WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A MAN?

In the past few years, traditional male stereotypes have come under increasing scrutiny. Psychologist Gary Barker explains why these stereotypes are harmful, and what a new, progressive form of masculinity could look like

- HELEN GLENNY

What started your interest in this area?

Gary Barker I witnessed a school shooting at my high school in Houston, Texas, and saw negative views around masculinity in a place that was supposed to be safe for me. Ironically, it felt safer for me to talk about masculinity in some violent parts of Latin America – where I have family ties – than it did at my own high school. I went on to study for a PhD in developmental psychology, and in 1997 I started Promundo in Brazil, which came out of a close conversation with women’s and children’s rights activists. We realised that we could only get so far with women’s rights without engaging men, too, which led us to start looking at men’s views on gender equality and masculinity.

The term ‘toxic masculinity’ keeps cropping up. What does it mean?

It’s the shorthand to refer to restrictive ideas of manhood, like if somebody threatens my honour, I’d better use violence to win it back. Or if I need help or I feel vulnerable, I don’t tell anybody about it. Or the idea that we’re emotionally suppressed, don’t emotionally connect to others, and that we’re inherently in charge. All these things, we’ve clustered together and called ‘toxic masculinities’. We’ve tended to avoid that term more recently. While it’s a useful shorthand to those of us in progressive spaces, it immediately turns off many of the men who most need that conversation. We say ‘toxic masculinity’ and they hear ‘you think men are inherently bad’. The activist Paul Kivel came up with the term ‘the man box’ to refer to this set of restrictive ideas [because they keep men stuck within a ‘box’ of how they think they should behave]. We’ve been using that term more, as it’s more colloquial and doesn’t feel so anti-men.