“Grow some balls. Suck it up. Boys don’t cry. Be a man.”
Masculinity is something I have never been abundantly filled with. Even when I was younger, I never gravitated towards the more “boyish” activities; I always wanted to do my own thing. My Hannah Montana binge-watching childhood provided me with numerous memorable and happy moments, but it didn’t come without struggle. I often felt out of place. A misshapen puzzle piece if you will. And it never occurred to me that my inclination towards traditionally non-masculine things was normal; I always assumed there was something wrong with me. I assumed I just needed to learn how to me more of a man.
“Grow some balls. Suck it up. Boys don’t cry. Be a man.”
I think I was about nine years old when it first occurred to me that I wasn’t necessarily like the standard boy. My consciousness of this difference stemmed into a monstrous decrease in self-esteem. I was weird, right? I shouldn’t be like this, right? I needed to be more of a man, right?
“Grow some balls. Suck it up. Boys don’t cry. Be a man.”
I fixed myself. Or I tried to, at least. I forced myself into “masculine” activities. I forced myself to play football. I removed emotions from my life. I tried to embody everything that I thought it meant to be a man: physicality and emotional toughness. I needed to be a man. But no matter how hard I tried to fit myself, this misshapen puzzle piece, into the puzzle of traditional manhood, I wouldn’t fit. I never fit.
“Grow some balls. Suck it up. Boys don’t cry. Be a man.”
In Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s documentary film The Mask You Live In it’s explained that we need to nurture young boys to become their authentic selves. We cannot continue to force them to prove their masculinity. When we do this, we create a culture of male emotional and social fragility. We are forcing young boys to change their puzzle piece in order to fit into a puzzle they were never meant to fit into.
“Grow some balls. Suck it up. Boys don’t cry. Be a man.”
We have to stop forcing our boys to change themselves, change their puzzle piece, in order to prove that they are masculine enough. I’m glad I did. I finally allowed myself to break the mold that was set for me, and I stopped making myself be who I didn’t want to be. Now it’s time for us to encourage other boys to do the same because we don’t want them all to be the same. I should be allowed to be who I want to be; everyone needs to stop dictating manhood. My manliness does not have to coincide with that of the traditional, preconceived notion of manliness.
I don’t need to grow some balls. I don’t need to suck it up. I can cry if I want to. Stop telling me how to be a man.
