Imagine you just got done with your bland Global meal at cleve. As you walk outside, a sense of anticipation strikes you, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for all day! You reach into your MJ Lenderman tote bag, fumble past your limited edition Laufey album and knock off labubu just to realize your terrible mistake – you forgot your Camel cigarettes at home. How will you ever performatively smoke your cigarette outside of Cleve now…you fall to your knees.
To some of you, this scenario might be nothing more than a joke, but to me it speaks to a real problem facing young men today. Men are increasingly falling into the trap of becoming dime-a-dozen copies of one another – indie boys, if you will. Handing in their personalities for a well-worn Detroit Jacket and a pair of Tecovas they wear their hearts on their sleeves, because what’s the point of having a personality if you can’t show it to everyone? They rage against the perception of masculinity but subscribe to a version of it that’s just as hollow as Andrew Tate’s Hustlers University, only without the overt theatrics. Indie boys find themselves in an untenable position: the veneer is fading, and the goodwill is going with it. But these indie boys can’t make this change on their own; after all, they’re just the newest product of the system.
I admit the claim that indie boys are victims is a charged one. Indie boys are more used to making victims than being them, but in order to understand what pit of hell they crawled out of, we must understand the forces that created them. Masculinity is an incredibly fraught topic in today’s culture, and the conflicts surrounding it reflect the “mismatch between rigid masculinity norms and the demands of a rapidly changing society.” “Toxic masculinity” is finally being called out, and that’s great – but masculinity as a whole is facing an identity crisis because of it.
Men now associate nearly any display of masculinity – harmless or not – with examples of toxic masculinity. Young men constantly see the public condemnation of “toxic masculinity” and begin distancing themselves from stereotypical ideas of what it means to be masculine. We find ourselves in a kind of pendulum swing: men are no longer pretending to be the testosterone-fueled meatheads they once were, but instead fashion themselves as “not like the other guys,” complete with all the performative accoutrement. Both of these guys are assholes, and they evolve in relation to masculinity – but what even is masculinity?
Your mind might immediately flood with images of characters such as Sergeant Blain Cooper from “Predator” or even Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in basically any of his movies, and you’d be right. These guys undeniably kick ass, but they are only one side of the coin. Is it masculine to be emotionally open, stoic and respectful? Some might say those are attributes of a man with positive masculinity, but I would argue they are simply attributes of a good human being. Why should men be the only ones able to show stoicism in the face of hardship? We’re playing by the same rules our ancestors did, but we’re not living in caves anymore. Stoicism isn’t about silently enduring the arrow in your knee; it’s about standing up for someone else who’s being victimized, and anyone can do that.
We have a flawed conception of what a man should be; we pigeonhole men into either conforming to a toxic blueprint of ideal masculinity or abandoning masculinity altogether. The answer to the problems surrounding masculinity is as simple as providing a good example of what a man should be. But this only reaffirms stone-age gender roles. Working within the system of masculinity isn’t going to work because the system itself is flawed. You can’t have good masculinity without the flipside of toxic masculinity. We don’t need someone who’s a good guy — we need someone who’s a good person who happens to be a guy.
