BEFORE THEY WERE MEN

Advocating for a sea change in how we view men and masculinity.

Tobia, a self-described “hairy nonbinary lady,” writes that “men and boys are now the ones suffering the most under the gender binary.” This is because men and boys, the author argues, have the fewest tools and opportunities to understand the ways in which masculinity has damaged them. Tobia presents a series of potential ways to help men heal. Positing that “being a man isn’t a privilege,” they contend that we should all help men heal their gender-based wounds by, among other suggestions, swapping the term “toxic masculinity” with “icky gender,” cultivating communal safety practices, and eliminating the term “male privilege” from our vocabulary. “When we reductively say that men are privileged and women are not,” Tobia writes, “I’m concerned we’re implying that men’s lives are easy and women’s lives are not.” These statements, like so many in the book, reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between the structure of power and individual experiences. While some of the author’s arguments are sound—a chapter in which they make sense of their traumatic reaction to their father’s tragic death to make a trenchant argument about the value of collective care and protection—overall, they undermine their own important thesis by failing to effectively connect hierarchies of oppression with people’s experiences. Tobia’s exuberant narration and witty asides are not enough to overcome the book’s circular, confusing reasoning and weak theoretical foundations.

A manifesto about masculinity that fails to live up to its promise.