One of my friends in law school once opened up to me and a few other people in our mixed-gender friend group that he didn't really have friends before he knew us, even though he thought he did. We sort of nodded like, yeah man, we're glad you're our friend too, sorry people back in your home town were shitty – and he stopped us like, no, you don't understand. He told us that he thought he had friends, and that those people thought that they were his friends – but that his all-male small-town social circle constantly hurled abuse at each other, and that they all thought that that was normal. He told us that he used to go out partying with them, and whereas when we'd go out, we'd talk each other up – like, man, nice shirt, love what you did with your hair, I bet chicks are gonna dig it, etc. – back in his old circle of friends? All they'd ever do before going out was talk each other down. You're dressed worse than your friends? You look like trash. You're dressed better than your friends? Why do you care so much about you're appearance, are you gay? You're dressed exactly the same as your friends? Wow, look at this loser copying other people's look. You could never win, you could never even break even, and you were expected to not only put up with this, but to participate, because that sort of normalized constant stream of verbal abuse was the main way that you and other men your age socialized. He literally did not realize that men could have actual, real friendships – with women, sure, but also with other men – until he met us, because to him, the act of hanging out with people who you weren't dating was so deeply intertwined with toxic competitive expectations that he flat out didn't know that there was a different way to be until he moved halfway across the country for law school in his late 20s.
It's incredibly fucked up, and men should be able to talk about what a patriarchal culture like that does to them without being silenced.
