Teach Children That Being a Man Includes Showing Vulnerability

"Boys and men get depressed because of what I call normal boyhood trauma under patriarchy. We are taught at three, four, five years old to deny our vulnerability, to disconnect from our feelings, to disconnect from others, all in the name of autonomy." – Terry Real, ERP 213: How Shame and Grandiosity Relate to Self-Esteem, an Interview with Terry Real

I am old enough that Father’s Day is a bittersweet holiday. I beam with pride thinking of my two daughters but shed a few tears remembering my dad, who passed last year.

Those emotions are competing today and have blended in my thoughts with recent pushback by some against testosterone-laden masculinity. I decided to stray from my usual AI and education focus and express some of those feelings. Showing vulnerability is, after all, the message of this article.

Not that I’m some model of manliness, whatever that is, nor that I’m always successful heeding the advice that follows. But I think my own dad can offer a few counter-lessons to toxic masculinity.

My dad was a gentle man and universally liked. He thrived in social situations, never had a bad thing to say about anyone, and kept his opinions to himself. His own father was, it seems, distant. Dad’s communication style was consistent with the “Silent Generation” label. There were few times when he talked of his own life pains.

But while his tastes and norms were often a bit behind the times, in one way he was way ahead of many fathers of my era and of this one: he was willing to show vulnerability and empathy. His lesson wasn’t to toughen up. It was, through example if not words, to have and follow moral principles about caring for other people.

Manliness hasn’t always been synonymous with toughness and invulnerability. Read some history of the U.S. founding fathers, for example, or about other great men of history. They often talk about their male friends in very affectionate terms and clearly shared deep personal thoughts with them. Society didn’t have a problem with that even though it clearly did with homosexuality. Masculinity hasn’t always been about being an invulnerable loner.

“As boys, we’re trained that affection is either a means of progressing to sex (seduction) or a signal of homosexuality — which was, when and where I grew up, a bad thing. Because of bad behavior, our touch is not trusted. So most males are robbed of affection. It’s lost from our arsenal to express friendship, fondness, or love.”—Scott Galloway, “Taking Affection Back”.

Dad showed vulnerability. He cried, and I’m sure that wasn’t typical of his era. I sensed that was more a physiological reaction he couldn’t control than something he wanted to happen, but he didn’t hide it.

He showed empathy. When I wrecked his new car as a teenager, he didn’t express anger but told me he knew how bad I felt, telling a story about crashing his uncle’s car as a kid. The lesson wasn’t to be unfeeling, but to use the feeling as motivation to do better.

He showed me affection. He hugged me and kissed me on the cheek every night before bed. As an adult, he and I greeted each other with a kiss on the lips. I think it was accidental at first, crossing up two cheek kisses, but he kept it. I say he did because I don’t recall deciding. I’ve not greeted any other men that way, nor I suspect had my dad, but I think he felt the symbolism important. I still do.

My dad couldn’t talk about his emotional self very well. He was never given the tools to do it. And there were a lot of other aspects of society and household during my childhood that enforced more traditional masculinity. But I think it was critical that my dad showed me in these little ways that it’s ok to be vulnerable. That you can still be a great man and cross the masculinity boundaries that society defines.

So I challenge the other men out there as I challenge myself. Will you be authentic, or a caricature? Will you show children, especially boys, that strength isn’t about meanness or bullying? That being vulnerable is about being human, and that sometimes showing it is a sign of maturity and confidence. That being wrong and admitting it is a necessary vulnerability too. Will you get together with your male friends and try to understand how they’re doing, not just how their sports team is?

Even if you’re uncomfortable going all that deep in conversation, my dad showed there are lots of ways you can still get the message across that manliness isn’t stoicism or callousness. It’s integrity, like my dad had. You can have a ton of that and still be a softie.

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