Liz Plank

A nonfiction investigation into masculinity, For The Love of Men provides actionable steps for how to be a man in the modern world, while also exploring how being a man in the world has evolved. In 2019, traditional masculinity is both rewarded and sanctioned. Men grow up being told that boys don’t cry and dolls are for girls (a newer phenomenon than you might realize—gendered toys came back in vogue as recently as the 80s). They learn they must hide their feelings and anxieties, that their masculinity must constantly be proven. They must be the breadwinners, they must be the romantic pursuers. This hasn’t been good for the culture at large: 99% of school shooters are male; men in fraternities are 300% (!) more likely to commit rape; a woman serving in uniform has a higher likelihood of being assaulted by a fellow soldier than to be killed by enemy fire. In For the Love of Men, Liz offers a smart, insightful, and deeply-researched guide for what we're all going to do about toxic masculinity. For both women looking to guide the men in their lives and men who want to do better and just don’t know how, For the Love of Men will lead the conversation on men's issues in a society where so much is changing, but gender roles have remained strangely stagnant. What are we going to do about men? Liz Plank has the answer. And it has the possibility to change the world for men and women alike.

From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

For the Love of Men

Erica England 

[Toxic Masculinity] It presents itself in subtle ways, such as the way we raise boys differently from girls. It starts when we equate emotion with weakness and direct boys to display strength no matter what. It shows up in the way we expect and encourage girls to show their true emotions while we demand that boys hide them from us. It reveals itself in the way we’re more comfortable with the image of a boy playing with a toy gun rather than a boy playing with a toy doll, because we’re more comfortable seeing a boy hold something that kills rather than something that cries.

We see it in the way genocidal white colonialism is systematically glamorized in school curricula—a romantic version of mass murder of indigenous people encoded in the millions of history books our children read. We see it in the way state-sponsored violence and wars against other countries filled with black and brown people are left unquestioned and that any critique is delegitimized as unpatriotic. We see it in the careful selection of the people we allow or don’t allow in our country and in the fact that one of the most powerful men in the world calls these places “shitholes.”

Women’s actions are accepted when the bending of expectations doesn’t threaten the existing moral order: it exists within it. The thin woman can stuff her face all she wants as long as she stays tiny. The same concept applies with men bending gendered norms. If a man wears high heels at a Halloween party, it’s fun, but if he wears them to work, it’s “inappropriate.” It’s especially preposterous, given that high heels were originally invented and worn by men!

If you stop to really think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we’ve decided here in the United States and many other industrialized countries that women can wear a skirt to a meeting, but men can’t. Who decided that women and men can wear the same colors, the same materials, but that if there are a few little stitches in the middle separating the legs, it’s unacceptable for men? What if we assigned similarly arbitrary rules to what women and men can eat instead of how they can dress? Saying men can wear pants but not skirts is like saying men can only eat square pizza because the round shape, well, that’s just for girls. It would be absurd! Yet we accept gendered norms about clothing as truth. We don’t ask questions because we assume it’s just the way things are, but perhaps it’s time to leave some of the rules about gender that regulate the lives of men that no longer serve us behind.

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