Men, Depression and Anger

Men, regardless of age group, often don't recognise when they are depressed. Depression in men is likely to be signalled by anger, so won't be recognised either by men themselves or by women as depression. Ironically, they may end up in jail rather than a GP's surgery. For a man to ask for help is seen as failure, because by convention men are supposed to be in control at all times. -- The UK Guardian

The past few weeks I've been inordinately quick-to-anger.  Mostly it's been people in cars cutting me off while I'm on my bicycle, but I've also been grumpy with my partner and just in general easily frustrated.  I've had this sort of mood before, throughout my life (in fact, I think I basically spent my 30s in that mood), but it's been a while since I felt it so strongly.  And the thing is, it's not the world "out there" that is creating this anger in me--not directly, anyway.  There are lots of reasons to be angry in the world, but those reasons haven't just popped up in the past few weeks, while my anger has.  I'm not (just) angry: I'm having some depression. 

Without going into the history of my relationship with depression, I just want to put it out there that I wish I had recognized the relationship between depression and anger, my relationship between depression and anger, years ago.  Recognizing it isn't any sort of cure, but it sure is a nice little clue when trying to figure out how to be less angry in the world. 

One thing that has helped me deal with this type of anger and depression is using meditation and Buddhist-ish authors to cope.  Part of that coping is letting myself feel the depression, instead of trying to push it away (which is pretty much how, exactly, it so easily translates into anger).  I'm also using some tools of 12-step recovery programs--in particular, focusing on recognizing, consciously, what I can't control.  

Here's an example:  The cars cutting me off in traffic are really more like the weather than individual people doing bad things--it's like the weather because it's ubiquitous.  Any one person I get angry at for cutting me off (this morning a guy made a u-turn right in front of me, and it was a close call) doesn't really matter, because tomorrow, there will be a different person doing similar stuff--it's how driving works in Oakland (at least for now!).  I'm convinced getting angry does absolutely nothing.  I can't communicate thoughtfully or forcefully with a driver when I'm that angry.  People who do really harmful driving things don't care what an angry cyclist has to say. Changing the way this works will have to be indirect (teaching people about bicycle safety, etc.).   In short, I can't control this. And I (sometimes) desperately want to. So I get depressed, and angry.

I know that this sort of issue isn't only happening to men--but I do know that, at least in my experience, traditional male masculinity says men can control it all.  It shouldn't be a huge surprise that this negatively affects men.  Add to that the culture in the United States that says that we are each the creators of our own destiny, and it's no wonder that suicide kills twice as many people here as homicide.

And like I said, noticing the relationship between depression and anger doesn't solve the problems that are created, but it does help me to let go of the need to control, just a bit. I don't believe I've ever had a conversation with another man about how depression turns to anger.  What's up with that?

Anti-Harassment

I love this video. There are, of course, some complexities to calling other men out right-then-right-there: Can it be done in a way that doesn't perpetuate conflict and violence between men, for example? There are also complexities around race that need to be taken into account--as a white guy, calling out a black guy on street harassment means something different than if another black guy does it. And yet, despite all of the complexities, I can't help but think that the world would be better off if we just heard more men like the men in this video...

Men's Stories

New men's stories in November during two nights of performance of the Men's Story Project. Anybody who lives in the SF Bay Area, we'd love to see you there. Even more info at the Men's Story Project site, and on Facebook.

A little taste of a previous MSP:

Men Doing Feminsit Work: Michael Messner

This week we'll take a look at Michael Messner, a sociologist who specializes in the relationship between masculinity and organized sports.

From his bio on the University of Souther California site, where he is a professor:

Michael Messner's most recent books are Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements (1997), Men's Lives (2004); Paradoxes of Youth and Sport (2002), and Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports (2002). His articles have appeared in Gender & Society, Theory & Society, Men and Masculinities, and Sociology of Sport Journal. He is a past president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, and has conducted several studies of gender in sports media for the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, and for Children Now.

His 1992 book, Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity, takes a critical look at how masculinity is shaped by organized sports, but it is his complex analysis of the impact of traditional masculinities on women's sports (and the effects of Title IX) that I find the most intriguing. In a review of Welch Suggs' book, A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX, Messner brings his analysis to bear:

Yet, herein lies a tension in the public debates about Title IX, and to a certain extent in Suggs's narrative. Suggs is right to raise questions about women's sports' uncritical adoption of "the male model" of sports. Sport sociologists have documented the many ways that men's college sports reflect and perpetuate many of the most negative aspects of narrow conceptions of masculinity (including violence to self and others) and promote values of commercialization that are antithetical to what many see as the mission of university life. Suggs points out that women athletes now face a rising rate of serious injury (especially to the knees) and other health-related problems; that their higher graduation rates, compared with those of men athletes, might now tumble; and that the "club" system of youth sports, as a feeder system to the university, has favored white middle-class kids, thus making it difficult for African American women to benefit from Title IX to the extent that white women have.

