Shut Up and Provide

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.Henry David Thoreau

Being a man hurts. From the time you are young, you are trained to be quiet and deal with it. You are taught that being uncomfortable and unfulfilled is just how it is. When a boy struggles to sit still in school, we medicate him into stagnancy. Energy and unapproved movement cannot go unpunished in the Prussian military model we call education. Individual thought needs to be stamped out as soon as possible. Boys are told to sit down, shut up, and pop another Adderall. Boys quickly learn to self-medicate their muffled misery with pornography, alcohol, drugs, and video games. We do anything to escape and feel special. The biggest video games are those of heroes and honor.

Boys are told that we are horrible cogs in an even more horrible patriarchy. The things that built and maintain the world are the same things we are hated for. Ambition, drive, forward thinking, protection, and discipline are obviously needed in society, but they are ridiculed by the same society that needs them. So boys stay boys. Why grow into something “evil”? Then the same “strong, independent women” who hate the so-called “patriarchy,” and who begged for masculinity to evaporate, say “I’m just a girl” and wait for men to save them. This disunion makes men tired and fed up. So, again, we retreat into comfort.

Men can either take on true masculinity — the old kind Scripture and history actually knew: a grown man who cultivates, guards, provides, and leads, spending his strength for others rather than himself — and be hated for it, or stay a boy and be missed and celebrated. It appears to be a loss no matter which direction a man takes. The internal struggle that men carry but cannot talk about — because we do not know how to express it, and it is seen as weakness to try — weighs heavy and creates a desperation we are not allowed to show, because we have to shut up and provide. Stoicism is demanded as competence, then pathologized as silence. Ambition is needed and then treated as a sin. “Speak up” arrives after years of “don’t make it about you.” People subscribe to both “we need more male vulnerability” and “we still punish male need” at the same time. That contradiction is exhausting and caustic, but, once again, that is just weakness, apparently.

We eat the pain, smile through it, say “I’m fine” or “I’m good,” keep on providing, keep on building and maintaining the staggering infrastructures of this vast world, keep on hating ourselves, keep on self-medicating, and keep on being three of every four suicides. The same people who told males, as boys, to shut up are the same people begging men to speak. Men fade away — stuck in pain and rotting in desperation.

We want unconditional love, but as Chris Rock said, “Only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally. A man is only loved under the condition that he provides something.” Although this is not true in every case, it is true for many men. Most men want to make a difference and be a hero, but more than that we want to be seen, known, loved, and cared for even in our weakness, not just our strength. For fear of being a burden and of being told to shut up, most men’s positive potential sits behind desperation, pain, loneliness, and guilt. Men go to the grave with the song still in them. I am not arguing that men should abandon responsibility. I am arguing that responsibility should not require men to abandon their own humanity and emotional needs. We just want to provide and protect, and to be thanked and loved for the sacrifice.