Toxic Masculinity and Depression

I have depression and I think that I always will, a fact about me that I am only just accepting.When it subsumes me, shuts down my attention, focus and memory and tells me that I don't belong here and I never will I have to deconstruct it, I have to understand it. I have to dismantle it, rearrange the parts and build myself back up in order to get myself back to where I was before it consumed my soul. Yes, if you're reading this as an overly sentimentalized piece of prose, replete with pathos and well-worn metaphors that's because the intensity of depression is both overly emotional and repetitive (at least in my case when it re-emerges semi-episodically). The reason I journal is so I can analyse my depression in order to isolate, extract and fully capture the root of the problem, the underlying cause and to dig it up to interrogate it. If I can at least understand it, I assure myself, then I am able to confront it and nullify its power by destabilizing it's nucleus of control.One way I try to minimise its destructive impact on me is to journal and keep a diary. Today I opened up my diary and read something that I had written last year (please forgive the frenetic shifts in first and second person);

2.1.19 When my depression infects me it paralyses me. Depression paralyses me and infects me like a parasitic virus once I've tuned into its frequency; it shuts down my emotional resilience and leaves your defenses and leaves you vulnerable, fragile, over-sensitive and prone to internalizing every single comment other people make about you. It tells you that you are a failure, that you haven't achieved enough, that your performance is less than adequate and insufficient.

As I read this, as a psychoanalyst might retrospectively read a patient's private journal, I was struck by how my experiences of, and the triggers to, my anxiety and depression where fed from the paradigm of toxic masculinity. It is both fascinating and disturbing how the 'reasons' and manifestations I attribute to depression are conditioned and learned responses to assess myself on a model of toxic masculinity. When I wrote that my 'emotional resilience' was shut down what I really meant was that I had permitted my sensitivities, insecurities and vulnerabilities to rise to the surface. The psychological self-flagellation wasn't arising out of guilt or of pressure but out of shame for allowing my feelings to rise to the surface, defenceless, raw and exposed for a cruel and critical audience. Was it really a problem that I internalize the 'banter' of other men who see my sexuality as a spectacle and an object of ridicule where its apparent magnetism ensures that any comment levelled at me somehow a comment on my sexuality. Is it really a problem that I was affected and impacted by the words of others and their tone of voice? And the questions I ask about 'adequacy' and 'sufficiency' are clear-cut signifiers of the cultural conditioning of masculinity that continually conflates the value of the man with with the intensity of his virility, power, control and his accumulation of progressive wealth. His stoic sense of unaffected self-assurance; it's part and parcel. I find it interesting here as well that I used the word 'performance' in two ways. On the one hand it revealed to me my self-awareness over the constructedness of masculine-achievement-as-spectacle and as a predetermined sequence of participatory rituals in the medley of masculinity. Yet I also used the word in the sense of performance as a tool of assessment; as a framework for quantifying success; as a marker of my achievements that other people read me through. 

Ultimately, what I was able to discern from my own interrogation of depression was that I was actually evaluating my own abilities to assimilate, adapt and perform within the prism of masculine normativity. When I read it back I started to dismantle the binary structures of oppositional thoughts and feelings that I was evaluating my own self-esteem with. I was looking at  myself, through a masculine lens, of pass/fail, acceptable/unacceptable.

   

Why do we need to talk about Toxic Masculinity?

I am a man. I live, work and play, as a man.

But what does that mean?



It means that I cannot go to work wearing nail varnish, colourful trousers and express my emotions to my co-workers for fear of being labelled 'an attention seeker'.

It means that if I don't follow the mono-syllabic monochromatic march of my speech I am labelled as an 'excessive talker'.

It means that if I express vulnerability I am labelled as a 'drama queen'.

It means that if I express weakness about anything then I make other men uncomfortable and am labelled as 'a bit odd'.

It also means that if I do not repress my emotions, participate in the performance of indestructibility then I marginalized and put into the corner as a problem.

It means that if I cry in front of other people than I am labelled as having 'mental health issues'.

It means that if a female friend upsets me, my male friends cannot acknowledge that I am upset by a female and cannot therefore offer emotional support.

It means that I I cannot actively fix a problem then I am a failure and I am talked about as 'not the most reliable.

