While brainstorming ideas for this column a few weeks ago — a disorganized process of scrawling ideas in my Notes app and rereading my past pieces — I worried I wouldn’t be able to come up with a topic to write about for another semester. After spending more time than I’m willing to admit coming up with random half-baked ideas, I was struck by inspiration from an unlikely place: a rather critical comment I received on an article published last November titled “Support Men’s Mental Health.”
The title of the article clearly conveys its thesis: men are largely left out of much of the dialogue surrounding mental health. As a columnist for the Opinion section of The Hoya, I know everything I produce is, ultimately, just my opinion. While I always welcome other perspectives, the highly critical and rhetorically jarring nature of this comment didn’t sit well with me.
In his comment, my reader, a Georgetown alum, posits that “the male is the world’s number one problem,” and left a link to his website, badmalebehavior.com, which makes similar claims about the monolithically problematic nature of the male gender. I see the sentiment his website and comment convey in almost every community I’m a part of — the belief that there is something inherently problematic about men.
One revealing and tangible example of my commenter’s belief, sure to be familiar to any college-aged reader, is the viral TikTok audio that suggests women would feel safer in a room with a bear than a man. While the individual perspectives of women who used the audio to share their own stories are real and important, the way these sentiments are expressed make it seem like it applies to all men. Bad male behavior is a very real and inexcusable phenomenon that impacts the lives of many women. However, pressing this stereotype onto all men is unfair and, most importantly, unhelpful to the actual problem that can leave women feeling unsafe around men.
Like with any group of individuals, the assumptions we form about others are often hurtful. And to label all people of a certain gender or background as likely to fall into stereotypical behavior keeps us divided. Most of all, antagonistic blaming prevents us from addressing bad male behavior at its core.
At Georgetown, I feel this monolithic stereotyping of men when I tell my female peers I went to an all-boys Catholic school. Although I know they’re mostly jokes, they ask me what kind of ideas I must have about women and how I must feel uncomfortable sharing a classroom with girls; they’re surprised when I like reading Jane Austen or writing poetry — as if a conservative school for boys couldn’t produce anything more than either a jock or, more problematically, someone who has little to no regard for women.
To a greater extent, the qualities we deem problematic in men — ones that make them seem worse than bears — are ones we teach them to embody. We enforce different standards and activities on young boys and then fail to understand how they can cause these impressionable children to internalize certain notions of what it means to be a man. We blindly thrust boys into the same activities — such as contact sports — that encourage them to see aggression as a winning strategy in the game of life. Hearing coaches and parents repeatedly tell them to “be a man” and toughen up, young boys often conflate the qualities needed to win games with the qualities that are needed to “be a man” outside of these activities.
We are still teaching boys that there are certain traits they need to embody in order to be a boy. If boys are raised to exhibit damaging and problematic traits, it’s on us to address it. And the solution doesn’t start by monolithically claiming men to be the world’s number one problem.
Instead, we need to be more critical of how we raise boys and teach men to think about themselves. Nonetheless, while undoing stereotypes is a place to start, we must also work to hold the men who are a part of the problem accountable. Teaching boys to embody problematic behaviors is the first step leading to bad male behavior, so the solution begins with understanding that the behaviors we associate with men are learned — and thus can be unlearned.
Because these behaviors are able to be learned and unlearned, I have a lot of hope in ending the stereotyping of men. I am hopeful that men right now who display so-called bad male behavior have the power to change; I’m also hopeful that our sons might be raised under a more compassionate model of masculinity. So, if we work together, we might be able to raise a generation that puts the male stereotype to rest.
Dylan Goral is a first-year in the College of Arts and Sciences. This is the first installment of his new column, “Mental Health Matters.”
