This touching op/ed in the LA Times sheds a little light on why the tough guy culture is bad for men.
The author writes about how his male friends are dying off one by one as they all reach old age, and how he’s just now figuring out ways to tell him how much they matter.
I went there a shy and sensitive kid (my early nickname was “Pretty Boy”), but in order to survive, I soon developed the challenging posture and profane vocabulary of my little tough-guy fellows. “If I had a dog with a face like yours, I’d shave his butt and teach him to walk backward” was a typical greeting. The worst thing was to be thought a “sissy” or to appear vulnerable in any way. Our loyalties and unspoken devotion to one another ran deep.
My later reporter comrades bantered at one another and stiff-armed any expression of intimacy. But we were friends deeply tethered. I was a crew-cut, profane, hard-drinking, gruff and tough guy — or at least that’s what I showed the world. And we guys were to some degree all like that. We may have been afraid in dangerous situations. We had troubles at home, with marriages and kids. We had doubts about our talents and our futures. We understood all that about one another, but we didn’t talk about any of it.
I had my deep secrets, and I assumed my male friends had theirs, though none as shameful as mine — that when I was 5, I was forced into a sexual act by a gang of kids who laughed at me. I didn’t reveal that secret until I was 60 years old and in a 12-step program into which I’d stumbled because of the booze and drugs I’d used to Novocain the pain of my shame and self-doubt.
After that, the gap between the tough man I impersonated and the tender man I really was began to close. A pivotal moment came about six years ago when, at the end of a long cross-country phone conversation with an old friend, he said, “Karl, I love you.” I was knocked off balance. Saying “I love you” to another man? Unthinkable. I could only reply, “That cuts both ways.”
Then, not long afterward, another longtime, buttoned-up male friend whom I hugged as we parted at my door said, “I never thought I would live to be able to hug another man.” “Me either,” I said.
I have treasured my friendships with men. I miss those who are gone, the laughter, the camaraderie. But what a great ride we had, what fun, what adventure. And it is ironic that in my twilight years, just when I am able to tell my male friends how deeply I love them, they are dying, one by one.
Read the whole thing. And if anyone gets ahold of his memoir, let me know how it is.