FYI, “male socialization” has a very problematic history of being used to exclude trans women from feminist and lesbian spaces, it has basically been turned into a terf dogwhistle by now but unfortunately is still used carelessly in many other contexts. I see it all the time being used especially in progressive circles by people who are not aware of the implications, and these implications do not go away. When you think there is such a thing as male socialization, you are implicitly making the claim that it applies to trans women, and you are also implying a behavorial determinism that mirrors the biodeterminism of classic terf arguments.

I am by no means saying any of this is your intention, but i do not think that the functioning of men under patriarchy can be adequately explained by “people made these childhood experiences as boys and now they are just programmed to be emotionally walled-off, domineering and violent people who objectify women.” As a trans woman, people tried to do that to me and it just didn’t stick. Whatever did get internalized largely crumbled the moment i realized that i never wanted to be seen as a man again. Here’s a primer on the critique of the concept from a transfeminist lens.

From both my own lived experience that includes performing several starkly different gender roles over my lifetime and from extensively studying feminist theory from Butler to Feinberg, i can firmly say that we need to regard the behavior of men not as a biographical artifact, but as a continuous act of constructing gender. When Butler says that gender is performative, they do not just mean that we run a script we learned as kids, the performativity of gender and its social construction are constant and ongoing. This means you have to actively perform masculinity to be seen as a man.

A part of that performance is to use every opportunity to demonstrate heterosexuality, mainly by objectifying women, by being callous and pushy in regards to women’s boundaries and by being extremely persistent in pursuing us. The behavior that OOP vents about is a direct result of men having to constantly prove their masculinity by being shitty to women.

Men are also not emotionally stunted because they did not learn to have feelings as kids. Nobody grows up in a silo where they only learn the gender performance of their AGAB. In fact, we have to know both binary, patriarchal gender roles for the system to function, as patriarchy requires that we police each others’ genders constantly.

Men do not struggle with emotional availability because they never learned it, they struggle because they are constantly punished for showing softness and vulnerability, and they are constantly denied the trust and closeness that women receive from each other because being too nice to a man you do not see in a sexual way carries an extreme risk of that man getting the wrong ideas, and then being extremely shitty about being turned down because our society also very actively punishes women for asserting boundaries too firmly. All of this is part of an ongoing process of constructing and maintaining gender. Once you stop engaging in that and start engaging in constructing and being perceived as another gender, that becomes super fucking obvious.

And this performance is obviously harmful for the men engaging in it, but it also enables them to integrate into existing power structures that require that type of guy. Networking as a man requires that you are dominant in such ways. The better you are at it, the easier it is to socialize with powerful men and to advance in professional settings. You need to be able to engage in and handle the banter, and you can’t come off as a buzzkill when your boss is being a misogynist again. Emphasizing how hard this all is for men is kind of like saying that the Vietnam war was bad because it traumatized or killed so many American G.I.s. Yes, it did, but that does not mean the US and Vietnam were harmed by it equally.