APA declares traditional masculinity pathological

[The Emerald Legion]

so we've got another case of a right-wing OP misrepresenting their own source to generate outrage bait for anti-feminists.

... No. We have a case of feminists misrepresenting or misunderstanding why the paper is offensive. Then everyone remotely left assuming that the assertion that 'Oh it's really pro men because they acknowledge that men have higher suicide rates but then go on to say that it's because of toxic masculinity and oppressive patriarchal structures.'

[Tahar Joblis]

They're issues that affect men, and in most cases, are unique to men. (e.g. black men are more likely to be perceived as dangerous than black women, because racism against black women usually manifests in different ways.) How are those not men's issues?

Because men in general are percieved as dangerous. That men who are 'foreign' for lack of a better word are percieved as more dangerous than more familiar men is both unsurprising and doesn't require some hackjob of redirecting attention back to the race aspect.

It really works pretty close to independently in both categories for that example. Black women are stereotyped as more dangerous than white women. Treating the two factors as independent (MEN are viewed as more dangerous than WOMEN; BLACKS are viewed as more dangerous than WHITES) leads you to exactly the right set of diagnoses of how the pattern of stereotyping falls.

It's when the unexpected shows up that you need a special note.

I'll give an example of the unexpected that ties in deeply with the psychology of men's health. In general, white men have it better than black men - better cardiovascular health, more education, more wealth, less trouble with the law, and all kinds of things that correlate nicely with having a generally better life. The section in the APA guidelines affirming that whiteness is privileging isn't that far off the mark in some ways.

So. Who's committing suicide? White men kill themselves far more often than black men.

This, by the way, is not mentioned anywhere in the 30 page set of guidelines from the APA, which instead has chosen to underline the following:

Childhood suicide rates have increased among school-aged African American males in relation to White males (Bridgeet. al., 2015)

I'll save you the trouble of cross-checking that claim against the CDC figures above. It's technically true but very misleading.

Suicides among 10-14 year old [non-Hispanic] black males have gone up from 1.4 to 2.5 per 100,000 per annum. Among 10-14 year old [non-Hispanic] white males, it's gone from 2.1 to 3.3 per 100,000 per annum. This is also the age group least likely to commit suicide, so we're talking about very small and very noise n values; in the case of black boys, 22 in 1999 and 39 in 2014. The suicide rate among black men in every other age group is lower.

In spite of what most readers will infer from that line in the APA guidelines, white boys kill themselves more often than black boys, have been doing so for a long time. Black boys have just caught up a little bit. In the mean time, adult white men are killing themselves over twice as often as adult black men.

Even this isn't really clearly an intersection effect if you're paying close attention to the race / suicide relationship, mind you - white women kill themselves more often than black women too - it's a white thing almost as much as a male thing. (White women kill themselves less often than black men, though not by a very large margin). If you multiply the (race x sex) factors, you end up in the right ballpark again.

Is it gross negligence to write up a thirty page set of guidelines that spend a couple of pages talking about the way that race and sex interact to produce suicide risks and conceal the fact that white non-Hispanic men make up a large majority of all suicides in the United States? I think so.

[The Serbian Empire]

I'd say they're onto something. But to describe it as a disease when it is a cultural issue is a bit much for the reality. As it definitely does cause deaths prematurely by the thousands in between various suicides, ignoring health warning signs until it's too late, and homicides from machismo in gang culture. There is a death toll probably around 10-30K deaths a year for various reasons pertaining to masculinity stereotypical behaviors.

[Novus Wrepland]

Wasn’t toxic masculinity termed by the MRAs anyway? Seems like more stupid outrage.

I thought it was a feminist term, but idk. Like I said, many points in the paper are things that MRAs should agree with.

The reaction to this just proves that outrage culture is far from limited to the left.

I’m waiting for Ostro to post.

[Costa Fierro]

It's like Freud became reincarnated as a radical feminist.

Aaah, Sigmund Freud, the infamous creator of the theories of "innate bisexuality" and "penis envy".

Now it's vagina envy.

[Western Vale Confederacy]

Aaah, Sigmund Freud, the infamous creator of the theories of "innate bisexuality" and "penis envy".

Now it's vagina envy.

Freudian psychosexual theories are effed up, man.

[Autarkheia]

To be fair "vagina envy" was invented by feminists, who hate Freud and think he was a misogynist patriarchal creep.

I’m waiting for Ostro to post.[/img]

Surprised he hasn't yet.

