Eye-opening look at what the idea of masculinity can lead to and how the cycle needs to be broken. ( )

I found this just as compulsively readable as the first Sexton book I read last year. This one has much more of a memoir approach but really delves deeply into how the patricarchal masculinity is both pervasive and toxic. He includes research but it is both his own life and insights that really powerfully bring the message home.

American Macho is toxic

The Man They Wanted Me To Be is a cathartic look at Jared’s Sexton’s life to date (He’s 38). It is a stinging condemnation of working-class white males and their attitudes. They control, berate and beat their wives and children, hate anything that doesn’t smack of white male supremacy, and are self-contained frustration bombs, ready to explode at any time.

Sexton was a chubby, asthmatic and emotional child, which infuriated a series of men – his father and several stepfathers. He was given the ultimate crushing insult: he was “no better than a girl.” His mother bounced from one abusive relationship to another, totally unable to hook up with a reasonable man. Sexton grew up into a poor, alcoholic, frustrated and self-loathing beast of a teen and young adult. In this, he simply followed his role models.

Sexton’s thesis is that the working-class white American male is in an impossible situation. Carrying the burden of being superior, the sole breadwinner and the hardest worker, he can show no emotion or even understanding of anyone else. He is there to be served. He has no time, patience or tolerance for variance in his vision of the perfect society. That society, the American Dream, does not exist for him, making it difficult for him to rationalize his life. Every nibble at his dreamworld – blacks getting educations, women getting equal pay, children going to university, immigrants taking the worst jobs available – all make him dig in and fight. He is open and welcoming to conspiracy theories backing his views of the world. And inevitably, he has come to see Donald Trump as his savior. Sexton says “America is a bastion of patriarchal pitfalls, and consistently reinforces toxic concepts.”

This is called performative masculinity, and in a patriarchal society, these males must be “on” at all times. To miss that goal is to show weakness. It totally prevents any kind of intimacy, with men or even their own wives. In Sexton’s eastern Indiana in the 1980s and 90s, there was nothing else to emulate, it seems. The schoolyard reinforced it. The girls reinforced it. Sports reinforced it. It involved a lot of swearing, racism, sexism, misogyny, posing, slouching and attitude.

It is also actually toxic. In all of the research Sexton conducted for the book, he found men are sicker, die earlier and are lonely and miserable in their self-enforced, controlling solitude. Sexton himself slept with a loaded rifle, ready to use it on himself at any time.

The book is really about three things: Sexton’s life, the insufferable existence of men, and the rise of the alt-right to take advantage of and reinforce it. It is both a confession and a plea for readers to open their eyes. Things are the way they are in America for good reason. And more posturing isn’t going to fix it. If you can see that in the book, it is well worthwhile.

It’s tempting to conclude that white working-class American males are the most gullible, weak and insecure examples of Homo sapiens there can be. They constantly fear for their position of superiority. They are afraid of everyone from their politicians to anyone of a different color, to their own wives and children. They fall for every idiot story that floats past.

But of course, that’s not true. It is rather, true of people in general. Why are we puzzled that young men can be radicalized into joining ISIS by looking at websites, when mass murderer Dylan Roof self-radicalized the exact same way, except it was White Supremacy instead of ISIS? Why is Make America Great Again a genuine threat to the very existence of the USA? Sexton shows how it can be, through toxic masculinity. It leads to the breakdown of self-respect, of respect for others, of the family and ultimately of the nation, as the frustration of the isolated white male becomes the front burner issue.

The key to the violence, Sexton concludes, is simple shame. Embarrassed by their own lack of humanity and success, men lash out. It is part of the contradiction that makes their lives impossible to live. It took his own father 59 years to realize it, admit it, reject it, and try to humanize himself. Just as he was getting a handle on it, he died, because part of toxic masculinity is never seeing a doctor.

I learned this violence syndrome years ago in the story of freed slaves, deported to Liberia in the mid 1800s. Instead of using their new-found freedom to work with the native Liberians, they beat them into submission, kept them out of the better jobs and schooling, and perpetuated the generations of vicious lessons of the American South. As one ex-slave put it in an extraordinary admission: "How true it is, the greater the injury done to the injured, the greater the hatred of those who have done the injury!"

David Wineberg ( )