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Abstract

y guidance or supervision. Other people take a “carrot and stick” approach, rewarding right behavior and punishing wrong behavior.But the one thing, no one wants to see past that arbitrary point is anything weak, playful, radiating joy, soft, or lacking composure. From that point on, adults, peers, siblings, and parents all slowly start to get uncomfortable seeing you as Vulnerable.If you play music, you need to be ‘good’ at it. What’s the point if you aren’t gonna make something good?If you get bullied, everyone just watches. Are you gonna do something about it?If you want to tell a story, you have to get to the point. Why does what you say matter?The natural response of the gentleness and randomness of a little human — the kindness, care, support, and encouragement — it all suddenly start to drain away. Slowly, but never coming back with each drop. The vulnerability within us just stops getting acknowledgement, as if it weren’t there at all, much less so any validation.Regular people start to look at you with pity, disgust, embarrassment, or as a nuisance. You begin to get the sense that you are making an obvious error that no one will guide you on. But there’s no one to talk to about it with because, for some reason, that is part of the mysterious error to your approach. And even if you are bold enough to try there are no words for it. You never learned them.So I think each guy comes up with his own concept of it. But no guy needed to even hear the word “strong” to know that this is what he had to be to cope with this change of affairs. Callous, unfeeling, and tolerant of an unloving world is a prerequisite to not losing your sanity at a young age.Then after you build that, you can start to try to figure out how to get your humanity back.<h2 id="8ec2">The Birth of a Butterfly</h2>The expectation is abandonment, at best, unless you can ‘do’ that special something that is worthwhile. That something that will convince people that you are deserving of care and empathy and worth once again.That thing, whatever it is, is the seed desire under “Being a Man”. However, in this nascent phase, it is more like a desire to “Be a Human”. It takes a little bit more to turn that into a desire to be a Man.My best assessment of my ‘key’ to success, after years of simply trying to fine the words for what I was constantly pursuing, was that people want me to be Interesting. And if I’m not interesting, then they’ll be okay with whatever happens to me. But each guy comes up with their own.Stronger. Useful. Uncaring. Passionate. Mean. Successful. Cool. Polite. Responsible. Flawless. Attractive. Kind. Good. Bad. It is endless really because it is whatever seemed to work the most in making people empathetic and appreciative of your existence.However, if that were it, then at best I would have said that the trauma was “The World of Abandonment”. But there is something unfortunately more sadistic and very hard to describe because I don’t think anyone talks about it really.There are a few people that look at that vulnerability in boys as what I can only describe as an opportunity. There are many versions of this.Your peers, other boys, see you as an easy lay up to prove they aren't a liability, like you. Older people see a rare moment in time where they feel justified in punishing you to ‘teach you a lesson.’ And ephemerally, the girls, just watch, uncomfortable, or confused, or disgusted or smug.You cry, and people see a good joke. You rage, and people see a target. You go insane, and people see a loser.Hopefully you see it. It’s not just the lack of empathy or care. It’s almost as if, in the absence of care or love for boys, there is a great opportunity to outpour the sadistic, the anger, the frustration, and pain for just about anyone. Some indulge for themselves, others just watch. But if there’s anyone a person would use as an outlet for a little more of their negativity or hardship, the first thought is a guy. And apparently, we are meant to get ‘better’ somehow from this. We aren’t supposed to care.It starts as a suspicion, but as you grow up, it becomes increasingly a fact. The movies kill a bunch of ‘bad guys’ to make the ‘good guys’ look good. You don’t hit girls, even if they hit you, but fighting another boy is fair game. You are meant to sign a draft to go to war for your country. It is ugly and shameful to let your sister, wife, mother face violence and live to tell it afterwords. People would rather you die, than be a coward.People would rather you die, than feel.This is the birth of “the World of Violence”. And with it, your traumatic entry into manhood. It’s not just that people have abandoned your humanity, but that they lick their lips to make good use of your trauma. I hope this is starting to be understandable or relatable.To be a Man is to know what to die for, not what to live

