Be a man
Story 15
Listen to this story here:
This has been written in a hurry because I only discovered two days ago that today (19th November) is International Men’s Day, which is apparently a thing, so bear with me as I try to make sense of stuff that I’ve serendipitously come across in the past few months, along with my very own existence, that brings me pause while I consider what it means to be a man and more, as I scramble to publish this in time.
Why should I even be writing this? I mean, just because I’m a man, and it’s International Men’s Day, doesn’t mean I have to offer any kind of perspective on anything. I could choose to simply do something else and let everyone get on with it. I could decide to put my head down and quietly continue working on all the things I’m supposed to be working on, like my income, looking after my house, my health, my relationships, etc.
But when have you ever heard a man not offer his opinion on things? And on International Men’s Day? I mean, you see it right? This should be Christmas for men. If there’s any day when you celebrate the patriarchy, it’s today, right? I will mansplain and manspread today to my heart’s content with zero considerations!
The more astute of you will recognise that I am using humour (poorly, I admit) to diffuse a potentially dicey topic - masculinity. Nobody seems to talk about masculinity nowadays without adding the word ‘crisis’ to it in some capacity. Which guy wants to hear about the ever present and chronic issues that dudes deal with? Honestly? What we’d like is a big meal, a comfortable place to sleep, and to be left alone.
Which is probably why we’re lonelier than most.
Anyway, I’m not here to speak on behalf of all men (god forbid), or even most men, or even some men, but only one man. Me. And I’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking lately and I’d like to trauma dump share here.
Young man
I was 15 years old when I first felt people judge me because of my gender. Or perhaps the truth is that it was the first time in my life when I became aware that being male wasn’t an automatic win at the genetic lottery. Well, it was a bit of a toxic mix of my gender and my religion. I am muslim, and I grew up muslim in a majority muslim country. But being a young muslim male in a post-9/11 world meant I was automatically grouped into either victim of or perpetrator of violence.
These were boys my age, often like me (educated, middle-class) who decided to leave their lives and go fight in organisations that regularly killed civilians around the world under a warped banner of reclaiming some kind of lost respect or place of prestige for Islam. I knew I wasn’t them, but what truly kept me awake at night was wondering how far away was I from being radicalised? It seemed to be happening to all kinds of boys at a frightening speed, and I was so scared of falling into that trap myself, that I did everything I could to simply come across as non-threatening. Once, during my undergrad days, I overheard two female friends talk to each other in the library saying “Imran is just so harmless.”
I often publicly hid my faith, to the extent that it was only last year that I felt comfortable enough to grow a beard, so nervous was I that people would connect my facial hair with some kind of militant Islamic ideology. I mean, it’s just a beard, but also, it’s never just a beard.
Despite my best efforts, I’ve been singled-out ‘randomly’ at airports in India, the UK, other European countries, and Canada. For a while, I almost expected it every time I travelled, which is why I always had my passport ready when waiting in line at immigration. And the sad part is I get it, because if I were in their shoes, I’d probably do the same thing, just to be safe.
It’s only in the past four years that I’ve started to have a better relationship with my faith, and I’m still trying to find the right balance for myself. Perhaps I never will. But the fact is that I still had an easier time of it. I’ve heard too many stories from too many people who have faced unnecessary discrimination around the world, simply because they were young, muslim, and more importantly, male. Being young and muslim isn’t quite as threatening to people until you add the ‘male’ to it.
Middle-aged man
Over the weekend I finished listening to a recent podcast called Kill List and it was gripping yet upsetting stuff. To summarise without giving too much away, in 2020 when everything was on fire, author Carl Miller stumbled across a list of names off a hitman-for-hire website from the dark web. It was essentially a list of people who somebody, somewhere, wanted dead, so they hired killers through the dark web to do the job for them. Now while that sounds disturbing enough (and the podcast chronicles how he and his team try to actively warn the people on this list in time, because law enforcement is often either too slow or doesn’t take their reporting seriously), there is a very striking theme to who the victims are on the list, and who the people are who are trying to get them killed. Overwhelmingly, the victims are women and the people doing the hiring are either their current or former husbands.
The story is depressingly familiar. What starts off as a loving and fun relationship ends up being either abusive or violent, leading to the husband putting out a hit on his wife. I don’t even fully understand how anyone can want to escalate things to such an extent that he feels compelled to have his spouse killed. I can’t imagine how that is a logical thought process. My general armchair analysis, which is something that the podcast also mentions, is that in this scenario, the men feel empowered by controlling the women in their lives, and when they lose that control, they will do anything, however violent, to regain that control and reassert their dominance and warped sense of masculinity. Which, I suspect, is the definition of abuse.
What was scarier to me was that in this story the men were often duplicitous, showing two often extreme sides of their personalities, going from loving and supportive husband in public to psychopathic misogynist in secret.
This, sadly, isn’t new. We’ve heard these stories a million times and I fear we will hear them a million more. Why this particularly sat with me was because it feels like by definition, it’s men who struggle more with a changing society, often resorting to violent means to reassert their supposed emasculation and diminishing role in their community.