[Tahar Joblis]

Agreed, and these now guidelines are absolutely ridiculous. Psychology should be a science, not a form of far-left political activism.

This paper is not far-left. The real far-left position would be more like "all mental illness is caused by capitalism itself and the APA is a bourgeois organization that exists to provide band-aid solutions without examining the deeper structural problems within capitalism blah blah socialize all property and it will disappear". We could say it's liberal, but liberalism is not far-left.

[/quote]
Assigning that much to traditional masculinity is no less radical. It's simply radical feminism rather than radical socialism.

See, I didn't hear about it from right wing media, but those buzzwords are red flags that are worth paying attention to. Intersectionality as an ideology is involved in very little good science. "Masculinities" (plural) is a word that probably has not been used in a single meaningful paper on clinical practice, but is part of the vocabulary of gender studies (i.e., feminist ideology). If the APA's guidelines spent a lot of time talking about the id, ego, superego, and Oedipal complexes, we would reasonably conclude that it was endorsing the likes of Freud.

[...]

There are things in the guidelines that are not troublesome. There are plenty of things that are agreeable only if you hold values somewhere left of center (i.e., basic trans issue splits), and right wing media will of course be alarmed about that. Then there's a lot of highly ideological garbage that has nothing to do with sound clinical practice and is instead more likely to further isolate men from contact with mental health professionals..

This is a reasonable take.

However, just because a paper contains some gender studies buzzwords does not necessarily mean its conclusions are all wrong, or anti-male, or that there is a vast left-wing conspiracy to destroy men. I am a bit surprised the APA chose to use words like "microaggression" when in my experience, psychology doesn't tend to use the vocabulary of social justice nearly as much as sociology or gender studies do.

When a paper uses those buzzwords directly - i.e., rather than critiquing their use - it is very safe to conclude that it is written from the approach of gender studies. Which has, in turn, almost nothing to do with good practice for clinical psychology.

Microaggressions are a particularly interesting case. It's not just a case of a buzzword used by feminists to refer to something that psychologists have different a field-specific piece of jargon they usually use; "microaggression" refers to a distinctive concept that doesn't really have an alternate name. It just happens that there's no real evidence that "microaggressions" are of any real significance for psychological health.

If you drill down to the research cited in the guidelines, a lot of it is crap.

Male privilege tends to be invisible to men, yet they can become aware of it through a variety of means, such as education (Kilmartin, Addis, Mahalik,
& O’Neil, 2013)

The cited paper consists of four educational psych profs talking about their courses.

This is not the cream of the crop of literature on sound clinical practice or sound psychological research.

[The South Falls]

To be fair "vagina envy" was invented by feminists, who hate Freud and think he was a misogynist patriarchal creep.

I’m waiting for Ostro to post.[/img]

Surprised he hasn't yet.

It's probably going to be filled with 18-paragraph long rants about how all feminists are evil and somehow how no feminist through history has done good.

[Autarkheia]

It's simply radical feminism

This paper doesn't strike me as radfem. It uses concepts like male privilege which radfems talk about, but there is no talk of abolishing the male gender or shit like that.

When a paper uses those buzzwords directly - i.e., rather than critiquing their use - it is very safe to conclude that it is written from the approach of gender studies. Which has, in turn, almost nothing to do with good practice for clinical psychology.

I don't automatically write off the whole field of gender studies as being worthless. Still, it isn't any use to psychologists unless these conclusions can be backed up with research.

Microaggressions are a particularly interesting case. It's not just a case of a buzzword used by feminists to refer to something that psychologists have different a field-specific piece of jargon they usually use; "microaggression" refers to a distinctive concept that doesn't really have an alternate name. It just happens that there's no real evidence that "microaggressions" are of any real significance for psychological health.

If you drill down to the research cited in the guidelines, a lot of it is crap.

Male privilege tends to be invisible to men, yet they can become aware of it through a variety of means, such as education (Kilmartin, Addis, Mahalik,
& O’Neil, 2013)

The cited paper consists of four educational psych profs talking about their courses.

This is not the cream of the crop of literature on sound clinical practice or sound psychological research.

That is a legitimate concern. There are dozens of papers cited though and that is just one of them.

[Adversary One]

IMHO, "traditional masculinity" has been dead since humanism became the status quo. Heavy handed social engineering, I assume this is more for setting the tone for soft violence (the law) against predominantly dissident and conformant resistant groups and individuals. Purpose: Thinly veiled eugenics, to encourage submissive and cooperative traits among societal populations.

