Men don't need to be heroes. They just need to be people.

On entitlement and inadequacy. How hero stories hold boys to an impossible standard.

Hello. Sorry for the delay in getting this newsletter out. It’s been a crazy time with the seemingly neverending launch for Boymom and the ongoing (lack of) summer childcare. If you responded to my last post about my planned Zoom discussion group about boys, men and masculinity, I will be in touch about that soon via DM. And if you did not reply then but are interested in that idea, then please leave a comment or reply to this email and I’ll add you to the list!

I also have some other in person events coming up in California and Seattle and I’d love for you to join. At Orinda Books in Orinda, CA on August 20th; at Zibby’s Bookstore in Santa Monica CA on September 11th (9am); at Blackbird Books in San Francisco on September 26th, and two special private brunches organized by Happy Women Dinners- in Palo Alto on October 20th and Seattle on October 27th. The brunch events are ticketed, take place in beautiful private homes- the price includes a full brunch, a hardcover copy of Boymom and great conversation with a group of smart interesting women. (email jill@happywomendinners.com for tickets and more details)

And now, some thoughts on hero stories and impossible masculinity.

Men don’t need to be heroes.  They just need to be people. 

“ Entitlement and Inadequacy.”   How hero narratives are holding boys to an impossible standard.

Threatened boomer masculinity is the psychic motor driving the modern Republican party,  and bizarrely, this vibe is playing surprisingly well with young men.  The Trump-Hulk Hogan flavor of aging, furious, perma-tanned manhood is clearly speaking to Gen Z guys, who now support Trump for President with around a 14 point lead.  

Or perhaps it’s not that watching racist septuagenarians rant about macho heroes and “real Americans” is actually so compelling to 18 year old boys; but more that this demographic feels so abandoned and unheard by the left, that it just seems like the least worst option in a Sophie’s Choice.   

Both politically and culturally, progressives have done a poor job of listening to young men, and articulating a hopeful vision for them, and at least partly as a result, they are moving dramatically to the right .  The boys that were hitting puberty back in 2017, when the #Metoo movement kicked off a global reckoning with toxic masculinity, are now of voting age, and they are now more likely than their fathers and even their grandfathers to identify as conservative, and to believe that “feminism is harmful.”

For the most part, the left is showing little imagination in how to do a better job of listening to them, still trapped in the same depressingly limited paradigms.  Last week New York Times columnist David French reiterated one of the more common ideas circulating about how to draw men towards progressive ideals.     “I wonder if Democrats should answer the Republican men’s night with a men’s night of their own” he wrote about the RNC’s cartoonishly unhinged display of tough guy posturing.  “A night that features heroes instead of bullies and showmen, a night that answers the Republican appeal to men’s basest instincts with an appeal to their highest ideals.”  He suggested that the DNC should showcase a more high-minded version of masculinity to counter the Trumpian rapists and racists, suggesting a fearless, self sacrificing Navy Seal as an example of a better kind of American hero.

The argument is nothing new.  Caitlin Flanagan wrote something similar for the Atlantic a while back, in a piece entitled,  “In Praise of Heroic Masculinity.”  The article sported the bizarre subhed “Teach boys that strength can be a virtue,” as if anyone had ever stopped pushing that message onto boys, pretty relentlessly from birth onwards.    Flanagan’s argument was similar to French’s.   To fight toxic masculinity, we need heroic masculinity.   Heroes to slay villains.

In other words, a good guy with a gun, to fight the bad guy with a gun.  

I certainly won’t pretend to know anything about election strategy- where the aim is not lasting culture change but whatever achieves the highly specific outcome of drawing in voters most efficiently in the time available. But when it comes to providing a more expansive and healthier vision for the next generation of boys, we need to do better than this oppressive hero-villain binary.  We urgently need to give boys the permission and the tools to imagine their lives and prospects outside of the chokehold of this paradigm. 

Heroes are great when you need them of course, and can provide aspirational role models for people of all genders.  But in a similar vein to the the Madonna- whore binary for women, the hero-villain framing is damaging and limiting for men and boys, and for those trying to live alongside them.

The hero’s journey has become in many ways, an organizing principle for men’s inner lives. Glory-seeking heroes have dominated boys’ fictional worlds since humans started telling stories.  The hero’s journey is the basis for the majority of Hollywood movies. Marvel superhero epics alone dominate the modern cinematic landscape, drawing in close to a third of all box office revenue for all movies in a given year. Hero narratives in various forms are also the foundation of a significant number of video games that are beloved of boys, and in some form, the majority of the books and TV shows marketed towards them- from Harry Potter to Percy Jackson, Spiderman to the Paw Patrol.  

So compelling is the idea of the hero’s journey to the male psyche that research by the US Defense Department found that ISIS recruiters had studied this narrative formula and replicated it in recruitment videos to target adolescent boys, who they saw as particularly susceptible to this kind of heroic fantasy. 

In this classic storytelling pattern, the superheroes and fantasy warriors and video game avatars tend to be one individual man, working alone, usually with some kind of innate superhuman power or at the very least hypermasculine strength and abilities, who slays the villain, saves the day in a blaze of glory and usually ends up ‘getting the girl’ as a result.  Women are generally side characters, essentially objects that men either rescue or acquire as prizes for their bravery and heroism.    The woman in most hero stories is not quite a full human in her own right, but more a kind of narrative macguffin to further the desires of men.

