My childhood home was a patriarchy with my father at its head and my two elder brothers beneath him.
My dad, a stern, mustachioed RCMP detective, was neither kind nor unkind. He took great pride in being a Mountie and carried himself with the sort of stoicism that haunts men working in the Major Crime Unit.
My brothers looked up to him, and I looked up to them.
Our pecking order functioned something like this: they were cool, competent, and strong, while I was destined to be the perpetual punching bag, cry-baby, and tattle tale.
All I wanted was to be a man — a big stinking one. With a moustache, a hairy chest, and high blood pressure.
I thought stress was a moral obligation, and if somebody cut you off in traffic, you should follow them to the grocery store and yell outside the car.
My father was a complicated man with emotions that came in fits and starts. He could stifle a smile, laugh, or tear on command but often succumbed to unrestrained rage without warning.
He presented his love through backhanded compliments and wet-willies in the car.
His brand of masculinity fell into the realm of toxic, but I do not fault him for it. In fact, I love him more. I think it was a burden he would’ve rather been rid of. One that began in his youth.
Psychologist Niobe Way has made her career studying social and emotional development. Her research has uncovered what she describes as an epidemic of loneliness among men.
Way found boys form strong, emotionally diverse relationships in prepubescence but become emotionally withdrawn in their adolescence. They are less inclined to share their feelings and have a difficult time forming emotional connections.
She attributes the withdrawal to her patients’ conceptions of what it means to be a man and believes culture is to blame. Boys experience a crisis of connection because society associates human needs like intimacy and connection to gender, she said.
Way’s findings epitomize my dad’s childhood. As the eldest of three boys, my grandfather (also a staunch RCMP man) held him to the highest standards. He imposed an archaic sense of masculinity on my dad, better suited to the Wild West than a loving family home.
His worldview idealized hardiness and respect but chastised vulnerability and compassion.
I’ve never met my grandfather; he died of brain cancer before I was born. From what I know, he was tenacious and aloof.
“They don’t make men like that anymore,” my family would say.
Except they do make men like that.
“We’ve created the problem. We’ve taken basic human capacities — which is to think and to feel — and we’ve given them a gender. We’ve made thinking into a masculine thing, and feeling into a feminine thing, which doesn’t make any sense because all humans think and we feel,” Way said.
Let me be clear; I do not want to undermine the impacts of gender inequality on women.
Canadian women face a greater risk of domestic violence, harassment, sexual assault, and sex trafficking. The gender-pay gap is well studied, exists in every country, and pervades nearly every industry. And historically, men have not needed social movements to advocate for equal representation, recognition, and reproductive rights.
In early 2017, the #MeToo movement brought sexual assault and gender inequality to the forefront of social discourse, but studies show Canada has been slow to change.
Last year, Plan International Canada surveyed 1,452 Canadian women and produced a gender equality report. The resulting data indicates little has changed public perception of gender roles.
Eighty-one per cent of women reported feeling pressured to fulfill traditional gender roles (cooking, cleaning, and childcare) and 70 per cent reported experiencing inequality in their lifetime.
Perhaps most telling of all, respondents indicated an expectation that men should be confident and tough (83 per cent), while women should be accommodating and emotional (81 per cent).
The data shows there are still overwhelming preconceptions of how people should act, think, and feel based on their gender.
This pressure to live up to gender expectations is killing men.
“The gender roles, norms and practices socially imposed on men reinforce a lack of self-care and neglect of their own physical and mental health,” reads a 2019 report from the Pan American Health Organization.
That lack of self-care takes its form in alcoholism, depression, and suicide.
America’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found men are 2.5 times more likely to die alcohol-related deaths than women. And while men and women suffer from depression at roughly the same rate, men are four times as likely to die by suicide, says the Centers for Disease Control.
Despite suicide being the second leading cause of death for males under 45, men are less likely than women to ask for help. Experts believe masculine culture is the root of the problem.
The men in my family have historically grown to be emotionally impotent. For my dad, it was a parting gift from his late father and one he would likely have passed on to me if a malignant tumour hadn’t intervened.
He died of brain cancer in 2011, the same variety which claimed my grandfather nearly three decades before. Living without him has been a challenge, but it has also absolved me of his conception of masculinity.
It is a blessing and a curse.
In the last year of his life, he began seeing a therapist. I wonder at how his life may have changed if he’d taken this step earlier. I believe his relationship with masculinity contributed to his illness.
He lived and died by his definition of manliness.