign country we would be at war. If it were an alien from another planet it would be the villain in a movie. American men are dying and killing. They are suffering and making others suffer with them. Men are letting it happen. We are letting people die and kill. In Jared Yates Sexton's insightful and important book The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making, toxic masculinity is a system of absolute taboos and impossible expectations imposed on men—and through assertions of male power on everyone else--through physical and emotional abuse. Over the last few years—not nearly long enough—I've struggled directly with my own relationship to toxic masculinity and specifically with how to write about it and write at it, in ways that reduce its power. No matter where I start my floundering efforts or what angle I take into the project, I always run up against the same barrier: the men who most need to read about toxic masculinity are the least likely to. I don't know if Sexton has solved that particular problem or if that problem is solvable, but he has made an important contribution to the conversation around toxic masculinity that offers at least a starting point for our recovery from it.
The Greatest Generation is toxic masculinity's masculine ideal; they endured The Great Depression, defeated the Nazis and the Japanese Empire in military combat, and provided for their families often (if they were white of course) earning enough to buy a house and a car, feed their family, and take the occasional vacation, from a job in a manly industry like manufacturing. But this veneration of The Greatest Generation is a destructive force, one that hurts those it is supposed to celebrate and now hurts their descendants.
One of the tropes of The Greatest Generation is “Dad doesn't talk about the war.” As we learn more about PTSD, it's clear that thousands of American men returned from WWII (and Korea and Vietnam and the First Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq...) with PTSD and lived with it untreated for the rest of their lives. We celebrated their stoic silence as they suffered in silence. Or rather, we watched their attempts to cope with their suffering but refused to see it, interpreting three-martini lunches, late night poker games, spending all Saturday alone in the garage, corporal punishment, and demanding their injured sons “walk it off,” as inherent masculine traits rather than as inadequate coping mechanisms, as living up to an ideal rather than suffering from a mental illness. Toxic masculinity predates The Greatest Generation, but Sexton shows The Greatest Generation gave toxic masculinity a core to metastasize around and the fuel to supercharge its transmission.
Sexton argues The Greatest Generation's achievements were weaponized. “If our fathers and grandfathers could survive a depression, ship off to Europe or Asia, and fight the forces of fascism, then we should be capable of conducting civilian lives without complaint.” Sure, your job batters your body and mind so you feel like a crushed can every night, but your grandfather saw his best friend step on a landmine outside of Berlin and he never complained about it. But, of course, it's not enough to suffer in silence; any weakness, any failure, any instant in your life when you are not George C. Scott's General Patton is fundamental proof that you are not a real man like your grandfather. This masculine ideal has always and will always be impossible to achieve, as Sexton summarizes the work of Dr. Joseph Pick, “because gender roles are social constructs and thus impossible to fulfill, the inevitable failure to live up to them can result in psychological damage,” but the lionizing of The Greatest Generation created a specific ideal to fail against, while at the same time many of its members literally passed on their trauma through emotional and physical abuse.
Physical and emotional abuse that Sexton himself suffered at the hands of a number of the men in his life. A key part of the book is Sexton's description of this abuse as well was how he struggled to define himself against it and how, ultimately, he embodied many of the traits he tried to resist until he finally hit rock bottom and sought the professional help he needed to begin healing from his trauma. The arc of Sexton's story feels familiar. It is a narrative arch we've seen in dozens of memoirs and movies about addiction, but this is not the appropriation of a popular form. Sexton's story feels like an addiction memoir because toxic masculinity is an addiction. Sexton writes, “It permeates everything, reverberating throughout our language and tainting our power structure; it plagues every action and thought...Toxic masculinity is a chronic illness, and once we're infected we always carry it with us.”
But rather than consuming a substance, toxic masculinity, as addiction, manifests itself in performance, poses and postures of physical endurance, of willingness to engage in or actual violence, in a stoic absence of any emotion, except for anger. “John whipped and beat me when I didn't fulfill my end of the masculine bargain. If I cried, if I complained, if I was sick or if I simply felt short of his expectations, that's when I received punishment.” As children, men learn the poses and postures that get them hit or insulted and the poses and postures that don't and perform those “until there's no performance any more. There's just a man who knows no other way.” The performative nature of toxic masculinity truly hit Sexton in a breakthrough moment with his father. “The life he'd been living all these years had been one where he'd had to carry himself a certain way lest he got shit from his friends and family. Deep down, the person he was didn't look at all like the one he pretended to be.” Toxic masculinity is not something men cling to because they enjoy it; it is imposed on them by the world and their fathers until it is just easier to become that man than the person they might more honestly be, until they are addicted to the performance. /they defend it because, by the time they have their own children, they know of no other way to be.