[Autarkheia]

IMHO, "traditional masculinity" has been dead since humanism became the status quo. Heavy handed social engineering, I assume this is more for setting the tone for soft violence (the law) against predominantly dissident and conformant resistant groups and individuals. Purpose: Thinly veiled eugenics, to encourage submissive and cooperative traits among societal populations.

Don't forget they're putting chemicals in the water that are turning the freaking frogs gay.

[Tahar Joblis]

I'd say they're onto something. But to describe it as a disease when it is a cultural issue is a bit much for the reality. As it definitely does cause deaths prematurely by the thousands in between various suicides, ignoring health warning signs until it's too late, and homicides from machismo in gang culture. There is a death toll probably around 10-30K deaths a year for various reasons pertaining to masculinity stereotypical behaviors.

If you treat the elevated risk of male suicide and homicides committed by men as a death toll due to masculinity, that's about 25,000 per year for suicide plus maybe around 10,000 for homicide. Add in accidental deaths and failure to seek medical treatment, and you go far past that.

On the other hand, just because men tend to be masculine and men tend to die more doesn't mean that "traditional masculinity" is really responsible for the excess deaths. E.g., men who grow up without fathers, who logically have less of an opportunity to be trained in older-fashioned masculinity, are more likely to engage in violent and risky behavior.

It seems pretty clear that we need to pay attention to men's health and develop a better understanding of why men do things like kill themselves more often, but pronouncing the answer to be "traditional masculinity" for all of the woes suffered by by men is at best simplistic and at worst can be counterproductive.

[Tahar Joblis]

It's simply radical feminism

This paper doesn't strike me as radfem. It uses concepts like male privilege which radfems talk about, but there is no talk of abolishing the male gender or shit like that.

It's not Valerie Solanas radfem, but it is no less radfem than, say, Robin Morgan. It's not TERFy, but it's definitely in the camp of "culture [patriarchy] oppresses women and privileges men, we need to enact cultural reform upon masculinity, et cetera."

When a paper uses those buzzwords directly - i.e., rather than critiquing their use - it is very safe to conclude that it is written from the approach of gender studies. Which has, in turn, almost nothing to do with good practice for clinical psychology.

I don't automatically write off the whole field of gender studies as being worthless. Still, it isn't any use to psychologists unless these conclusions can be backed up with research.

With good research.

There's a reason psychology has a replication crisis. There's a lot of bad research out there (including in particular plenty coming out of gender studies, in my unfortunately extensive experience).

Microaggressions are a particularly interesting case. It's not just a case of a buzzword used by feminists to refer to something that psychologists have different a field-specific piece of jargon they usually use; "microaggression" refers to a distinctive concept that doesn't really have an alternate name. It just happens that there's no real evidence that "microaggressions" are of any real significance for psychological health.

If you drill down to the research cited in the guidelines, a lot of it is crap.

The cited paper consists of four educational psych profs talking about their courses.

This is not the cream of the crop of literature on sound clinical practice or sound psychological research.

That is a legitimate concern. There are dozens of papers cited though and that is just one of them.

There are ten pages in the bibliography, adding up to literally hundreds of citations. They had an entire lit search team working on rounding up references - they say as much in the acknowledgements:

Guidelines recommendations and selected literature were determined with the assistance
and expertise of several scholars: Michael Addis, Larry Beer, Matt Englar-Carlson, Sam
Cochran, lore m. dickey, William B. Elder, Anderson J. Franklin, Glenn Good, Michele
Harway, Denise Hines, Andy Horne, Anthony Isacco, Chris Kilmartin, Mark Kiselica, Ron
Levant, Christopher Liang, William Liu, David Lisak, James Mahalik, Ryon McDermott,
Michael Mobley, Roberta Nutt, James O’Neil, Wizdom Powell, Fredric Rabinowitz, Aaron
Rochlen, Jonathan Schwartz, Andrew Smiler, Warren Spielberg, Mark Stevens, Stephen
Wester, and Joel Wong

Note O'Neil is one of the authors on that paper. Plenty of these citations are to the authors, citation team, and their collaborators, which is not unusual in any event, but would help explain why a particularly weak citation got attached to the claim.

I recognize Lisak's name, and not in a good way. I've talked about the problems with a few of his papers here on NSG from time to time.

However, citation quantity is no guarantee of citation quality. That wasn't a cherry-picked citation. That was literally just the first citation I pulled out looking for what they were citing on their recommendation that men be trained to become aware of their purported male privilege. There are many weak papers out there that can be cited for all kinds of "facts," and perhaps more importantly, a lot of good research that's gotten squeezed out that really would be helpful to put in a set of guidelines somewhere.

