“THE MANLY WAY” BY BRENDAN KWIATKOWSKI-HARTMAN (2018)

When I was a kid, my cousin and I discovered “the manly way.”
Instead of walking on the sidewalk we’d jump across the ditch
And yell, “This is the manly way!”
—Encouraging and taunting the other to follow so that they can also prove their manliness. It was harmless fun, we were both pretty equal and when one would take the manly way the other was sure to follow.
But I remember one time when our friend didn’t take the manly way with us.
He didn’t want to climb the tree, even when we warned him that this was the manly way!
And when he told us that his mouth was sore, which was why he couldn’t climb the tree,
We heard, “I’m not man enough to take the manly way.”
And we felt better about ourselves by thinking less of him
…but it was harmless

Then when I was sixteen my best friend and I worked at a summer camp as counsellors
One morning our friend told us she had had a weird dream about us.
In her dream we were a married couple and one of us was pregnant with our child
But me and my best friend were both boys and not gay
And the last thing that we wanted, even in a dream, was to be the one with the child.
Because then that would have meant we were even more “girly.”
And when you’re trying to be a man,
Girly just won’t do.
So that dream started a real-life competition about who was less feminine that the other.
For the next 8 years,
When one of us would do something “feminine”
the other would say
“See! He’s more feminine than I am!”
It was an ongoing joke,
I viewed the feminine like it was contagious.
And the best way to protect against it was to find someone who had it more.
People laughed, we laughed.
So I guess that meant it was all harmless.

When I became a high school teacher it was tough at times
To see how adolescents treat one another
The posturing, the insecurities, the hurt; their innocence changing to experience.
But there is always so much light to witness in these kids as well.
One of the brightest—(they say you shouldn’t have favourites but he was mine)
Ended his life
I ran into him in the hallway earlier that day
And asked how he was doing.
He said stressed
I followed up a bit more
But since he was late for class
We parted ways.

I want to be clear, I have no idea if his gender played a role in his death but here is what I do know: Men are around 4x more likely to die by suicide than women, and that gender disproportion starts being evident from around high school—which corresponds to the age when boys become more emotionally restricted. And psychological research consistently shows that the three most dangerous messages about masculinity given to males is “suppress your emotions,” “dominate others,” and “figure things out yourself, you’re alone.”

This is not harmless.

I also learned in the research that two of the greatest obstacles preventing boys and men from challenging those restrictive messages is the fear of femininity and the fear of homosexuality.
—Both of these fears were present in the “games” I grew up playing.

But I also grew up watching a true Canadian T.V. show
about a man named Red Green who would fix things with duct tape.
At the end of each show a group of men would cite this creed:
“I’m a man…but I can change, if I have to, I guess”

The audience would always laugh, but now that I’m older, I can’t find the joke in it anymore.
I hear it now as an honest reflection that change is hard but still possible.
My masculinity is still a journey, but here’s what my current creed would sound like:

I’m a man, and I will seek growth
To become aware of how what I do, or how I think
hurts people, “other’s” those around me, or hurts myself

I’m a man, and I’m enough
To know that my strength lies
In my ability to love.

I’m a man, and I will be open to change
For my masculinity is not restrictive
And doesn’t keep femininity caged.