“The male loneliness epidemic is our reward for centuries of homophobia. The two are forever linked.” This quote from Tiktoker @cookinglikeag addresses how men’s mental health month is June, yet most of us do not know or even acknowledge the holiday, instead having June known for being pride month.
He discusses how cisgender heterosexual men have been socialized to be against anything feminine. Traits such as thoughtfulness and compassion are taboo, pushing them to a void where they are emotionally immature, and distraught, incapable of expressing any emotions besides aggression and lust or unloading all their mental trauma onto the woman in their lives. The growing gender divide within Generation Z has the men regressing into far-right ideologies is an epidemic. Also, trigger warning, there will be mentions of suicide.
My whole life has inspired this article yet seeing so many tweets about men and their reactions to situations revolving around rapper Bun B and Twitch streamer Sketch was the breaking point. Bun B testified in June for a home invasion he and his wife faced in their home back in 2019. Devastation ran through the courtroom as he testified saying, “There are times where she gets closed off, she can’t communicate… I just get so angry all over again, because she didn’t deserve this, she didn’t ask for this (Bun B Describes Wife’s Trauma Following Home Invasion: ‘She Didn’t Deserve This’, paragraph 2).” Hearing the recounting, my heart sank, but what broke my heart when I got on Twitter and was unpleasantly surprised by Bun’s testimony being ridiculed by men, black men at that. They were making fun of Bun B by saying a man breaking out in tears in front of a group of people is embarrassing, and that he needs to be angrier, and more prideful in shooting the perpetrator. Once again, men show themselves to be the weakest links and threats to the community and how masculinity is a performance of torture that they still buy into.
These gender stereotypes that men cannot express vulnerability or weakness lead to policing themselves into a void of apathy and emotional neglect. These men are the same ones demanding awareness for men’s mental health, hypocrites on full display. What puts salt in the wound is men’s ignorance of the issues or pathetic acceptance of “that’s just the way the world is.” IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS!!
The men showed their true colors again with the streamer Sketch. Sketch, a popular streamer due to his earnest yet off-kilter humor, has captured the hearts of men of a variety. Yet, his world almost came to an end, when a YouTube commentary channel did an exposé on Sketch’s past life of being an “OnlyFans” creator, specifically a gay creator. Not surprisingly to me, these men switched up and started spewing homophobia, some even felt the audacity to say his career was done and how embarrassing this was. Sketch felt the same way when he got online and explained how if his past had come out, he probably would have committed suicide. When telling what happened the night everything dropped, he seemed ready to finish offing himself. Yet, thankfully, things didn’t work out this way as a good home front surrounded Sketch and made sure he was going to be alright. Sketch even in his video was still cracking jokes and being bubbly as normal. Yet once again, this story showcases the cage of masculinity enforced by other men.
Filtering through the jokes in the comment sections on Twitter, it’s all men making the mockery. Men are policing each other, keeping each other to the predefined status quo, and holding each other in bondage misery. And this suffering, since men are obtuse to the pain they inflict on others, femmes, and queer people face the brunt of men’s wrath that should be redirected at fighting the patriarchy and freeing themselves and therefore the rest of us.
But sadly, I know this battle is nowhere near over, and stories like the ones of Bun B and Sketch are not new and will be added to the continuous archive. Men don’t care about men’s mental health. No matter how much they whine and moan every June, their actions do not change. This is why, most femmes and queer people have given up on you all and created communities separated and far away from male entities at all. Still, my final question to men is, “Why do you continuously deny yourself liberation?”
