[If you’ve not yet read the intro, kindly do so.]

The Early Years: Wherein I examine (toxic) masculinity through the lens of my upbringing.

I grew up in the 1980s. In fact, I became a teenager the year the ’80s came to a close. In the United States, nine of those ten years saw a Republican President in the White House, and Republicans controlled Congress for much of the decade. Crack cocaine and AIDS were allowed – encouraged, even – to wreak havoc on the Black and LGBTQ communities, respectively. It was a time when consumerism held sway over the American people and wealth and material were highly prized.

Conservative values dominated the country, with so-called traditional gender roles the norm, and casual bigotry including misogyny and homophobia sadly allowed to thrive. Straight white male privilege was so widespread that it went generally unnoticed by straight white males. It wasn’t commonly acknowledged; it simply was. While author Tom Wolfe coined “the ‘Me’ Decade” to describe the 1970s, it seems a more fitting descriptor for the greed and apathy of the 1980s.

Growing up, I saw casual misogyny. I saw homophobia. I saw racism. I saw unnecessary male aggression toward virtually anyone or anything. When you experience something enough – whether first-hand or otherwise – it can easily become normalized, even when it’s not something you support or agree with. In other words, if you attend a school where students are often bullied, you may not like the behavior but you will probably acknowledge that that’s just the way it works at that school.

The unnecessary aggression I describe wasn’t always directed at women, people of color, or LGBTQ individuals. I may be a straight white male, but I was short, I was frequently overweight, I was soft-spoken. I was awkward, and probably perceived as effeminate at times, no doubt the result of having a close relationship with my mother since birth. In short, I was an appealing target. Virtually all of the people who antagonized me growing up were boys or men. At the time, I didn’t know how to describe this male meanness – “bullying”, I probably would have said – but today it falls under the umbrella of toxic masculinity.

As a result of these experiences, today it is very difficult for me to have an ongoing friendship with a guy in part because it’s difficult to trust that the prospective friend has values that are at least somewhat in proximity to my own. It doesn’t have to be as overt as storming the Capitol or carrying a tiki torch through Charlottesville. It doesn’t have to be a closet full of Nazi memorabilia or having attended Klan rallies. It can be something as low-profile as harassing women under an assumed identity on social media. It can be trolling to compensate for one’s own shortcomings. It can be posting revenge porn. Hell, it can be mistreating waitstaff or otherwise refusing to care about one’s fellow human being.

Beyond all of that, it has traditionally been difficult for me to maintain friendships with guys because I don’t care much about sports or cars, and it seems like 90% of conversations I’ve had with men revolve around one of these two things. Sure, I know enough to fake it most of the time, but if we’re at a party and the men are mingling with the other men while the women are mingling with the other women – because suburban living is nothing if not conformist – chances are that my social anxiety is through the ceiling because I know I’m likely to get roped into a conversation about sports or cars.

In fact, in decades past very few of my conversations with other men involved pop culture, with the occasional exception of the most mainstream films, television shows, video games, and music. This is because up until fairly recently it wasn’t socially acceptable to be a geek and to have interests including but not limited to comic books, roleplaying games, and science fiction. In the 1990s, when I was a teenager and a young adult, bringing up any of these topics was a likely path to widespread derision.

Now, it may seem like I just wasn’t hanging out with the right people, and I can’t honestly say this wasn’t the case. But given how many people of my generation now talk openly about playing Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s, or standing in long lines to buy multiple copies of Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 in 1991, it seems more likely that at least some of the guys who would have shoved someone into a trash can and rolled them down a hill for having geeky interests were probably into the same things but just couldn’t admit it. Lest they too be shoved into a trash can and rolled down a hill.

Anyway, why would I want to hang out with people who just want to talk about the same basic bullshit? And when the conversation wasn’t in the “sports and cars” realm, I still felt the need – and still do, in fact – to be on guard for casual racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Even when I’ve spent sufficient time in a man’s company to determine that he’s unlikely to express bigotry toward others, I still keep my guard up because heaven forbid I decide someone’s cool and let my guard down only to find out he voted for Trump.

(I realize that non-toxic masculinity exists and always has existed. I realize that there are other men like me who would rather not contribute to the problem. Decent, well-adjusted men are out there. But sometimes looking for male friends doesn’t feel like a worthwhile endeavor.)

Hanging out with one guy is risky enough, but with a group of guys the risk becomes exponentially higher. With one guy, there’s actually a pretty good chance that he’ll be decent. At least fifty-fifty odds, I’m thinking, though I have no statistics or other data to back that up. But let’s say you’re hanging out with a group of five guys. What are the odds that none of these five is a piece of shit? Again, I have no basis for any of this other than my own experience, but I’ve got to think that at least one of them (and probably more – maybe four) has disregarded a woman’s lack of consent, has participated in a hate crime against a member of the LGBTQ community, and/or would express umbrage over his daughter dating someone from a different race or ethnicity.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve always been closer to women and had more women friends than men. I find it easier to let my guard down with women, and even conversation comes more naturally. After all, there have been relatively few women who’ve failed to make me feel at ease around them whereas with men there have been relatively few who’ve succeeded. At times, I’ve wondered if this predilection was less altruistic: “Do I have women friends because I’m wary of toxic masculinity, or because I’m straight and women are more useful to me sexually than men are?” I try my best to always be self-aware – perhaps to my own detriment – but I’ve consistently come to the conclusion that that isn’t the reason.

It’s been hard to overcome the programming to which I was exposed during childhood and adolescence. Even though I never liked what I would come to know as toxic masculinity, it seemed a fait accompli. It was all around me, seen not only in the people around me but in the entertainment and other media I consumed, and that’s what I thought I was expected to be. Supposed to be, even. I didn’t fit in with other guys, and this led to identity issues, and intense introspective analysis. “IS this what makes a man?”

Sure, I had guy friends over the years, but generally speaking I saw it as taking the bad with the good. The way I saw it, every one of them had some antisocial dysfunction I was not yet aware of. Such dysfunction was part of being a guy. The question, once I sussed out what that dysfunction was in any given one of my male friends, was could I live with it?

I know the above is a very superior and fucked-up attitude to have. If it was true that some manner of toxicity was inevitable, was part and parcel of being a guy, then surely that meant I had something wrong with me too. Alternatively, if I am fairly well-adjusted – and I’m not saying I am, but if I am – surely other boys and men are too. Still, being exposed to terrible behaviors that have been condoned and even normalized by the collective, it becomes very easy to assume the worst of others.

In the next post I’ll talk about the now-dead friendship. I’ll demonstrate why it was such a breath of fresh air when compared to other male friendships I’ve had. I’ll revisit how the friendship began, how it evolved, and the benefits I enjoyed as a result. And because it’s me, I’ll introspect. A lot. Stay tuned.

Continued in Part 3.