I raised my 19-year-old son alone, after his mother passed away when he was two years old. During this journey, I never felt emasculated. I never felt that I had to assert my masculinity. Until recently, I thought that this was also the case with my son. Talking to him, I realized that he is lost. He isn’t sure about his place as a young man in society. And he is not alone.
The date was fast approaching. There were only a few more days to tame my impatience, before what my mother and her siblings described as the rite that would make me, like my cousins before me, a man. This ritual was circumcision. In my mother’s tribe, it was the moment when boys became men. The moment when they were finally taken seriously. The moment when they were addressed with respect. The moment when they were considered the heads of the family in homes where the father figure was absent, which was the case with me. My parents had separated when I was two years old. My mother raised us alone. I was the first boy, which was a guarantee that I would become the head of the family if I passed the test with flying colors. I was seven years old. In families where both parents were present, the ritual ensured that boys would be admitted into adult circles. The father was also supposed to teach them the ropes of life.
On D-day, I was torn between apprehension and excitement. These mixed feelings were due to the fact that part of my anatomy was going to be cut off, but at the same time, I was eager to be at the center of the little party which had been organized in our honor, my cousin Ayi and me. We were taken to the neighborhood dispensary which was about ten minutes from the house. I remember shedding a few discreet tears, despite the fact that we had been told repeatedly that men did not cry. At the end of the procedure, our mothers made us wear a kind of traditional loincloth. All we had to do was jump over a wire that had been installed in front of the main door of the house and then each kill a rooster. By noon, we had become men.
From there came contradictory rules of masculinity. We were no longer expected to help in the kitchen. We were no longer expected to do chores because these were reserved for women. We were no longer supposed to hang out with girls and women. We were supposed to not cry and show courage. We were supposed to have deep voices. We learned that there were tasks for men and tasks for women. In the village or in the countryside, men were supposed to go hunting and fishing. As for the farm, we men were supposed to clear the bushes with a machete, while the women would use a hoe. The playful activities didn’t escape this gender-based categorization. We men were supposed to dance differently than women. We weren’t supposed to move our butts. Women, on the other hand, were supposed to wiggle their butts and their breasts. Of course, sports were a man’s affair. Women could participate in them, but more as fans. What was interesting was that, despite how our society defined the role of a man, in practice, the lines of demarcation between men and women were not so clear. For example, young men were expected to help in the kitchen or elsewhere. There was a clear dichotomy between perception and reality.
We were in a male-dominated society. From the outside, it was a patriarchy, but from the inside, women were the dominant sex. They kept the pot full. They were the real driving force of social life. These were strong women. Yet, men did not feel emasculated. It would happen that some men were mocked by their friends because their wives were assertive, but their masculinity was never questioned. There was never what I would call “male malaise.”
In the community where I grew up, men never felt that their place was threatened because women were strong and ambitious, brave, determined and valiant. This has followed me all my life. I never felt less of a man, less masculine. I never felt the need to assert myself as a man because I always knew who I was. I never felt the need to play the macho man. I just never felt the need to prove that I was a man. I was comfortable in my skin. This was the case with young men of my generation and the generations before me. My strong sisters and female friends never threatened or challenged my masculinity.
I have never felt the need to pretend to be someone else or to exaggerate my male attributes to assert myself. I am confronted with racism more in my daily life than with threats to my masculinity. This is how I raised my son. I always thought of him as being comfortable in his masculinity, so I was very surprised when a few months ago I realized that this was not the case. I saw that my son seemed to be wondering what his place was as a man in society. As if he was lost as a young man in a fast-changing world. As if he lacked bearings.
In May 2023, my son, Lauren, and four of his male friends visited New York, right after the end of their freshman year in college. My son had just turned 18. His friends were between 18 and 19. It was a sort of late “spring break” for them. One day, I overheard them using an expression, which at first, I thought was an insider joke:
“Could you imagine if a man had said that?”