It means that if I don't persistently crack jokes then I am blamed for creating an awkward silence.

It means that if I talk about women in the same way that I talk about men then I am disrespectful and don't 'treat women the way they should be treated'.

It means that when I go to a gig I must sway and nod rhythmically and not make eye contact with other men whilst I watch groups of girls living in the moment and letting themselves go and submitting themselves to the euphoric tides of the audio-aesthetic immersive experiences of transitory acoustic bliss.

It means that when you start a new job, enter a new social circle,both men and women expect you to have an interest in sport, in a world that revolves around the pursuit of a William-the-Conqueror come Predator envisioning of sex, in TV and in pints of beer at the pub whilst you sit and debate and assert your opinions whilst the women are expected to giggle, laugh and talk about all that emotional women baggage that they 'av (this is a quote that I will never forget that I heard).

It means that I am raised within a r#pe culture and I am not permitted to call out this culture because it is 'inappropriate' and 'offensive'.

It means that if I express a desire for alone time to work on my own mental health I am allowed to be ridiculed, laughed and accused of as being ridiculous and extreme.

It's the reason that I can't attend a wedding and tell the bride how fabulous their dress is and

It also means that I am most likely to die by suicide.



The phrase 'toxic masculinity' is something that I only heard last year on Twitter and 'boy' am I glad I had. I felt like suddenly the chains of oppression and the masks of masculinity that I wear became visible, I felt unplugged and I could see the code of masculinity infected everything like a virus round me. It is very hard to describe. It is an invisible virus that slowly infects you from your formative years of schooling and stays with you through college, university and at work. It is a code of conduct that you sign and subscribe a membership to that enables you to ascend the hierarchy of employment and social status. It ensures that you 'know your place' in society. You can only break free from the chains of toxic masculinity if you are an artist, a musician famous or have a 'reason' to 'perform' in a more effeminate manner. Toxic masculinity it the gender equivalent of cultural theorist Richard Dyer's 'absent white centre'. In other words, being a slave to masculine gender roles is the normative default setting and anything is a deviation from this norm that requires justification and explanation.  It is a restrictive state of existence that ensures men are in a continuous state of loneliness and alienation where a true spiritual and emotional bond between you and another male is continuously denied because it is an intimacy that is too extreme and unbecoming. In order to understand exactly how the micro-mechanisms of toxic masculinity it is useful to consider cultural philosopher Michel Foucault's definition of repression, or how toxic masculinity ensalves men into crippling corsets of conformist masculinity:

  these are the characteristics of repression...it operates as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of non-existence, and, by implication , an admission that there is nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know'.
Michael Foucault (1978) in 'We Other Victorians' 

 The 'injunction to silence' describes the underlying assumption in male homo-social spaces that expressing emotions with no concrete or quantifiable output or visible result is not-productive and therefore a waste of time, a non-exchange and as an investment that in way improves upon the silence. Instead what is permissible as a voice is the discussion of objects, specificities, nothing vague and abstract and statistical data than can be challenged and argued.  Reinforcing this is (some not all) women's expectation that all men are likely to say very little and certainly nothing about emotions. If men do give heartfelt answers that expose vulnerability and weakness then they are dumbfounded and perplexed, unabe to respond, paralysed by the observation of deviancy. Culminating in this 'affirmation of non-existence' is the expectation that men are not going to express their emotions to you and if they do then there is a serious mental health issue or a wider and deeper dramatic issue. Indeed, such an 'event' is discussed time for many week after it has occured.  With men and fragility there is 'nothing to see, nothing to hear and nothing to know'. 

But there is...


In 2017, 5,821 suicides were recorded in Great Britain, of these 75% were males¹⁰. Suicide represents the largest cause of death for men under 50¹¹.  

In England, men have been found to be less likely to access psychological therapies than women, with males making up only 36% of referrals to Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) .^​6 Men may also be less likely to disclose their mental health issues to family members or friends², and more likely to use potentially harmful coping methods such as drugs or alcohol in response to distress⁵. However, there is research to suggest that men will seek and access help when they feel that the help being offered meets their preferences, and is easily accessed, meaningful, and engaging^3.

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/m/men-and-mental-health

^{So what is toxic masculinity? It's a straight jacket and believe me it is suffocating...I know because I have been trying to take it off for 30 years.}