Like many men of his generation, Sexton sought refuge from this process on the blogs and message boards of the young internet. But few, if any of those young men had the emotional tools to protect that refuge from the forces of toxic masculinity that drove them there in the first place. On the internet, no one knew how physically strong you were, if you were an athlete, if you had ever cried at a family reunion or on the playground, but instead of using that anonymity to find value elsewhere, they exploited it to ease their performance of those toxic poses and postures, creating “their own patriarchal reality that not only reinforced the old expectations but superharged them.” Instead of feeling free from expectations, they could not even stand the idea that someone might consider their anonymous online avatars effeminate, and so they used that freedom from physical limitations and consequences to relentlessly verbally one-up each other in a contest that no one could win because it could never end, performing an increasingly extreme toxic masculinity, “punishing the world while laughing to prove they're stronger than humanity,” and becoming the trolls that haunt the internet today.
Sexton's ability to perform toxic masculinity gave him access to Trump supporters that few other journalists had. At campaign rallies for Trump, attendees did not see Sexton as a journalist but as another dude and so were open around him in ways they were not for other journalists. Sexton was horrified by the racism, homophobia, and misogyny that he saw and heard at these rallies and his op-ed about his experiences at these rallies brought him to the public eye. The quality of a work of nonfiction, whether it's memoir, journalism, philosophy, cultural criticism, or whatever, is the material it gives its readers to form their own conclusions, whether readers are able to extend their understanding of the world beyond the limits of the book itself. Applying his other insights to his experiences at Trump rallies, we can reach a potentially surprising conclusion; some of that vitriol was performative, spewed by men who did not believe it, or at least not with that intensity, but were afraid their masculinity would be questioned if they didn't. Some, if not many, of Trump's supporters engaged in the same kind of pissing contest that trolls do, where the point was not to actually advance an idea but to prove how tough you, personally, are. To put this another way, there are members of Trump's base, especially men, who don't really believe in him, but feel obligated to attend his rallies, shout his slogans, and even vote for him to prove their masculinity. This is not to absolve them of responsibility for their actions and votes, but to try to define the relationship with toxic masculinity in our search for a solution.
Sexton wants to change the world. A perfect review of a book like this would be able to look into the future and see if he has. I don't know if Sexton solves that fundamental problem of audience. I don't know if the men who most need to read it, both for their own health and for the health of society, will read it. But their sons might. Their daughters might. A new football coach might. And they might find a path forward.
The first step is to just stop. Just stop beating your sons when they cry. Stop using feminine and homosexual descriptions as insults. Believe yourself when you feel like something isn't right. Believe yourself when you feel like you are acting or performing something that is not true to you. Preserving toxic masculinity takes work; relentless physical and emotional work that must envelop a child until the man they want you to be is extruded. Just stop. Just fucking stop. And the thing is, masculine men can still have everything they like about traditional masculinity. Throwing hits in hockey. Shooting powerful guns at a gun range. Pushing your body, taking some risks, late night bullshit sessions with your buddies. All of it will still be there, we just won't be able to snatch those activities from other identities who might want to enjoy them or punish our sons if they don't. And we get the ability to opt out. And we get the ability to try other activities, fashions, and experiences. And we get the ability to ask for help. Seeing toxic masculinity as a performance men are addicted to points towards the ideas needed, not just to prevent its transmission, but to enable our recovery from it. There are millions of people who have learned how to manage their addictions. We can take our knowledge of addictions, our awareness of toxic masculinity, and our growing understanding of PTSD and build something much better than we have today. The only thing we give up is the power to control what other people want from life. A power that, in truth, doesn't exist.
The Man They Wanted Me to be is limited in scope. It is rooted in Sexton's personal experience and uses that experience to guide what science, research, and other observations he brings into the book. This means the book says very little about how people of color experience toxic masculinity or about the experiences of women and people of other genders and sexualities. Sexton is open about the limits of the book and frequently clarifies when an experience is unique to white men while being careful to never center men and white men in particular as “the real victims of toxic masculinity.” But, in many ways, an important book about toxic masculinity, written by a straight white man, needs to be limited in scope because it needs to be personal.
There is a fundamental taboo against sharing anything personal, especially your feelings. In toxic masculinity, men are supposed to be invulnerable and expressing any pain (and even joy) is an act of unacceptable vulnerability. As important as the data is and as insightful as Sexton is with that data, the most important thing he does in The Man They Wanted Me to Be is break that taboo. He shares his alcoholism. He shares his eating disorders. He shares the abuse. He shares his pain. He shares the help he received, including therapy. Ultimately, this book is a permission slip. It says you can explore your own toxic masculinity. You can interrogate the men in your life. You can do the research. And you can get help in the process and that help can include professional help from a therapist or psychologist. And you can share this process with others. Through this process, unlike your father and grandfather and great grandfather who suffered in silence, forced the rest of the family to suffer with them, and passed on the suffering to their descendants, you will become a better human being, a healthier man, and help break the cycle of toxic masculinity.
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