Options

for. The joy and radiance and love of life is not welcomed until you have something you can die for. Happiness for its own sake is… not useful. Why learn what brings you joy or pleasure when you can get better at what you are meant to die for?How are you meant to understand this as a boy?You do not. And you never will, really.We just come up with justifications why it must happen because no one around us questions it. Your parents, your friends, the tv, the girls. That’s supposedly just reality, or evolution, or nature or some spiritual principle of manhood.<h2 id="9c91">Subtle Hints if You Don’t Pick an Answer</h2>The hint is not so subtle actually.It is apparent that it is girls, women that we are meant to die for, if nothing else. Most of us likely felt fond feelings for women (if heterosexual) and gladly take up that idea. And from that point all the complicated feelings about women spin and turn forever into the disturbing manifestations that women are familiar with.The claim “The reason to die is for women” is not far from “The reason you must die is women.”Love and Hatred.<ul><li>A desperate desire to have them appreciate you. To love you unconditionally. To forgive you. To see you as the little boy. To be obsessed and yearning for you as a being. As a Man. As a Human. All at once</li><li>But also a desperate anger and rage at them for not just saying Yes. For not seeing you. For not saving you. For just watching. For choosing. For existing. An endless expectation that she should look at you.</li></ul>But at the end of the day. In the World of Violence, the world of men, women are the benchmark of if you have earned the right to be free from it. If you earned the right to be vulnerable. If you have earned the right to be human.The mixed feelings are quite inevitable in these terms.Without vulnerability, intimacy looks a lot like domination.Who pointed at women as the Cause and the Purpose? I do not know but something tells me, rich people. They find good use in throwing the image of women next to a product to get men to spend money. And also find good use at throwing the image of women in our face to get us to die for them in a war. So I suspect it is them.The trauma in story form:“Your humanity is stolen from you. You ask how to get it. No one knows. You ask where is it. Everyone points to women. Why does she have it? They do not know. But everyone knows that your life means nothing without it.”“So do what you have to do, kid.”“And when no one will help you to do this mysterious thing, exploitation, violence, deceit, intimidation, coercion, force, and all the other sins of the earth, are on the table because… well… No one wants to Love you for free. You gotta earn it by any means necessary.”“When you’re faced with an abyss of uncaring like that under every step you take, it isn’t that hard to hurt people. You try not to and to find alternatives. But you know it’s way easier to succeed if you hurt people. People don’t save you from abuse because they are ‘your problem’. You know people will hurt you, if given the chance. Why put your cards on the table? Why forgive? Why be more human when you are better off as a monster?”“If no one will give you Love for free, then you must take it.”The strangling of the little boy within is subtle.It is an awareness that Manhood, whatever that thing you have been striving for, is unwanted. That the World of Violence is Unwanted.But if Manhood itself is unwanted, who will protect you? Who will love you? Who will care if you are dead? Who will remember that you are just a human? Who will stop people from hurting you? Who will be strong if you are not? Who will want to see your joy? Your disgusting, degenerate, weak, pitiful, useless joy?No one.But you knew that anyway. “Be a Man” about it.FINThanks for Reading. I think these feelings underly the male experience to varying degrees though I can be wrong. I suspect that if you apply this to a lot of male misbehaviors, you can understand it a lot more clearly.Anger is a cry for help, even if no one can do so. It is a raging against the fact that no one will. I think it took a long time for me to even accept the things I shared here because it manifested as hatred for a lot of things before this. It does make me angry but also deeply sad and worthless at times. I needed to access the depths of my pain to not let this essay turn into anger, as I think people cannot see past male anger (understandably).Also please, if you can, keep insults or jokes or dismissals or ‘x have it worse’ stuff to a minimum. I understand your sentiment but save it for a less vulnerable essay. At the very least, explore the emotions in the comments rather than dismiss me. Otherwise, feel free to just share your thoughts and feelings or if you have experiences that relate to this.</article></body>

The Male Trauma without the Anger

The Most Honest Cry for Help I Can Muster on Behalf of Men

I have heard many times from many women about that first moment where she transforms from being a little girl to a piece of meat to a man. Something to be consumed in some strange unfathomable and disturbing way. Sometimes it is an uncomfortable touch, or a look you shouldn’t be getting from an older man, or the boys at school noticing something about you after a summer break, or something worse.

It seems, from the outside like a kind of coming of age trauma for the modern era that women go through. It throws them into the world of survival against the unending desires of men OR if it doesn’t happen and unending insecurity about if she could call herself woman without that trauma.

The desire of men no matter how unwanted, painfully and disturbingly acts as this kind of fulcrum to assess one’s woman-ness and I have seen a whole society of women wrestle with this in so many ways.

I don’t think I can understand it perfectly having not experienced it but I try to model it better in my mind so that I could try to imagine myself in the shoes of a woman.

I think anger and hate of men make sense in the model.

Disgust with men make sense in the model.

The paradoxical desire and repulsion of men make sense in the model.

A hopeless disappointment in men makes sense in the model.

The shame about loving or liking men make sense in the model.

I have slowly understood those emotions even though I didn’t feel good about them. But there was one that doesn’t make sense in the model. It cuts me more than all the others in an unfathomable way and hence I can’t really put my words on it. I can only say what it feels like.

It feels as though someone desires to reach down to the little boy within me and strangle him.

This feeling is underneath whatever sense of guilt, anger, sadness, and pain I have upon hearing anything a woman shares that comes from “the trauma of men.”

In my eyes, I could be the best guy in the world and I don’t think that would make the feelings I listed go away unless I was delusional enough to believe I could never be capable of harming a woman. I know that to promise something like that would be just as hard as saying I’m sure I’d never be capable of harming a person. The infinite paradoxes of human living makes it an infinite process of healing the ills of human living.

