What Is Healthy Masculinity?
Photo by Jurien Huggins
This anthology was originally published in the Fall 2012 issue of Voice Male Magazine. Voice Male has always been a venue for diverse voices working to change the way we see, act, and think about masculinity. If you think it’s important to chronicle men’s involvement in the feminist movement, help us save Voice Male by supporting our crowdfunding campaign!
With a healthy masculinity summit in October 2012 in Washington, D.C., a key component of an ambitious two-year project to ‘spread the message of nonviolent, emotionally healthy masculinity,’ it seemed timely for Voice Male to ask several members of its national advisory board, and other colleagues and allies, to address in short essays their thoughts about the challenges inherent in trying define ‘healthy masculinity.’ What follows are the voices of those who responded just before the magazine went to press.
Healthy Masculinity is Oxymoronic
By Allan Johnson
The idea of a ‘healthy masculinity’ is oxymoronic, because what patriarchy takes from both women and men is the fullness of our humanity, which is the only valid standard against which to measure the health of a human being. I can think of no positive human capability that is best realized by being culturally assigned to one gender or another, nor can I imagine a truly healthy way of life that does not include the work of understanding and embodying what it means to live as a full human being.
Men Are Human First
By Robert Jensen
The list of traits we claim to associate with being a man—the things we would feel comfortable telling a child to strive for—are in fact not distinctive characteristics of men but traits of human beings we value, what we want all people to be. The list of understandings of masculinity that men routinely impose on each other is quite different. Here, being a man means not being a woman or gay, seeing relationships as fundamentally a contest for control, and viewing sex as the acquisition of pleasure from a woman. Of course that’s not all men are, but it sums up the dominant, and very toxic, conception of masculinity with which most men are raised in the contemporary United States. It’s not an assertion about all men or all possible ideas about masculinity, but a description of a pattern.
“When I die, I’d hate to be remembered only as a ‘healthy’ man in a ‘healthy’ relationship or as a ‘responsible’ father. I want my family (and others) to think of me as a loving, passionate, grounded, joyful man.”
Loving, Passionate, and Grounded
By Juan Carlos Arean
I’ll be totally frank. I understand the label of ‘healthy’ when we talk about masculinity, relationships, communities. In fact, it’s in the name of the very network I lead. However, I don’t like to stop there.
Men’s Existential Vulnerability
By Charles Knight
Men’s health suffers from anxiety associated with deeply felt needs to control the world. Boys, much more than girls, are taught to seek power over things and relationships. Many men sense that control is a male privilege and feel that control should be within their reach.
Escaping the Man Box
By Ted Bunch
Men must challenge our views and beliefs about each other. A major obstacle will be to confront our traditional male socialization and how it limits us and boxes us in. We must get out of the socially defined roles that sexism, patriarchy, and male privilege provide for us. In addition, we must end our collusion with the violence, objectification and demeaning thoughts and behaviors that we as men engage in toward women.
“Should masculinity even be linked to topics or issues of health? Is this a term that’s now a part of our vocabulary because of how men wrestle with their identity and the handling of power in this society?”
Healthy Males, Healthy Females
By E. Ethelbert Miller
The term ‘healthy masculinity’ seems somewhat problematic to me. Is there a bar or level of measurement we should all attempt to reach? Should masculinity even be linked to topics or issues of health? Are we looking at our actions, thoughts or simple conditioning? Is this a term that’s now a part of our vocabulary because of how men wrestle with their identity and the handling of power in this society? Social change often demands a realignment of power relationships between groups. As women become more empowered does it threaten male privilege? Do men respond by showing ‘unhealthy’ manners and behavior?
The Courage to Grow
By Tom Gardner
“What are you afraid of?” That was a question I wanted to put to a young friend whom most would define as courageous—a man’s man. He never flinched from tough, physical sports like ice hockey, or dangerous assignments connected with his work abroad. But he seemed to be running from something more challenging—a committed relationship.
Beyond Boxes
By Paul Kivel
Describe a healthy masculinity. Sounds easy at first glance. But the word ‘masculinity’ immediately calls up feelings and thoughts—from cultural meanings and practices the word has accumulated—almost none of which seem healthy either to the bearer or those around them. A certified masculinity and its benefits were the devastating ‘rewards’ that male socialized people were given for colluding with ruling elites and carrying out their violence. My colleagues and I have long invited men to step out of the ‘Act Like a Man’ box that glorifies certain attributes and calls them ‘true’ or ‘successful’ masculinity. Do we really want to create another box that claims to describe a healthy one?
A Collective Journey
By Steven Botkin
Healthy masculinity is remembering and reclaiming a caring, loving and sensitive self from the dominant legacies of patriarchy. Even as the boy grows to be a man, learning each gesture of domination or control, he is also searching for ways to express his inherent, healthy desire for connection and natural capacity for compassion.
Any Gender is a Drag
By Michael Kaufman
What is healthy masculinity? There’s no such thing! After all, masculinities are social constructs, descriptions of the power relations between women and men and among men. Especially in their hegemonic versions, they are a set of stereotyped assumptions about what it means to be a man. They are systems of ideas—ideologies. But the thing is, masculinity doesn’t exist, at least not as we think it exists, as a fixed or timeless reality or as a synonym (healthy or harmful) for being a male.
Irreconcilable Concepts
By Jackson Katz
‘Healthy masculinity’ incorporates two distinct but nonetheless intertwined concepts: ‘health,’ which suggests a biological perspective, and ‘masculinity,’ which is a social construct.
This interplay between the biological and the societal represents one of the great dialectics of our time, and raises a fundamental question: what does it mean to be a ‘healthy’ man when the very idea of what it means to be a man is so contingent on the maintenance of an economic and social order in which men are arranged hierarchically in relation to one another and as a group are in a position of dominance over women?
“There is no single definition or ideal of healthy masculinity—there are as many definitions as there are men.”
A Thousand Points of Light?
By Patrick McGann
A year ago when I typed into a Google search bar ‘defining healthy masculinity,’ one of the first links to appear was the website of the organization where I work, Men Can Stop Rape, I thought, “Oh, good. Maybe we’ve already defined it.” Joe Samalin, my former colleague who wrote the piece in 2009, characterizes healthy masculinity as “a group of high school boys volunteering at a local domestic violence shelter…or, straight and cis-gendered college men partnering as allies with LGBTQ student organizations…and, the enlisted men and officers in the Air Force who come to [our organization] for training on how to create safer workplaces.” But when it comes to defining it, he claims “there is no single definition or ideal of healthy masculinity—there are as many definitions as there are men.” Here’s a definition with the caveat that it’s very much a work in progress.