Just as some of the things they're saying in the guidelines are true, some of the citations are to perfectly good science... just generally not the ones attached to the mainly ideological stuff I'm objecting to.

EDIT: Mind you, I should add that "write the paper and then have people dig up citations to support what you want to say," while typical practice in some fields, is not really how you come up with a good synthesis of what the research in the field says is good clinical practice.

[Major-Tom]

Masculinity and toxic masculinity are two different things. The sort of machismo style mindset that leads to the sort of "in your face" ill-adjusted individuals is a dangerous and harmful mindset, but people with more masculine emotions, desires, and physical traits? I don't see a problem with that.

I understand the need to critique the toxic, harmful mindsets sometimes associated with males who are suppressed emotionally and are sort of stunted in some regards, but this paper is heavy-handed.

I mean, why can't the APA simply say "it's okay for a man to be feminine or more masculine, so long as they're honest to themselves, others, and treat everyone equally?" Are we past the bliss of honest to god simplicity?

Edit: Looking deeper and seeing that the APA is referring more to the machismo mindset I critiqued, which is fair game, I suppose, but as per my second post, I still have some major issues with the document they've recently published.

[Major-Tom]

On another note, I think my biggest grievance with the APA's stance here is that it somewhat politicizes the job of a clinical psychologist. Hell, I'm something of a feminist myself, and I still think this is silly.

[LiberNovusAmericae]

I don't automatically write off the whole field of gender studies as being worthless. Still, it isn't any use to psychologists unless these conclusions can be backed up with research.

"Research" conducted by gender studies academia doesn't have a good peer review system. With that being said, it appears that same kind of ideology is being used in this new era of psychology, because their terms are used throughout sections of this paper.

[The Emerald Legion]

Christ, masculinity and toxic masculinity are two different things. The sort of machismo style mindset that leads to the sort of "in your face" ill-adjusted individuals (douchebags) is a dangerous and harmful mindset, but people with more masculine emotions, desires, and physical traits? I don't see a problem with that. I mean, I love hunting, fishing, hiking, working out, beer, steaks, etc etc, I'd call that a somewhat subconscious masculine mindset, and I know it isn't pathological.

I mean, why can't the APA simply say "it's okay for a man to be feminine or more masculine, so long as they're honest to themselves, others, and treat everyone equally?" Are we past the bliss of honest to god simplicity?

And again, the issue is less that 'These traits can inherently turn sour' ANY trait can turn sour when elevated on a pedestal. You can see it in all sorts of subcultures where people NEED to be the most [trait] thing ever. It's part of human nature to want high status, and so long as that desire exists, that desire will turn sour when people fail to live up to it and have people tell them they should do better.

[Major-Tom]

Christ, masculinity and toxic masculinity are two different things. The sort of machismo style mindset that leads to the sort of "in your face" ill-adjusted individuals (douchebags) is a dangerous and harmful mindset, but people with more masculine emotions, desires, and physical traits? I don't see a problem with that. I mean, I love hunting, fishing, hiking, working out, beer, steaks, etc etc, I'd call that a somewhat subconscious masculine mindset, and I know it isn't pathological.

I mean, why can't the APA simply say "it's okay for a man to be feminine or more masculine, so long as they're honest to themselves, others, and treat everyone equally?" Are we past the bliss of honest to god simplicity?

And again, the issue is less that 'These traits can inherently turn sour' ANY trait can turn sour when elevated on a pedestal. You can see it in all sorts of subcultures where people NEED to be the most [trait] thing ever. It's part of human nature to want high status, and so long as that desire exists, that desire will turn sour when people fail to live up to it and have people tell them they should do better.

I edited my post before you posted - I fully understand the issues with machismo and toxic masculinity where men inevitably suppress their emotions, I understand that. I still have grievances with some of the guidelines, however, that they've laid out for psychologists, it's heavy handed.

A clinical psychologist should already fully understand the issues with suppression of emotions, a heavy need to be number one all the time, validation issues etc etc.

[The Emerald Legion]

And again, the issue is less that 'These traits can inherently turn sour' ANY trait can turn sour when elevated on a pedestal. You can see it in all sorts of subcultures where people NEED to be the most [trait] thing ever. It's part of human nature to want high status, and so long as that desire exists, that desire will turn sour when people fail to live up to it and have people tell them they should do better.

