Excerpts from Connor Beaton:
One of the biggest challenges that men face today some might say that it’s being able to develop a deep sense of emotional intelligence, while others would say that it’s being able to really understand racial and gender inequality. Now, while both of those are true, I see that the biggest challenge they face in order to address these is being able to overcome and move through some of the negative stereotypes that surround masculinity. You see at a very young age most boys and young men are taught that their highest value as a man is their ability to dominate to control and to succeed at all costs.
One of the biggest challenges that young boys and young men face today is being taught that emotional and creative expression is not what a real man does. You see the rise of the empowered woman is not a threat to masculinity, feminism is not the death of men. Machoism and our idea that in order to be a successful man, we need to dominate others, we need to be a lone wolf and that we need to figure it out by ourselves, that’s what’s really crushing men today.
These archetypes have an impact. They have consequences, the quantum consequences are very real. The World Health Organization, last year released a study showing that men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women. Four times. That means that out of the eight hundred thousand people who took their lives last year, three quarters of them were men. That’s nearly six hundred thousand men. So why is this happening? Why is this on a borderline epidemic? Well researchers in the U.K. just did a study and found that half fifty percent of men over the age of twenty five cannot identify what they would consider to be a best friend or a close friend. So that means that if they live to lose their job if they’re struggling financially. If they lose a parent if they lose a child. If they are diagnosed with cancer, if their business is struggling so bad that they don’t know how they going to pay themselves or their employees, they have no one to go talk to. Researchers have linked this to the sixty percent increase in male suicides over the last forty five years alone. That doesn’t even take into account the millions of men who will die in wars. Fathers and sons who will be gunned down in the streets because of emotional and in aptitudes not to mention the millions of women who will be abused will be mutilated, and who will be killed because of this misplaced sense of superiority.
