Mick Hartley

Andrew Sullivan has a fine old rant at Trump, and the current government stand-off over his wall, in his regular slot at the New York mag. – Welcome to Act III of the Trump Tragedy. 

I was more interested though in his piece below – scroll down – on The Pathologized Male:

The American Psychological Association’s summary of its first-ever guide to treating boys and men begins with an apology. Men, according to the author Stephanie Pappas, especially white men, have been the subject of psychology and psychiatry forever. Why bother now to treat them separately at all?

After that somewhat defensive and dismissive start, the answer is that men, when they follow what the APA called “traditional masculine ideology,” hurt themselves and others, and this is a problem for men and everyone. Hence the need for psychological intervention. And we quickly arrive at this statement: “Traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.” Men should presumably learn to be the opposite: emotionally inconstant, collaborative, submissive, and passive. If that’s the kind of man you want to be — much more like a sexist stereotype of a woman — an army of psychologists is ready to help you.

Men and women, for the APA, are not intrinsically or naturally different: “When researchers strip away stereotypes and expectations, there isn’t much difference in the basic behaviors of men and women.” As you keep reading, you begin to realize just how saturated psychology has now become with critical gender theory, and its profound rejection of anything we might call “nature.” Because biology has no influence on sex and gender at all, and testosterone is thereby irrelevant in understanding the psychological nature of men (it is never mentioned in the report), everything is a social construct, and social constructs — a function of patriarchy and white supremacy — can be changed. “If we can change men,” one psychologist tellingly admits, “we can change the world.” If this sounds more like a political project than a guide to therapy, you’re not wrong.  […]

The role of psychology? So far as I can tell, it’s indoctrination in critical gender theory: “Psychologists can help clients develop awareness of systems that assume cisgender masculinity expression is the expected norm, and identify how they have been harmed by discrimination against those who are gender nonconforming. Given the connections between sexism and other forms of prejudice, psychologists may find it useful to link oppressions as a pedagogical strategy, especially when working with boys and men in groups.” Good luck with that. […]

To tell you the truth, it reminded me of the way psychologists used to treat gay men: as pathological, dangerous, and in need of reparative and conversion therapy. As homosexuals, we learned for a long time to be very wary of psychologists and psychiatrists because they routinely saw us as individuals whose nature and behavior needed to be fundamentally altered — for our sake and for others’. What once was used against gay men, is now being used against all men.