Male Suicide is Not a Privilege
Almost 80% of all suicides are male. Those stats have a cause. Why does our culture target males, and teach them that suicidal is a normal pattern of behavior? Why teach men that being a man, being “masculine,” means routinely performing bodily harm and self-destruction? What function does teaching males to kill themselves serve?
And how do these questions fit into the broader concept of “being a man” amid the other forms of socialization that coerce men into hurting and destroying themselves, a socialization process rooted in society’s deliberate creation of trauma for males, which results in the “male ego” (the boastfulness, the bravado, the singularity of focus, the one-track mind, the risk taking, etc.), the male ego that is so lambasted and critiqued and lampooned and silenced in our culture (which, of course, this condescending towards the male ego is a component of the trauma-inducing socialization that must be created to serve a certain function in society). The boasting and bravado behaviors of males are psychological tricks of the mind, a mind attempting to withstand trauma, the trick of the mind is to sublimate trauma into functional behaviors of self-destruction.
“Being a man” entails enduring a socialization process that coerces a child to construct a self that is little more than exploitable meat, meat that must always serve others, blindly, and whole-heartedly, because others, all others, are more valuable than the male himself (think about the phrase, “women and children first”). The boy child must turn himself into meat that will self-identify as a Monster, as sub-human, as having little value other than exchange value (the male body is history’s most commodified object) , of being not-worthy, meat that must identify itself as the cause of all evil in the world, meat that must learn to suppress emotions, and the ability and desire to express emotions (for dialog with others, emotional connections with others, would allow this harmful socialization to be countered, so dialog must be eliminated in a “man”), meat that must take all the trauma necessary in this harmful socialization process and sublimate that trauma into the functional behaviors that are the purpose and goal of all that socialization in the first place. When the “male ego” is the target of snark, and lampoon, when it is critiqued and mispresented, when “woke” ideologues poke fun of “mansplaining” and “manspreading” what is being lampooned is the manifestation of trauma, one is blaming a victim of trauma for manifesting behaviors that resulted because of trauma.
But, here’s the kicker: that’s exactly what one is suppposed to do to males, because that is part of the socialization process that is designed to traumatize males. That is a commponet of a traumatizing process that has bred and socialized males since the beginning of history to be self-destructive. The “woke” ideologue is supposed to help traumatize males, so that males will serve a particular function in the society.
Males are traumatized for a certain function of our culture. What is that function? In a nut shell: to be a meat machine.
For example, a few days ago I was digging up a part of a stubborn root-system from an old tree in my family’s backyard with nothing more than a shovel. I have been reading over the past month a bunch of research on how the male brain is formed and functions, and the differences between the formation and function process with female brains. The difference in hormones, and neural networks, the differentials in the connections between processing areas in the brain, and the differentials in the connections of the brain to the peripheral nervous system, etc. As I was digging and pulling and digging and pulling, I laughed to myself a little because everything I had been reading was occurring in my brain: I was getting angry.
Angry at the root system. I was cussing and pulling and cursing and with all my strength stabbing the shovel into the roots to shred them. I knew the anger was a functional behavior. I knew this anger was what built the bridges, and roads, and pyramids, and cities, and etc. of history. I knew the anger was the result of my brain tapping into memory areas, and areas of humiliation and shame emotions, it was tapping into the trauma of my socialization process, of being told by my culture in countless ways, I was a monster, I was not valuable, I was just meat.
Yet, my brain also had to “functionalize” the angry by not allowing these traumatic experiences to become fully conscious, which would have neutralized my anger and distracted my focus. It had to let the shame and humiliation and trauma flow just under the surface, which for the most part it always flows, always ready to be activated at a moment’s notice (think: the male as “protector” role, the male as defensive).
Another “functionalizing” my brain had to do was to aim this manufactured anger, so: my brain produced dopamine to incentive me and motivate me to find enjoyment at being angry at the roots, so as to remove them, to accomplish the focused goal. The dopamine was giving me a positive value/feel at being angry at the roots, so as to motivate me.
An additional thing my brain was doing to motivate me was activating certain areas of the brain that deal with sympathy and connecting with other people. My anger was pleasurable and proper and morally permissible because the motivated, one-track minded focus on getting the stubborn roots out of the ground was deeply connecting me to other people, by serving other people (namely, my wife, my family, my friends who come over for backyard bbqs). My anger was a social bonding emotion. A form of communication.
My anger was a mode of communication. In essence, my trauma was communication. As a male I had to be traumatized so as to be taught a functional form of communication with my community. As a male I had to learn to psychologically suffer (trauma) and physically suffer (my back and blistered hands were sore for days) to communicate.
As a male, I was socialized and bred so that my mind would reroute trauma I was deliberately made to experience into functional behaviors to serve others (think about why anyone would become a soldier, coal digger, why anyone would voluntarily ( and non-voluntarily for many males) destroy their body building the foundations of a house and all those other back-breaking jobs of history). And this, one morning of digging roots, is just one quick illustration of a lifetime of dealing with trauma and how it manifests as function.
And what’s more all of this, everything I just wrote I’m supposed just be quiet about it. “Real men” don’t share their emotions, “real men” are just supposed to spout whatever ideology is popular within the culture at any given moment in history, whether it be capitalism, feminism, social democracy, fascism, dadism, surrealism, etc.
I‘m socialized to just be quiet about it. At this point, I’m quite certain some readers are rolling their eyes, thinking “Aw…poor privileged male. Frowny face.” Which, as mentioned earlier, that’s exaclty what you are supposed to think, because that’s part of the socialization process of me just keeping it all bottled up.
I am socialized to feel anger and shame at my feelings of anger and shame. I’m socialized to, not just silently suffer trauma, but to actually celebrate being traumatized. I’m supposed to aspire to be recorded into history, which is little more than past propaganda to teach me to aspire to be traumatized, to be a “hero” so that future boys (and now girls) will read about me so they too will aspire to accept their traumatizatio.
None of this is a “privilege” or a “power” or “authority,” thinking so is a disgustingly self-serving way to think about this process, a self-serving politic rooted in the same-old-same-old timeless power-politics of us/them. And none of it is all that new. Shoving everything into an us/them, power-powerless model is a timeless pattern, and a trite way to understand the world and history.
Isn’t that weird that our culture may operate like that? Specifically targeting men, traumatizing them on purpose, socializing them into sublimating the trauma into functional behaviors of self-destruction, dangerous jobs, long hours at the office, becoming political cogs, forsaking personal and emotional relationships, and in the end outright suicide. It is no surprise that suicide stats are such as they are.
Augustus Fossly is an autodidatic deinstitutionalist dwelling in an (a)liminal non-representational space of immanance. His writings have been featured in the journal No Where. He spends his time as a gadfly. Follow him on instagram @augustus.fossly