I edited my post before you posted - I fully understand the issues with machismo and toxic masculinity where men inevitably suppress their emotions, I understand that. I still have grievances with some of the guidelines, however, that they've laid out for psychologists, it's heavy handed.

A clinical psychologist should already fully understand the issues with suppression of emotions, a heavy need to be number one all the time, validation issues etc etc.

I wasn't disagreeing so much as I was augmenting the statement. When traits confer higher status, people will be pressured to conform to those traits.

[Autarkheia]

It's not Valerie Solanas radfem, but it is no less radfem than, say, Robin Morgan. It's not TERFy, but it's definitely in the camp of "culture [patriarchy] oppresses women and privileges men, we need to enact cultural reform upon masculinity, et cetera."

My understanding is that radfems by definition want to abolish gender itself. But point taken.

With good research.

There's a reason psychology has a replication crisis. There's a lot of bad research out there (including in particular plenty coming out of gender studies, in my unfortunately extensive experience).

Of course. And that is especially true of social psychology. That's why I would advocate reading this with skepticism.

Note O'Neil is one of the authors on that paper. Plenty of these citations are to the authors, citation team, and their collaborators, which is not unusual in any event, but would help explain why a particularly weak citation got attached to the claim.

I recognize Lisak's name, and not in a good way. I've talked about the problems with a few of his papers here on NSG from time to time.

However, citation quantity is no guarantee of citation quality. That wasn't a cherry-picked citation. That was literally just the first citation I pulled out looking for what they were citing on their recommendation that men be trained to become aware of their purported male privilege. There are many weak papers out there that can be cited for all kinds of "facts," and perhaps more importantly, a lot of good research that's gotten squeezed out that really would be helpful to put in a set of guidelines somewhere.

Just as some of the things they're saying in the guidelines are true, some of the citations are to perfectly good science... just generally not the ones attached to the mainly ideological stuff I'm objecting to.

EDIT: Mind you, I should add that "write the paper and then have people dig up citations to support what you want to say," while typical practice in some fields, is not really how you come up with a good synthesis of what the research in the field says is good clinical practice.

Fair enough. I don't recognize any of those names myself, because social psychology is not my area of interest within psychology.

There will be some who will dismiss all the research this paper is based on because they don't like the conclusions. It would be ridiculous to expect someone to go through all the cited research and pick out which papers are good and which are bad, and besides that's something only someone with specialized training can do. I just meant I doubt all the research is crap.

"Research" conducted by gender studies academia doesn't have a good peer review system. With that being said, it appears that same kind of ideology is being used in this new era of psychology, because their terms are used throughout sections of this paper.

There are a lot of shitty journals who will accept any paper without even reading it. That's not new. Hypatia is notorious for its low standards. We can't draw conclusions about the broader state of gender studies because two people pranked some probably low-impact journals with shitposts. We also can't assume psychology has been overtaken by SJWs because one paper used words like "privilege".

[Hatterleigh]

The embracement of modern society is pathological. Human men were built to be masculine in nature, but were not meant to work 9 to 5 jobs in tiny cubicles for materialistic gains and fake pleasures. Yet one of them is a problem that must be dealt with while the other is just the way of the world.

[Major-Tom]

I edited my post before you posted - I fully understand the issues with machismo and toxic masculinity where men inevitably suppress their emotions, I understand that. I still have grievances with some of the guidelines, however, that they've laid out for psychologists, it's heavy handed.

A clinical psychologist should already fully understand the issues with suppression of emotions, a heavy need to be number one all the time, validation issues etc etc.

I wasn't disagreeing so much as I was augmenting the statement. When traits confer higher status, people will be pressured to conform to those traits.

My bad, I'm a sleep deprived dullard this evening.

Anyways - yeah, I don't think the issue of people harming themselves and others around them in pursuit of higher status will ever change - I have a hope that our culture is gradually changing more towards self-acceptance, and most importantly, acceptance of failures, regardless of any APA report.

[Liriena]

To be fair "vagina envy" was invented by feminists, who hate Freud and think he was a misogynist patriarchal creep.
Surprised he hasn't yet.

It's probably going to be filled with 18-paragraph long rants about how all feminists are evil and somehow how no feminist through history has done good.

And comparisons to nazism and the KKK.

[The Two Jerseys]

It looks ideologically driven and flawed and there's a real possibility it will drive men away from therapy.

Well, the men whom these guidelines are targeting think that therapy is for pussies anyway, so...what do we do now?

---

Jokes aside, am I the only one who thinks that declaring "he-men are crazy" is a backdoor attempt at gun control?