Daragh Fleming: ‘Masculinity, in the traditional sense, harms everyone at some point’

If I’m honest, I’m tired of talking about masculinity. Which may seem odd considering I’m the guy who bangs on about men’s mental health, and how I’d like to raise my boys if I ever have them. But it’s true. I don’t think being hyper-focused on masculinity changes anything. If anything, focusing on masculinity causes more division.

The Andrew Tates of this world want us to believe that being a man is inherently linked to how masculine you appear. And I say ‘appear’ with intent, because many of the prescribed behaviours for being a man are performative. They are done to gain attention, fit in, feel seen. That your testosterone levels are directly connected to how much of a man you are. Many of these alpha-bro types want you to show up in the world exactly as they do because they’re simply afraid of anything that’s remotely different to themselves. So they bang on about masculinity because it’s so intangible. But really, it’s sort of boring to keep talking about.

Masculinity is an energy. It’s also a word, used to define a set of characteristics typically displayed by those who have a lot of masculine energy. This, generally speaking, is men, but that isn’t to say that masculine energy doesn’t exist in women too, of course it does. Both men and women have varying levels of masculine and feminine energies. And the issue, so far as I can tell, is that while most men are comfortable embracing their masculine sides, many men are uncomfortable embracing their feminine sides. And so, this creates an imbalance.

Take me as an example. I’m not the ‘expected’ thirty-one-year-old man. I talk about my emotions. I write poetry. I cry when I feel like crying. I’m not obsessed with a football team. I typically symbolise a ‘softer’ form of masculinity, which is to say, I embrace my feminine side more than your average man. Doing so makes me no less of a man, and yet my whole life, accusations of being gay have been thrown my way, intended as insults. But what is really meant by these words is this – what you’re doing doesn’t align with our understanding of what it means to be a man. How I show up in the world isn’t the prescribed version of being a man because I embrace my feminine side. And so this is called gay because it is not purely masculine, and therefore not purely straight, and therefore not purely man.

Of course, this is the result of conditioning, socialisation, culture. Decades and generations of it. It seeps in via the media, social norms, expectations. It is not the individual man’s fault that they think this way. It’s the result of a society prescribing expectations of how men are supposed to be. (We do this to women as well, of course, but today we’re focusing on the lads).

But to me, if you are a man, you are a man regardless of how you turn up in this world. Your manhood doesn’t hinge upon an arbitrary list of behaviours and traits. That’s not how it works, but if you spend any time at all behaving in ways that aren’t expected of men, then your manhood is brought into question fairly promptly. Which is interesting. And sad. Thus, so many men, myself included, learn to mask. We hide our true selves in order to fit into the box that society has labelled ‘man’, even if this box doesn’t suit us at all.

So, if a man is a man regardless of how they turn up in the world, why are we so eager to define what it means to be ‘a good man’? When this specific part of us is inherent, unchanging, it feels bizarre to base an entire identity around it. It’s akin to basing your identity around the fact that you have hair, or a nose, or a beating heart. These things are implied, so to focus so intensely on them to glean value makes no sense.

Rather than focusing on what it means to be a good man or a good woman, it feels far more productive to focus on what it means to be a good person. Teaching our children, and ourselves, what it means to be good, to be kind, to have moral integrity, naturally leads to being a good man. Because if you are a good person, then you are a good man, nose-owner, heart-carrier, etc. Do you get what I’m saying? These identity markers make no difference, because if you are a good person, you’ll also inherently be a good man.

And so this is why I’m tired of talking about masculinity. Because to focus on it is to avoid addressing problems. Masculinity, in the traditional sense, harms everyone at some point. To be masculine is to resist asking for help. It is stubbornness. It is anger. But we have put these characteristics into the word. We created it. Which suggests we can change it, too. We can make masculinity softer to touch, while keeping all the positive attributes. Just because you’re a man doesn’t mean you can’t talk about your real emotions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is wilfully causing harm. And it’s time we asked why.