If You’re a Man, Don’t Put Others Down

Reflections on toxic masculinity

When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and be a manly man.

I didn’t really know what this meant at the time, but I thought I had some idea.

In middle school, I was on many sports teams and idolized my macho, tough, and muscular sports coaches. These coaches made my teammates and I feel small and ridiculed us as if it was their way of initiating us into manhood.

At home, I grew up under an alpha male father who was very aggressive, angry, and dominating. He was a lion father, which meant that everything was under his control, or else he’d lose his sh*t.

In my late adolescence and early twenties, I spent a lot of time in the gym bodybuilding because of relationship insecurities. I was once head over heels for a girl I was in a relationship with that wanted me to “get big”.

Then at the age of 23, my bodybuilding career took a drastic turn as I experienced a life-altering injury — a pinched nerve in my neck.

To this day, this injury has been the most humbling and devastating thing I have experienced.

I was once the guy that people thought was on steroids, and guys would come to in order to ask for advice on how to get big. People used to think I competed in bodybuilding shows because of what I looked like and how serious I took my training. Bodybuilding was once my life.

Not being able to lift in the same ways, and look the same, definitely impacted me mentally. More importantly, it brought my fragile concept of manliness to the light.

Now that I’m 25 and have been dealing with my injury for the better part of the last two years, I really think about what it means to be a man.

I dig deep and ask myself if I really do feel like a man.

And when I can’t seem to answer this question properly, I start to ask myself what it even means to be a man.

The difference between a boy and a man

In their book, King Warrior Magician Lover, authors Moore and Gillette separate what they call boy psychology from man psychology.

For them, a boy is one who constantly feels the urge to put others down and be abusive. A boy is insecure and feels the need to dominate others to feel good about himself.

A man, on the other hand, is calm, centered, compassionate, and supportive towards others. He is secure in himself and does not operate on the basis of his ego.

A boy is an expression of immature masculinity, whereas a man expresses mature masculinity.

When I read the intro to their book, I really felt what they meant.

It became clear to me that the men I looked up to and that surrounded me as I grew up, we’re operating on the level of a boy.

My father dominated my entire family, not because he was strong, but because he was weak. He was insecure.

My middle school coaches also ridiculed my teammates and me because they too were weak and insecure — deep down.

How society gets manliness wrong

It’s not fair for me to point my finger at my father and my coaches and say that they messed up.

The truth is that they were taught to be destructive. They were influenced to be violent, aggressive, and beat others down.

Their fathers and coaches probably did the same thing, so they followed the custom.

This custom is what we call patriarchy, and it has been around for a very, very long time; It continues to permeate society even today.

Patriarchy is basically the net outcome of society’s men living as boys.

It’s reinforced every time men make an effort to express their feelings genuinely, and they get shut down. And it’s reinforced when terms like “nice guy” and “gentleman” are used indirectly to insult men.

It’s reinforced by macho coaches, by gang leaders, and army leaders. It’s reinforced by men that appear to be very manly on the outside, but are boys in the inside.

Women also reinforce patriarchy when they choose the less manly man. They sometimes pick the man who is a boy over the man who is a real man.

Both women and men get manliness wrong, which is why society as a whole gets it wrong.

According to Moore and Gillette, some accounts of modern-day feminism target masculinity and say that it’s toxic by nature. But the truth is that it isn’t. And we can work our way forward as a society to bring this to the light.

Manliness doesn’t have to be evil. It doesn’t have to be destructive, violent, and abusive. At its core, claim Moore and Gillette, manliness is indeed generative, compassionate, and supportive.

What I think it means to be a man

“To be a man is to be calm,” said one of my favorite YouTubers.

But as much as it hit me, I think that to be a man is to be more than just calm through the trials and tribulations of life.

After reading Moore and Gillette, and thinking about masculinity, I think that to be a man is to bring value to the world. It means to bring value to yourself and to those around you — including other men and women.

Being calm and centered serves as a prerequisite for being able to add value to the world. So it’s vitally important. But it’s not the whole picture.

To be a man is to be able to leave a situation better than it was before you got there. It is to be of service and useful.

It is to live with integrity and have a vision in life. A direction that does not involve putting others down so that you can climb, but involves raising them up too so that they can soar with you.