12/18/2023 0 Comments Boi we need to go deeper5, 2021, a man upset by Donald Trump’s electoral defeat had confessed to friends and loved ones that he was afraid and that he felt he was losing control in a world he believed no longer valued him? What if he had sat with those feelings, cried if he wanted to and discussed how to chart his path in a changing landscape? That would have been vulnerable. If true vulnerability seems scary, it is - but that doesn’t make expressing it any less necessary, for men as for everyone. If true vulnerability means accepting change, personal fallibility and the human condition of reliance on others, petulant vulnerability feigns emotional fragility as a means of retaining power. What is real vulnerability? Brené Brown, a researcher whose work on vulnerability has made her a celebrity, defines it as “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure” in her 2013 book “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.” Petulant vulnerability, however, uses the language of vulnerability as a cudgel. 6, but some became hapless patsies once they were held accountable. Classic toxic masculinity was on full display when those would-be heroes rallied to “save America” on Jan. One rioter even blamed “Foxitis” for his actions: His lawyer argued that months of watching Fox News had destabilized him to the point where he started believing untruths. While the attack itself was violent and wrathful, many in the mostly male mob, who screamed obscenities or threw heavy objects at police officers that day, later wept as they expressed shame, offered excuses or complained about jobs and friends they lost. 6 attack on the Capitol was a festival of petulant vulnerability. They show strikingly how this aggrieved, self-righteous mind-set privileges one’s own vulnerability over that of others: The crying killer doesn’t recognize the vulnerability of his victim. The courtroom tears of Kyle Rittenhouse, who was later acquitted in the deaths of two men he shot and the wounding of another, and Travis McMichael, who, along with his father and a neighbor, was convicted of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, were public displays of petulant vulnerability. There have been some extreme examples in high-profile court cases of the past year. And the film “Promising Young Woman” showcased the horror of the “nice guy” whose sensitivity slides stealthily into misogyny and abuse. On the HBO Show “Succession,” Kendall Roy professes his empathy with the plight of abused women only to feed his narcissistic desires. Or the hundreds of texts and anecdotes of so-called softbois collected on the Instagram account - men who express their feelings the way avalanches share snow, often as a form of manipulation or passive aggression. Think of the boyfriend professing loneliness to ensure his partner never sees their friends. As it happens, vulnerability was having a cultural moment - as the topic of popular TED talks and the focus of groups invested in helping men evolve, such as The ManKind Project and Evryman (whose men’s retreats echoed earlier movements encouraging self-reflection in men, including Robert Bly’s “mythopoetic men’s movement”).īut my hope has begun to diminish as I’ve watched male vulnerability curdle into something toxic: Let’s call it petulant vulnerability. Expressing my true gender identity did not immediately fix my relationship with vulnerability, but it led me to delve deeper into what vulnerability is and how it can operate. Two years ago, I came out as a nonbinary trans person. In high school, after telling my best friend that my grandfather died, he asked me to please leave his house if I was planning to cry. I cried often as a child, and a cousin once pulled me aside to tell me that as a boy I should never cry unless I had a cut running from my eye to my ankle. I spent my first 31 years moving through spaces where I didn’t feel I belonged, and I was often told implicitly or explicitly that I wasn’t performing maleness correctly. My personal relationship to masculinity is fraught. For better or worse, everyone you know is watching “Ted Lasso.” The strong, silent type is losing some of his allure. Others have enrolled in workshops and men’s groups in an effort to get in touch with their feelings and become better men. It hasn’t disappeared, of course, but in the years since #MeToo, many men have been trying to drop the stoicism and anger that have long warped masculinity.
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