Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
In the nineties I joined a men&#x27;s group retreat where we circled up and listened to each other&#x27;s struggles, gave lots of support, and lots of hugs. Then we did some consciousness raising around circumcision and it&#x27;s barbarity. We took our cue from the Feminist movement. They were getting their shit together and so could we. Gary Snyder read his gorgeous nature poetry, Peter Berg sold us on a green cities concept that would make our urban areas more livable.<p>Later, the monstrosity called the &quot;manosphere&quot; completely gutted our movement and turned it into a grievance fest against feminism. They stole our issues but instead of working on them, they weaponized them against feminists, especially against us feminist men. Domestic violence by and against men, paternal rights, genital mutilation, psych support, male fragility and toxic aspects of traditional masculinity, etc. But then they never did anything about any of these problems but bitch and bash feminists with them. As if it&#x27;s womens&#x27; job to clean up our mess.<p>Step one to improving the situation for men is to destroy the right-wing MRM. &quot;Let men be men again!&quot; is the cry of the regressive who sees the problems and plugs his hears screaming &quot;Naaaaaah!&quot; No progress is possible from that position. If you bother to look, the MRM does absolutely nothing to confront the problems men face in this world. Why? They don&#x27;t want to. They do not care about men&#x27;s problems, they only care about protecting men&#x27;s ability to rape, dominate, and abuse.<p>Take a look at this thread. For so many commenters their problem is with acknowledging the problems. Pointing out the toxic aspects of traditional masculinity is seen as an attack rather than an attempt at resolving the issues.  How the hell are things supposed to improve if we can&#x27;t acknowledge problems or ally with the movement [feminism] that did the first work to outline such problems? Feminists have been pointing out toxicity of the &quot;man up&quot; attitude for decades. So have queers. Feminists and queer men are natural allies in this struggle to improve men&#x27;s lives. But we&#x27;ve let proto-fascists hijack the conversation.<p>My greatest fear is that reactionary men join across class and race lines to form a united front for fascism. That&#x27;s certainly the goal of the MRM. We must stop them. Let&#x27;s go back to a Men&#x27;s movement that forms alliances, rather than buries heads in the sand.<p>If we did that, we could have men&#x27;s domestic violence shelters, an ACLU for paternal rights, education policy makers that tackle bullying and lack of emotional support for men, and so much more. But we don&#x27;t because too many are lured in by propagandists who would gladly destroy democracy to protect the status quo.