This year, I became a husband. I can’t help but wonder what happened to all those other husbands that pushed them in this direction? Why would anyone choose such actions, on somebody you chose to love? What kind of support system have these men had that they are not able to deal with failure, rejection, and loss in a healthy, matter-of-fact way? Why is everything to them, especially when it comes to women, an attack on their masculinity? Or rather, why do they view their own masculinity through a lens of somebody else’s femininity? And did they always know they were capable of such diabolic behaviour?
I still consider myself to be extremely lucky and blessed that I have always had the most supportive and loving parents, family, and friends that I never, ever, felt the need to even consider a path that so many men do. My childhood was exceptional, my adulthood has been blessed. And yet I still wonder just how far away from a different path am I really? Maybe a-random-acquaintance away? Or a-random-online-video-from-an-extremist-group away? Or an-occasional-harsh-word-from-my-family away?
Or, even more horrifyingly, have I not escaped it yet? Is my entire existence as a man me balancing precariously on the precipice of my sanity, with the deep, dark gorge of violence on my left and the peaceful fertile fields of happiness on my right?
It’s thoughts like these that flood my mind sometimes. It helps to remind myself that at the end of the day, my own existence is incredibly unpredictable and improbable, that so many things had to have happened exactly the way they did throughout the history of time for me to live this exact moment at this exact time in this exact way, and that ultimately I will die, and so will literally everyone else and so will the planet and nothing will remain and that what I should be doing is to try to be as good a person as I can be in the time I have on this planet and just relax a little bit.
Old man
My own personal insecurities aside, I do have several fears of how I may, or may not, grow older. I want to age well, as I’m sure everyone does, this isn’t a hugely original thought. But I also don’t know how much work is required for me to actually age well.
Physically speaking, two things happened to me at two very different times in my life that aged me in opposite directions. I started to lose my hair when I was around 15 (as you can imagine, it was a year my masculinity was made obvious to me). Something that most men only experience in their 40s and beyond, I went through in my teens. I did the whole trying-to-grow-my-hair-back-with-tonics-and-oils, but was ultimately resigned to the fact that this was a permanent thing, and I simply had to own it. Which is why shortly after I left school, I started to shave my head, and have kept it shaved ever since.
When it happened, I suddenly looked several years older than my peers, and I can admit now, that it did bother me a lot. Here I was, in my early 20s, supposedly the peak of my physical condition, and I looked like an ‘uncle’. Again, the usual bald jokes and ribbing aside, I was never meant to feel like an outcast. But when male friends of mine started losing their hair later in life, I felt vindicated. I had experienced and made peace with the trauma of hair loss already. Been there, done that. Finally, I was ahead!
Fast-forward another twenty-years or so, and I was severely overweight in the post-pandemic period. My weight had fluctuated throughout my life, I was never athletically built, but I saw myself in the mirror one January morning in 2022 and I didn’t like it. Unlike my hair loss, which felt like the universe had played a cruel trick on me, I had piled on the pounds myself. This time, I was perpetrator and victim, and I didn’t like what I saw.
Often times, simply the act of taking action is enough to make me feel better. However, this time I spent the next nine months on a strict regimen, dropping 24kg. Of course, it was bloody hard work, and also not sustainable (I have since put on some weight), but I suddenly felt like I had gained a bonus 10 years of youth.
All this is to say that growing older as a man is scary. And it’s telling that most of the time I am terrified by what I see - men, sitting by themselves, sometimes mumbling to themselves, shuffling their feet, hunched over severely, looking generally unhappy and isolated. It’s heartbreaking.
Again, I’m lucky that I have amazing role models in my own family, people embracing their age without compromising their passions or abilities. But then I wonder, how long into my older age will my shrinking circle of male friends last? How long till when I’m classified a burden and not a contributing member of society? How long till my body doesn’t recover the way I expect it to, or move at the speed and agility that I’m used to? How long till my mind forgets more things than I can remember?
Then there’s the other side to it. Many older men I see seem to spew some hateful ideologies, and often get appointed into positions of power where their mandate is to regress on social progress. Many older men seem adamant on keeping things the way they are, instead of moving things forward. It’s once again the whole idea of reclaiming a ‘lost prestige’ and ‘better way of life’. Will I become that? Destined to cling to bygone achievements, trapped in the shadow of past glories, with nothing left to look forward to, only back? There has to be more to growing older than that, right?
I’m sure there is. Of course there is. But the threats are ever present and real. It has always seemed to me that I’m one step away from doing something stupid or making a wrong move that will undo a lifetime of work, and the fear of my own incompetence is often what helps me make decisions. Ultimately, I want to be remembered as somebody who made things better while they were around, and to be missed because of it. I don’t want people to remember me as somebody who began to lose it as I approached old age, but I neither want to be held up as an ‘inspiration’. That pisses me off, when people do that.
I’m here just to live my life the best way I can. Leave me alone.
But also, don’t.
Some further reading
Like I said earlier, I’m not here to speak on behalf of all men, just me. But if you’re interested, here are some things that talk about being a man that I found interesting:
There's so much attached to the idea of being the 'perfect' man; it is your appearance, your physique, your ability to provide, and your ability to protect. A single crack in either one of those departments is unforgivable- in many ways this notion gave birth to the angry man, the ugly side of the 'perfect' man. I do see change happening, more men are open about their feelings nowadays but that image of perfection still dictates how men walk the earth. Thank you for writing this and for being vulnerable with all of us; there's so much here that I relate to!