These are all important issues, but since Suggs falls short of a radical critique of men's sports, two unsatisfactory alternatives remain: women's sports should use Title IX to "go for the money" and mimic men's sports as much as possible, including taking on all of the costs and negative consequences of men's sports; or women's sports should return to the pre-Title-IX ethic of healthy noncompetitive sports and games. This latter will not happen, of course. As Suggs points out, Tide IX and women's sports are here to stay.

So are we stuck with the unsatisfactory dynamic of liberal, equalopportunity feminism fighting against the backlash of an anti-Title-IX conservatism that claims to fight for fairness for men? I think not. Although Suggs does not become a critic or an advocate-preferring to stay, I believe, in the middle space of the reporter-I think it's consistent with his reporting to suggest that women's sports activists need to proceed simultaneously on two fronts. First, continue to use Tide IX to fight for equal opportunities (still far from achieved, as Suggs points out with ample statistics on recruiting, coaching, and funding in women's college sports). second, wage a critical analysis of the negative aspects of the dominant men's sports-especially football, I would argue, which stands at the center of the sport-media-commercial complex. Far from being the goose that lays the golden egg (as its advocates like to suggest), institutionalized football is a major reason for the perpetuation of gender inequity in sports, for the ramping up of commercialization processes, and for a disproportionate number of the problems generally associated with college sports. And football's monopoly over resources, as economist Andrew Zimbalist's work has so clearly shown, is one of the main reasons that the "marginal" ("nonrevenue") men's sports are so vulnerable today when university athletics departments need to trim their budgets. Playing sports is good for girls and women-that has now been established by research, is accepted in public opinion, and is supported by the law. But the question of how we organize our sports-both for women and for men-needs to be put at the center of the table. Until we ask those more radical questions, we will be stuck in the quandary that Welch Suggs so nicely describes.

Messner is utilizing the feminist conceptual took of intersectionality, noting where gender, race, sexual orientation and class contribute to organized sport in order to take a critical look at male masculinity.

Messner has continued to broaden his study from men's organized sports to the ways in which men organize with each other in general, as the title of his Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements suggests.

You can't help liking a guy who says it like it is, even when he's liable to ruffle more than a few feathers. In an article about Chico State Alumni, Messner is quoted talking about the way some men use gang rape not only as a way to control women, but as a way to bond with each other sexually:

"Gang rape is not about sex as far as the victim is concerned, it's a brutal assault, and a stripping away of dignity, but when it comes to the group dynamic of the guys I think there is something sexual going on in gang rape, and it's not necessarily sex with a woman, because in gang rape the woman is really not there as a human being -- she is the vessel through which men are having sex with each other," said Messner.

More on Messner:
Other books by Messner.
Messner's Wikipedia entry.

What Men Can Do: Speak Up

More good stuff from Jackson Katz's The Macho Paradox

"I believe that men who are silent in the face of other men's violence--whether the silence is intentional or not--are complicit in the perpetration of that violence. We're not guilty because we're men. We're responsible--because we're men--either for speaking out or for not speaking out about other men's violence. This is hardly a new concept. Some of the proudest moments in the history of this country are grounded in the principle that members of dominant groups have a critical role to play in the struggle for equality. For example, whether motivated by secular or religious beliefs, many white abolitionists in the nineteenth century understood that they were complicit in the 'peculiar institution' of slavery unless they worked actively to end it. A similar sensibility informed the many courageous white radical college students and mainstream white liberals who played an important role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Not coincidentally, a lot of those white people were accused by racist whites of succumbing to 'white guilt.' "(pp25)

We've all got our proud moments and our not-so-proud moments. The other day, in a group of acquaintances, one guy made a couple of 'jokes' that revolved around rape in men's prisons. I wanted to say something, but I didn't. This is a not-so-proud moment. I think that conceptions of traditional masculinity have an ace in the hole when it comes to keeping men silent: It's been set up to be 'unmanly' to talk about things like prison rape, to talk about men's violence against other men, in any other words but those of male dominance (i.e. 'those guys in prison deserve what they get'); traditional masculinity reinforces itself by silencing those of us who have (perhaps) the most power to do something about it.