men, look: It’s really okay to just talk about your feelings and maybe hug a friend? You do not have to take cold showers and workout twice a day or use a dumb acronym just because you did something nice for someone else. (Also maybe it’s even nicer if you don’t need to advertise that you did it with a hashtag?)
(via Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study newsletter)
Virginia Sole-Smith’s whole interview with Anne Helen Petersen is great. Also read her article The Pandemic Is Heightening Diet Culture for Men (Medium warning)., which she talks about more here:
I do hope that there were at least a few guys who read that piece and thought to themselves, oh, okay, I don’t have to do this. But even then, it’s tough. Because there’s no cultural support—not even a common cultural language really—for a man trying to disengage from that stuff. Body positivity and intuitive eating are definitely branded as girly. And while we probably could be making more space for men who want to do this work, also, it’s not our job to fix sad white men, and a lot of us need a space without them in it in order to do our own work. So I really do think on some level, men have to save themselves here just like they have to figure out how to be governors without touching their interns, and how to be fathers who schedule play dates and clean toilets and don’t just leave all that shit to their wives to sort out. [emphasis mine]
Amen