Boys are socialized to see themselves as the hero on his journey, and the main character in any story, and to see everyone else, and especially women, as side characters or narrative foils.  As such, boys subtly absorb the idea that women and girls are not quite actual people with their own true agency or interiority, but more abstractions that exist to further the narrative of men.  

Stories in which men and boys star as glory-studded main characters send strong messages to boys about their own specialness and centrality to the world, about what is owed to them simply by virtue of being male- the level of adulation they can expect as their birthright. 

This easily spills over into a sense of entitlement and self centeredness in relationships more generally. But the internalized self-importance and superiority comes at a price. Taken together, the messages about individual glory contained in these stories can end up breeding an odd combination in boys of both entitlement and inadequacy.

 The basic story creates impossibly punishing  expectations for boys of what a man should be- hypermasculine, physically and emotionally bulletproof, ideally superhuman.  Actual boys and men, with human flaws and vulnerabilities will always fall short.   Failure is built into the project.  So many of the boys I interviewed for Boymom had fallen prey to this framing, internalizing a low-level shame at their inability to live up to the impossible demands of the masculine ideal.

I’ve written before about the ways in which we track boys and girls into two subtly but substantively different narrative viewpoints through the stories we expose them to. Through the friendship and relationship narratives they read and watch, girls absorb the idea that they are part of a relational system, a community that everyone contributes to and draws from, while boys are given stories which pit human interaction as essentially combative and competitive, with a good guy and a bad guy, a villain and a hero, who ‘saves the day’ by virtue of being unique and special.  And at some level that hunger for specialness and glory has endured as a kind of baseline expectation in the modern male psyche.

With this expectation lurking in the background, it makes sense that men might avoid the boring tasks of adulthood.  If you are shooting for eternal renown, doing the laundry or studying for your social studies test might well feel a little beneath you.  The kind of quiet diligence and cooperation modeled to girls can easily read as emasculating when compared to the sensational one-off glorious feats of the hero.  

But in most situations that life throws at us, quiet diligence is more important to success than splashy acts or inherent specialness.  It’s not innate genius or superpowers or grand feats of bravery that get you into college, or employment or out of your childhood bedroom, but mostly tedious, incremental drudge-work.  It’s perhaps not surprising that boys are spending so much time playing video games-  they provide the only arenas in which boys can live out this hero narrative,  finally meet that seductive, punishing fantasy of glory, away from the tedious business of being a functioning human.

The pressure to be masculine might have helped boys launch into adulthood when it was an economic requirement - when men were the sole breadwinners, and had to provide economically for a family.   But now with women gaining financial independence, and less urgency for men to step up economically, masculinity has been stripped of the only part of the story that really ever promoted adulthood.  Without the breadwinning, what’s left is just destructive scraps- a grab-bag of childish vanities and impossible pressures.

The pressures and expectations of masculinity still loom large in boys’ lives, and if anything, despite the right’s grandstanding about the ‘feminization’ of society, in many ways they have actually ramped up.  In recent years, the masculine ideal has become ever more cartoonish and extreme.  As a culture, we are moving away from the gentler, family-orientated “provider and protector” model of masculinity and towards a more caricatured, pumped-up action-hero version of fantasy manhood- all muscles and guns and hand to hand combat.

But when boys and men fail to meet the impossible expectations of heroic manhood, it can lead to a deep sense of inadequacy, according to psychologist Matt Englar Carlson.

“Shame is the core emotion for men,” he told me in an interview for Boymom.  “The way a lot of males experience depression is through externalization.  But there's an internal experience that you're not going to see, which is usually one of extreme shame.  Men are pretty aware when they don’t meet gender expectations.  Then there’s a shame cycle that occurs, that remains internal.”

And it is in this shame that the actual villainy takes root.  A wide body of research shows that it is not masculinity itself  that makes men violent, but the sense of shame that they are not masculine enough.   A range of research shows that men who score highly on measures for what researchers call ‘masculine discrepancy stress’, - ie stress derived from a belief that they fall short of society’s standards for manhood-  are significantly more likely to be violent in a variety of ways, including intimate partner violence, sexual violence and gun violence.

Our story of masculinity tells us not just that boys should be tough and aggressive, stoic and virile, but specifically that they should be heroes- special , notorious, superhuman.   Masculinity comes with built-in inadequacy. When I talked to boys for Boymom, I saw in so many different ways how, operating under these impossible expectations, they started to feel as though they were almost doomed to failure, constantly trying to outrun the impossible expectations of manhood, the stony dread of emasculation.

In its most extreme manifestation, this pervasive sense of shame and inadequacy is reflected in the psychological profiles of the high-school shooter or misogynistic incel.  Manifestos written by these young men show just how deeply they are tortured by the gap between their internalized entitlement to glory and heroism, and the crushing reality of being an unspectacular adolescent boy, ignored and rejected by the women that he has been led to believe are his birthright.

We don’t need heroes to fight villains- they are just two sides of the same coin.  Men just need permission to be real, flawed, fallible humans, just like- and living alongside- the rest of us.

You can order my book, Boymom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity on Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble or at your local bookstore. Or if you are in the UK, order the UK version here. And if you have already read and enjoyed it, please leave me a review on Amazon (you don’t need to have bought it there) and Goodreads. They really help. Thank you.