However, that feeling, the strangling of my inner boy, this does go away easily and on my own terms. It is a feeling that I feel to be quite normal and one that I have mastered the art of navigating, coping with, and even harnessing.

The key for accessing that feeling all my life was: ‘Be a Man’

The World of Violence

I would say that there is a male equivalent to the trauma that women experience at the hands of men. However, it is not one that is necessarily imposed by women but rather, by everyone.

It is hard for men to talk about because I think it feels like the air. A fish only knows water so it is hard to start a discussion on the topic other than in philosophical terms. Maybe in terms of ‘the nature of reality’ or ‘the nature of existence’ but not ‘the water’.

Men live and breathe what I can only call, “The World of Violence”

By this I don’t mean that men are the only ones that face the threat of violence. Actually, I mean the opposite.

It is a world that expects you to be violent.

However, it is subtle how this expectation emerges and I will have to take you through the journey of my best assessment of how this emerges and what it looks like.

The Cocoon

There is a time for every guy where people stop looking at him like a little boy and start looking at him like a Liability.

Thats the best word I could think of for it right now even though I sense that there are better words out there. Again it is hard to access.

By Liability, I mean looking at him like he is a loan, a walking debt that must return a profit in the future by any means necessary. He needs to be powerful, competent, able to save himself, at minimum.

Every guy knows the feeling but its formation is varied and unique. However, I think a good way of capturing what this kind of ‘gaze’ feels like is a constant question of “How do we make him worth something?” From that you get all kinds of strange approaches for how to treat us.

Some people take the “Laissez-Faire” approach, letting him do whatever assuming that he will naturally develop on his own without any guidance or supervision. Other people take a “carrot and stick” approach, rewarding right behavior and punishing wrong behavior.

But the one thing, no one wants to see past that arbitrary point is anything weak, playful, radiating joy, soft, or lacking composure. From that point on, adults, peers, siblings, and parents all slowly start to get uncomfortable seeing you as Vulnerable.

If you play music, you need to be ‘good’ at it. What’s the point if you aren’t gonna make something good?

If you get bullied, everyone just watches. Are you gonna do something about it?

If you want to tell a story, you have to get to the point. Why does what you say matter?

The natural response of the gentleness and randomness of a little human — the kindness, care, support, and encouragement — it all suddenly start to drain away. Slowly, but never coming back with each drop. The vulnerability within us just stops getting acknowledgement, as if it weren’t there at all, much less so any validation.

Regular people start to look at you with pity, disgust, embarrassment, or as a nuisance. You begin to get the sense that you are making an obvious error that no one will guide you on. But there’s no one to talk to about it with because, for some reason, that is part of the mysterious error to your approach. And even if you are bold enough to try there are no words for it. You never learned them.

So I think each guy comes up with his own concept of it. But no guy needed to even hear the word “strong” to know that this is what he had to be to cope with this change of affairs. Callous, unfeeling, and tolerant of an unloving world is a prerequisite to not losing your sanity at a young age.

Then after you build that, you can start to try to figure out how to get your humanity back.

The Birth of a Butterfly

The expectation is abandonment, at best, unless you can ‘do’ that special something that is worthwhile. That something that will convince people that you are deserving of care and empathy and worth once again.

That thing, whatever it is, is the seed desire under “Being a Man”. However, in this nascent phase, it is more like a desire to “Be a Human”. It takes a little bit more to turn that into a desire to be a Man.

My best assessment of my ‘key’ to success, after years of simply trying to fine the words for what I was constantly pursuing, was that people want me to be Interesting. And if I’m not interesting, then they’ll be okay with whatever happens to me. But each guy comes up with their own.

Stronger. Useful. Uncaring. Passionate. Mean. Successful. Cool. Polite. Responsible. Flawless. Attractive. Kind. Good. Bad. It is endless really because it is whatever seemed to work the most in making people empathetic and appreciative of your existence.

However, if that were it, then at best I would have said that the trauma was “The World of Abandonment”. But there is something unfortunately more sadistic and very hard to describe because I don’t think anyone talks about it really.

There are a few people that look at that vulnerability in boys as what I can only describe as an opportunity. There are many versions of this.

Your peers, other boys, see you as an easy lay up to prove they aren't a liability, like you. Older people see a rare moment in time where they feel justified in punishing you to ‘teach you a lesson.’ And ephemerally, the girls, just watch, uncomfortable, or confused, or disgusted or smug.

You cry, and people see a good joke. You rage, and people see a target. You go insane, and people see a loser.

