Part 2 of 5: The Men Who Shop for Women — Masculinity
“Some were broken, some were grieving, some just wanted somebody to lay next to to feel human again.” (Girl, 2025)
In this article I want to highlight the words of a woman who was trafficked at 19 years old and managed to get out of that life. She has dedicated herself since to raising awareness of human trafficking and talking about very nuanced topics that most are unable, unwilling, and uncomfortable to speak on. Ending human trafficking isn’t just about protecting women, but it is also extremely necessary to have conversations about the kinds of men who are purchasing women for a night or several, and it is not good enough to say that “all men are bad” as the 4th wave of feminism has been. Healing this world is not a one-way street and while many men are predators, most men are victims. We will not get anywhere blaming anyone but the pimps. We need to talk about these men.
With this insight from a former trafficked woman, we need to ask ourselves what the source of the problem is here, because without a market we have no pimps. I am here to explain that at least one big problem is a fun buzz-word that 4th wave feminism likes to use a lot, but one that the American Psychological Association has begun to take more and more seriously in post-modern years: Toxic masculinity. Oxford dictionary defines toxic masculinity as: a set of attitudes and ways of behaving stereotypically associated with or expected of men, regarded as having a negative impact on men and on society as a whole. This is a rather non-specific definition, and fails to highlight the issues that psychologists are seeing in men today. It is not wrong to have social scripts and feel that you fit into place within a gender binary, but rather specifically that many men feel that there is no acceptable time or place to feel an emotion, let alone ever talk about these emotions with a friend, family member, or therapist.
“In fact, the twentieth-century standards raise issues important to emotions research in general. Both the possibility of basic emotions and observable historical continuities in human emotion suggest that people may have a common range of emotions or affects that are biologically or psychologically programmed in. If this is the case, then culturally constructed efforts to constrain emotions may well affect overt expression, but the emotions will also demand compensatory outlets.” (Stearns, 1994)
Toxic masculinity is something that spans across history and cultures have created only certain types of “approved” emotional outlets for men. For example, Japanese middle-class men often are forced into the role of “approved drunkenness and some sexual license” while Victorian men “could seek alternatives to sexual regulations through pornography, use of prostitutes, and the like.” (Stearns, 1994) Media literature and comic books for young men glorify “the emotionless hero who experienced great excitement while displaying no passion of his own.” Many men begin to push back when they hear this buzzword, because they believe that taking away the toxic part can only lead to destruction of traditional masculinity. Many men simply don’t feel much need to cry, they like their friendships just as they are, and feel that they fit the role of a masculine man quite nicely. That is perfectly okay! Masculinity is a beautiful thing and should and will continue on. The toxic part of toxic masculinity is the rigidity of the box men are given—that doesn’t mean that if you fit into the box then feminists like me are now trying to say that you are inherently a bad person. Not at all! Masculinity is a wonderful aspect of human existence. It is a necessary energy that is essential to existence, but the pressure that we put on young boys and men to be a certain way, act and certain way, and present a certain way (even restricting what colors a man can and cannot like) “can lead to poor health outcomes, including higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, violence and early death.” (Dastagir, 2019)
The American Psychological Association released guidelines delving into the complexities of boyhood around sex, intimacy, and emotion which isn’t allowed room to breath with the ideal of stoicism and how most men are socialized to be hypersexual even with a variety of parenting styles (American, 2018) and this is where the toxic part comes in. When a man does fit the box, that is one thing. It becomes another toxic thing when a boy or man does not fix the box and is not given any space to exist. Of the men that purchase women, “most of them [are] lonely, bitter—[have] a hard time finding something meaningful [or are] addicted—The ones who were grieving… that was different.” (Girl 2025) Therein lies the problem: men are paying for prostitutes instead of therapy because therapy isn’t masculine, but hyper sexuality is.
This is killing our men. Toxic masculinity is not the beauty that masculinity can or should be. Men need to be given room to be who they are, not to be taught from young ages about the acceptable ways a man is allowed to be. Men and women are equally diverse human beings as gender is a spectrum. Biologically we have men and women, and that does facilitate some trends across the board, and that is the end of that conversation. We as people do not need to try to force our children to change their biology in an attempt to fit a curated personality that will never fit and is killing them and leading our men to seek alleviation from pain in places that will only cause their wounds to grow. Our men deserve better than to be told that real men don’t cry.
Works Cited
American Psychological Association, Boys and Men Guidelines Group. (2018). APA guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/about/policy/psychological-practice-boys-men-guidelines.pdf
Dastagir, A. E. (2019, January 10). Psychologists call “traditional masculinity” harmful, face uproar from conservatives. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/01/10/american-psychological-association-traditional-masculinity-harmful/2538520002/
Gril, S. (2025). What I learned about Men, Love and Loneliness while being sex trafficked. YouTube https://youtu.be/UfBso0Y4ETI?si=qCsrLhvDigUv7jgP
Stearns, Peter N.. “9. The Need for Outlets: Reshaping American Leisure”. American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style, New York, USA: New York University Press, 1994, pp. 264-284. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814771037.003.0012