Several months later, the same expression kept being uttered by my son while he was describing to me a few incidents at his college. He was basically telling me that his male classmates were afraid to open their mouths in class, him included. And this was, according to him, because their female classmates were setting the rules and were dismissive of their opinions. For my son, young males were muzzled. He told me that this was becoming the norm. I realized that what I took for a joke several months earlier was the expression of a deep malaise. It was a young male malaise. Young men like my son were at odds with a world they helped engineer. They are woke, which means that they believe in climate change, that people are equal regardless of the color of their skin, their gender or their sexual orientation. They have embraced the push for gender equality. They are fighting for a more balanced geopolitical reality between the South and the North. Yet, they find themselves lost. They seem to no longer know what their place is, or their role in society as boys or men. They feel that their words do not carry weight, a situation made worse by the #MeToo movement, they say.
They feel emasculated. Is being a man about keeping quiet, suffering in silence, being crushed, shutting up, even when you haven’t done anything wrong, because you’re afraid of saying something that will be misinterpreted? Or is it about rebelling against this, speaking your mind, saying what you think as you see it? They wonder. There is a big cry for help. They are torn, which makes them fragile, vulnerable and prey for devious politicians, intellectual crooks and greedy influencers who consider this an opportunity to enrich themselves. Unsurprisingly, these people have turned young male malaise into a new culture war, claiming that there is an assault against men and masculinity overall. According to a report published last December by The Survey Center on American Life, nearly one in four Gen Z men say they have experienced discrimination or were subjected to mistreatment simply because they were men.
“Traditional masculinity is what is missing in today’s society,” Andrew Tate, a former professional kickboxer turned entrepreneur and influencer posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) on November 11, 2023. Tate, who has nearly 10 million followers on the platform as of time of writing and promises to liberate men, celebrates toxic masculinity. He is proud to be misogynistic.
“Masculinity is the core essence behind every superhero,” he posted on October 4, 2023. “Beware anyone who tries to tell you it’s toxic or unnecessary. They are trying to make society defenseless.”
Tate has been building an empire on masculinity and the new patriarchy. The premise is clear: the enemy is feminism, as he and his supporters say. They therefore attack woke, the catch-all word that they throw in your face to put an end to any discussion or exchange of ideas. According to them, woke has launched a real war to destroy masculinity. There is a war against men, masked in the form of gender equality. Men and their masculinity are in danger. Expressions like “toxic masculinity”, “macho” and others should therefore be celebrated because they symbolize a form of resistance. This is the new resistance. A real man, they claim, says things as he sees them. Political correctness must disappear. A real man bangs his fist on the table. He is in charge and makes it known. He brags. He reigns.
Being masculine is about being a strong man who puts women in their place. Some go even further by defining what they consider to be the role of women: having children, staying at home and taking care of the home. It is a déjà vu. It is a return to the past. Basically, the societal progress made in recent decades has rotted society. It is the ideology of declinism.
The problem is that these arguments work. The gap is growing between young men and young women. We cannot deflect any longer. I have heard some brushing off this anguish. This dismissive response only pushes some young men into the arms of merchants of illusions and the so-called glorious past.
It is urgent to address the situation because my son, like other young men, doesn’t need to go back to the past. What does it mean to be a man today? My son does not need a woman to be relegated to the role of a housewife to call himself a man. He just needs society to admit that many benchmarks have been blurred too quickly in recent years and above all to be listened to. This is a generation that is being shaken up from all sides. A generation of disoriented young men.
It is important to acknowledge that our society has changed dramatically in the last few decades. The image of a strong man as the sole breadwinner of the family has collapsed. Women have entered the workforce and continue to feel more empowered, asserting their independence and revolting against any oppression that was taken for granted for a long time. Even the boundaries of biological genders versus how people identify themselves have been crossed. As a result, many men, especially the younger generations, feel unsure about how masculinity is defined. Listening to our young men is what we need to do. Listening to them and then asking ourselves what does it mean to be a man today? What is masculinity?
There is not just one way to define a man or masculinity. The boundaries are blurry at best.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Luc Olinga's work on Medium.