Pathologizing Masculinity:
The APA Diagnoses Men as the Problem
By John Stonestreet
A
NEW REPORT on boys and men from the American
Psychological Association 1 reminded me, again, why
worldview is so important. The report is the first of its kind
from the APA, which has previously issued guidelines for
girls and women, as well as for so-called “sexual minorities.” 2
For years now, the APA has been at the forefront of legit-
imizing progressive gender and sexual ideologies, and this
report is in that same vein. To put it mildly, their conclu-
sions are less clinical recommendations than they are naked
worldview assertions.
Of course, the report isn’t all false ideologies. It opens,
in fact, by recognizing a true and painful reality: Men and
boys in America are not doing well. They’re diagnosed
with ADHD at twice the rate of girls, they perform worse
on standardized tests, they’re suspended and expelled
from school at a disproportionate rate. As they get older,
men use drugs and alcohol more often. They don’t seek
help for mental health issues like depression as frequently
as women do. They commit 90 percent of homicides and
make up 77 percent of homicide victims. They account
for 93 percent of federal prison inmates and are 3.5 times
more likely than women to commit suicide. In fact, male
suicides are up more than fifty percent in the U.S. since
1980. 3 We’ve talked of these so-called “deaths by despair” a
few times on BreakPoint.
Faced with all of these troubling realities, the APA iden-
tifies the problem with men as being “traditional mascu-
linity,” which they define as “anti-femininity, achievement,
eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure,
risk, and violence.”
That’s not how I define traditional masculinity. Anti-fem-
ininity? Violence? That sounds like being a jerk. Reading
between the APA’s straw-men and caricatures, it becomes
clear what assumptions are really behind the report.
Traditional masculinity, the authors go on to argue, is
socially constructed. Real gender is “non-binary,” the report
says. In fact, even identifying male sex with masculine
gender betrays “heteronormative assumptions.” In other
words, masculinity does not objectively exist. It is whatever
we make it. The report actually says, “Psychologists should
help boys and men create their own concepts of what it
means to be male.”
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