I was going to do a lot of research for this. I usually tend to see a few things that confirm my bias, and others that go in the opposite direction to see where I actually land given some contrary information. It’s not the most educated way of doing research but for editorials it helps shape my ideas and put them into one place. In this instance however, the material I read on male self-pity or the misunderstandings of men left me very dissatisfied. Maybe I didn’t search long enough or detailed enough but it kind of left me in a bad spot when it came to finally writing this opinion piece. To be honest, that’s probably the point. There’s no failproof answer to this issue. No clean way to present it. It’s something I experience daily but could never put into words until today.
“Niggas are misunderstood cause we’d prefer peace over happiness if we had to choose” was the tweet I happened upon that made me start to go on that Google journey in the first place but I think it encapsulates everything I might be trying to get at here. There’s a level of pity, self-loathing, entitlement, and loneliness baked into that single sentence and it really reaches into the psyche of what a lot of men feel on a daily basis. Does it make sense? No, and that’s kind of the point. It’s oxymoronic. It’s haughty but flagellating. It’s honest but it doesn’t paint the full picture. It’s informational yet stupefying. It’s the current existence of men in a nutshell.
I can get all sociological and talk about evangelical patriarchy, the need for therapy, etc. but that phrase is more than just those very needed conversations I just listed. It’s even more than empathy that’s gonna be needed to have the conversation at all. It is THE mission statement that men go by and continue to exist in, and even are painfully aware of. It’s sad, frustrating, confusing, and yet the only way to move forward behaviorally is to internalize and understand it and that goes for everyone on the gender spectrum.
I think the one thing about the male experience as is in most societies is that we’re put on pedestals that most of us won’t even meet. Out of shame or pride, we tend to try to meet the unattainable goal anyways and become a victim of that impossibility. Men and women are looking to men to perform and succeed at whatever the environment considers manhood and we often fail. If it’s not financial, it’s emotional. If it’s not in accomplishments, it’s in competition. If it’s not in being logical, it’s being an ordained leader. It’s a maelstrom of contradicting virtues. Something that women also go through with the added bonus of being a minority. Which is, funnily enough, kind of a blessing as that minority status allows questioning of the current conditions among the in group on a greater level.
Men being the ones who set the perch up themselves have no such “privilege” if I were to be coy. There’s a deficiency in men that, if given the urgency other gender expressions have shown, could rectify the issues being had but the innate entitlement of being the one on top blinds us to so much, that it comes an ouroboros to our own existence. That “Male Pity” referred to in the title, is exactly that. A snake eating its own tail. The “woe is me, suffering from success” attitude men have is a cyclical self-inflicted wound that most will never realize is a problem until a breaking point is reached. And even that breaking point is just reinforced male ego that can end up being even more destructive.
So how do we begin to detangle the serpent at least? We need to individualize manhood more. We collectively came up with a framework for how gender is supposed to work and tried to apply that to every individual to ever exist. Mr. Rogers used to say at the end of his shows:
“You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.”
I feel like the natural cynicism of living took us away from really understanding what is being said here. It’s sugary sweet but it has a poignant point. There is no one like you and you make everyday matter more if you’re being yourself. Men are caught in this supremacist collective vision of manhood and our need for self-determination conflicts with this so much that it causes egotistical self-pitying. That framework of manhood doesn’t allow for self-reflective individualism but allows us lash out at everything else and make it their problem. We say we’re misunderstood, but we are really misunderstanding ourselves.