by Anthony Le | May 2023

This article was originally published in the Aqua Plums Substack. Subscribe to get new blogs sent to your email.

The last time I cried was the summer after 5th grade. I belly flopped into the ground, my hands covering my eyes and holding my head up. Everyone just left the room, and left me to cry. I started to feel shame and embarrassment immediately.

This was after an argument with my parents. They were planning to put me into a private middle school that would funnel me to a private high school that would funnel me to college. The plan was sound and generous, but I didn’t want any part of it. We were in mass too when my parents first told me about the school change. I was already on edge by being in a church, and now this life changing announcement! Back at home, I begged them to let me go to the high school that all my friends were going to. I didn’t have tons of friends growing up, but I felt like I had built some real friendships after such a long time, and the prospect of making new friends terrifies me even today. Crying was my last ditch effort to emotionally guilt my parents to change their minds, but it didn’t work. In the end, it was just my way to mourn the loss of those friendships, and I haven’t cried since.

I recognize that this is a problem. My crying dryspell is related to my concept of masculinity in my upbringing and socialization. 

I’ve thought a lot about masculinity on my journey to identifying as gender nonconforming and non binary. I don’t think my idea of masculinity fits into the traditional gender binary, but I’m still masculine in my own way, so I prefer he/they pronouns.

Rejecting toxic masculinity and exploring gender expression are repeating motifs in my art practice, and it’s no coincidence that I’m exploring my artistic and gender identity at the same time. Labels have always felt like rules I must break, but Blake Abbey, best human on season 2 of Bling Empire: New York, describes queerness simply as an “openness.” These terms help me explain things I’ve always kind of felt even before I learned the words. They give me a new sense of freedom and solidarity as I become my true Soft Art Boy.

This is the first of a series of writing about masculinity. We see headlines about how lonely men are and how the suicide rate of men are 4x higher than women with undeniable links to the abundance of guns in this country. 

Now before you say that I just mentioned not fitting into the gender binary, so why am I only talking about men and women, I say that’s a fair point, but I’m going to speak openly about the masculine vs feminine conceptions I had in the past. Maybe you’ll empathize or maybe not.

OK back to the current sad state of men. Men are out of touch with their feelings and are stuck in a self destructive cycle of toxic masculinity. This is of course all happening in our patriarchal society where men still get many benefits over women, but trying to break this cycle seems like a worthy cause especially when you consider the pitfalls. 

• Incel forums are vacuums of self-inflicted pain. There is no uplifting anyone. You stay to take each other down more and blame women. It’s like cutting, and misery loves company. You must leave if you want to change.

I made a list of concerns about masculinity as a way to reexamine how fraught toxic masculinity is. It’s pervasive and a default doctrine that everyone must fit into or else suffer from imposter syndrome. But the worst part is how self-sabotaging this value system is. As Kendall Roy says, it’s a one head one crown mentality where no one wants to be your friend. I hope to find some revelations through this archiving exercise as I consider how I used to feel about masculinity and how that has changed.

Growing Up: a list of concerns about masculinity

• I haven’t cried since the 5th grade.

We talked about this one earlier, and this problem reminds me that this is still happening in real-time for me. I hope that this writing will help me become better. Also, if you have any suggestions of ways that help you cry, please share them.

• When I was a child, adults including my family would make jokes that would sexualize co-sex friendships like “future marriage talk.”

This one happened so many times by so many people. Growing up in Tennessee, if there was an Asian girl in my class, people would tease us about getting married. This made me feel like this Asian girl might be my only chance to get married because the non-Asian girls wouldn’t want to marry me. This sets up a false urgency and expectation that this relationship is important to me and therefore should be important to her. 

My family did that as well with Vietnamese girls. It would be perfect for you to marry this daughter of my friend, and we’d all live happily ever after. I’m sure the intent was a harmless daydream, but the impact was a building up of this friendship with creepy marriage ambitions when I would have enjoyed a friend who understood what it was like to be Vietnamese in TN. The sexualization of co-sex relationships affected all of my relationships from then on, but more on this soon.

• Eldest son but really all sons are uplifted

I am the eldest son in my family, so I felt some cultural responsibility to be a successful and outstanding gentleman. I also have 3 older sisters, and they are like second mothers to me. I’m lucky that I wasn’t born earlier in the pecking order because I probably would have felt the need to get into dumb macho fights to show that I could protect the women in my family. I’ve never been in a fight though.

I do remember breaking more rules than my sisters or being punished less. I don’t know if that was related to some concept of safety as a man, but being raised as the eldest son, the world felt more open to me and more restrictive to my sisters. Now there was only one better position to be than the eldest son and that was being the youngest son. I think there’s something about being the forever baby of the family, and how they’re too cute to do any wrong.

I was raised with traditional gender roles that made it seem like the women of the family were there to support the men. This led me to become a privileged brat while my sisters are the ones setting the tone of what it means to be a loving family.

• Everything is not a contest: sports and gaming obsession

I was obsessed with Michael Jordan. He was the best and always won (at least while I was old enough to pay attention in the 90s). He was an alpha, and I desperately wanted to glean anything from him, so I studied him obsessively. I mean he was too good to be allowed in video games.

I had such a complex about being so bad at sports and video games, but I still wanted to spend as much time as possible playing one or the other. It was my first addiction and self-soothing obsession. Either I would win and beat the other players, or I would lose reinforcing how much of a loser I already felt like I was. This was also my main social activity with other boys, but more on that another time.