Cockroaches. Dogs. Snakes. Leaches. Ticks. Chocolate rolled in shit. M&Ms laced with poison. Russian roulette. I could go on. The social media mob clambers over itself to compare ‘men’ to any one of these things, in the name of so called ‘advocacy’. Uh oh. Here comes a man, place a bullet in the revolver, spin the cylinder and hope for the best. These highly useless thought experiments mean nothing, and only instil panic and division; building a culture that imprisons women within fear, and men within guilt, with each increasingly further and further apart. And now we are here: living life at the extreme. ‘Male’ (noun) a prefix for any number of words such as ‘fragility’, ‘toxicity’, ‘privilege’, ‘violence’, ‘oppression’, and yet without coincidence , ‘suicide’. I simply do not understand how the arbiters of such language, can claim they care for men’s mental health too. “Oh no. We don’t hate men. We just name everything bad after them!” Well thanks very much! I agree, it is useful to discuss and give visibility to the problematic and violent men in the world, but only if we also give the appropriate amount of visibility to the wonderful men too. The man mowing his lawn. The man eating a sandwich at a bus stop. The man buying a coffee in front of you, or feeding the birds, or playing with his children at the park. The monotonous and mundane man, whose ordinary life doesn’t make headlines and who’s name isn’t splashed across the News at 10. Good men. The many, many millions, all around you, that would far more likely risk his safety for yours, then do you harm. I’ve not seen one single meme go viral about these men. Not one. Let’s try and fix that today, and remind ourselves of the full scale and shape of the good men in our lives; our fathers, brothers, sons, uncles and friends, quietly eating sandwiches, all around you. ~ Michael Gurian  Images by Bruce Mars, Christopher Burns, Black Kiwi Hug, Remi Muller, and Adam Wilson from Unsplash. #menaregood #mentalhealthawareness #mensmentalhealth

2023-02-02