Hopefully you see it. It’s not just the lack of empathy or care. It’s almost as if, in the absence of care or love for boys, there is a great opportunity to outpour the sadistic, the anger, the frustration, and pain for just about anyone. Some indulge for themselves, others just watch. But if there’s anyone a person would use as an outlet for a little more of their negativity or hardship, the first thought is a guy. And apparently, we are meant to get ‘better’ somehow from this. We aren’t supposed to care.

It starts as a suspicion, but as you grow up, it becomes increasingly a fact. The movies kill a bunch of ‘bad guys’ to make the ‘good guys’ look good. You don’t hit girls, even if they hit you, but fighting another boy is fair game. You are meant to sign a draft to go to war for your country. It is ugly and shameful to let your sister, wife, mother face violence and live to tell it afterwords. People would rather you die, than be a coward.

People would rather you die, than feel.

This is the birth of “the World of Violence”. And with it, your traumatic entry into manhood. It’s not just that people have abandoned your humanity, but that they lick their lips to make good use of your trauma. I hope this is starting to be understandable or relatable.

To be a Man is to know what to die for, not what to live for. The joy and radiance and love of life is not welcomed until you have something you can die for. Happiness for its own sake is… not useful. Why learn what brings you joy or pleasure when you can get better at what you are meant to die for?

How are you meant to understand this as a boy?

You do not. And you never will, really.

We just come up with justifications why it must happen because no one around us questions it. Your parents, your friends, the tv, the girls. That’s supposedly just reality, or evolution, or nature or some spiritual principle of manhood.

Subtle Hints if You Don’t Pick an Answer

The hint is not so subtle actually.

It is apparent that it is girls, women that we are meant to die for, if nothing else. Most of us likely felt fond feelings for women (if heterosexual) and gladly take up that idea. And from that point all the complicated feelings about women spin and turn forever into the disturbing manifestations that women are familiar with.

The claim “The reason to die is for women” is not far from “The reason you must die is women.”

Love and Hatred.

A desperate desire to have them appreciate you. To love you unconditionally. To forgive you. To see you as the little boy. To be obsessed and yearning for you as a being. As a Man. As a Human. All at once
But also a desperate anger and rage at them for not just saying Yes. For not seeing you. For not saving you. For just watching. For choosing. For existing. An endless expectation that she should look at you.

But at the end of the day. In the World of Violence, the world of men, women are the benchmark of if you have earned the right to be free from it. If you earned the right to be vulnerable. If you have earned the right to be human.

The mixed feelings are quite inevitable in these terms.

Without vulnerability, intimacy looks a lot like domination.

Who pointed at women as the Cause and the Purpose? I do not know but something tells me, rich people. They find good use in throwing the image of women next to a product to get men to spend money. And also find good use at throwing the image of women in our face to get us to die for them in a war. So I suspect it is them.

The trauma in story form:

“Your humanity is stolen from you. You ask how to get it. No one knows. You ask where is it. Everyone points to women. Why does she have it? They do not know. But everyone knows that your life means nothing without it.”

“So do what you have to do, kid.”

“And when no one will help you to do this mysterious thing, exploitation, violence, deceit, intimidation, coercion, force, and all the other sins of the earth, are on the table because… well… No one wants to Love you for free. You gotta earn it by any means necessary.”

“When you’re faced with an abyss of uncaring like that under every step you take, it isn’t that hard to hurt people. You try not to and to find alternatives. But you know it’s way easier to succeed if you hurt people. People don’t save you from abuse because they are ‘your problem’. You know people will hurt you, if given the chance. Why put your cards on the table? Why forgive? Why be more human when you are better off as a monster?”

“If no one will give you Love for free, then you must take it.”

The strangling of the little boy within is subtle.

It is an awareness that Manhood, whatever that thing you have been striving for, is unwanted. That the World of Violence is Unwanted.

But if Manhood itself is unwanted, who will protect you? Who will love you? Who will care if you are dead? Who will remember that you are just a human? Who will stop people from hurting you? Who will be strong if you are not? Who will want to see your joy? Your disgusting, degenerate, weak, pitiful, useless joy?

No one.

But you knew that anyway. “Be a Man” about it.

FIN

Thanks for Reading. I think these feelings underly the male experience to varying degrees though I can be wrong. I suspect that if you apply this to a lot of male misbehaviors, you can understand it a lot more clearly.

Anger is a cry for help, even if no one can do so. It is a raging against the fact that no one will. I think it took a long time for me to even accept the things I shared here because it manifested as hatred for a lot of things before this. It does make me angry but also deeply sad and worthless at times. I needed to access the depths of my pain to not let this essay turn into anger, as I think people cannot see past male anger (understandably).

Also please, if you can, keep insults or jokes or dismissals or ‘x have it worse’ stuff to a minimum. I understand your sentiment but save it for a less vulnerable essay. At the very least, explore the emotions in the comments rather than dismiss me. Otherwise, feel free to just share your thoughts and feelings or if you have experiences that relate to this.