PLAYBOYS SUFFER ON THE INSIDE.

CONFORMING TO STEREOTYPES LINKED TO PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS AMONG MEN

Men who conform to masculine stereotypes have poorer mental health, according to new psychological research.

Pursuing a sexually promiscuous “playboy” lifestyle, and feeling a need to dominate or control women were especially powerful predictors of negative mental health outcomes, said Y. Joel Wong, who researches the psychology of masculinity at Indiana University Bloomington.

Along with the stereotype of self-reliance, these were the strongest psychological red flags to emerge from a checklist of “masculine norms” that, when read together, add up to the stereotypical caricature of the “dude bro.” In the modern vernacular, a “dude bro” is neither a “dude,” which connotes respect, nor a “bro,” a term of endearment, but a toxic product of the two. It is a near synonym to the slightly harsher “douche” or “dick.”

The list of norms includes “winning, emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, playboy, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuals, and pursuit of status,” according to Wong’s research, published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

Scoring high on this checklist, especially on the playboy and control of women factors, is “unfavourably, robustly, and consistently related to mental healthrelated outcomes,” Wong found. These factors predicted both poor mental health and a reluctance to get help for it.

To put it crassly, dicks are nuts. The question of causality is not clear, though, as Wong described it in an interview. It could be that being a stereotypical man makes you mentally ill, or that being mentally ill makes you a stereotypical man. Likewise, there could be some shared underlying cause.

Most likely, men who strongly conform to masculine norms tend to develop the same kind of negative consequences as any other anti-social person. The immediate effects are interpersonal, and more social than psychological. They lose friends and alienate people.

“When you behave in a sexist way, you get pushback from others,” Wong said. “People might tell you off or call you out ... People might start avoiding you because they find your behaviour offensive.”

It is not a major scientific surprise that masculine stereotypes are associated with poor mental health, but Wong said he had a “nagging suspicion” that some of these norms were more prevalent and powerful than others. This is where his research stands out from previous work.

It was a meta-analysis, a study of studies, 74 of them, including unpublished theses and dissertations. They involved psychological research on nearly 20,000 men, mostly American, but also Canadians and Australians; mostly white, with minorities of blacks and Asians; and mostly straight, with a few gay men, and a majority whose sexual orientation was not specified in the original study.

While acknowledging that race and culture are no doubt relevant to expressions of masculinity, Wong said he was unable to draw firm conclusions on that theme from the data set. He also looked at whether the percentage of sexual minorities affected the overall conclusion, but could not identify this effect.

With co-authors Moon-Ho Ringo Ho, Shu-Yi Wang and I.S. Keino Miller, Wong identified three factors that stood out from the 11 on the checklist as powerful predictors of poor mental health. The first, power over and control of women, was explicitly sexist. The second, the “playboy” norm of being sexually promiscuous, was implicitly sexist. Both would seem to work against a fellow’s chances of having a positive, long-standing relationship with a woman, and this might be what causes the negative mental health outcomes, Wong said.

But the strongest factor, which was not sexist nor even negative, was self-reliance. This was a puzzle.

“In today’s society, it’s increasingly harder to be independent and not ask for help,” Wong said. “In this interconnected world, self-reliance speaks to the desire for independence, difficulty asking for help, wanting to go it alone, wanting to be autonomous, and that’s becoming harder in a world where in workplaces you have to rely on people, in relationships you have to connect with people. The more selfreliant you are, the more challenges you’re going to have.”

As an everyday example, he cited the stereotypical male reluctance to ask for directions, even when lost.

There has been similar work on feminine norms, and it may be that stereotypically negative female behaviour is also associated with negative health outcomes.

There is a comparable psychological checklist of feminine norms, for example, drawn from the dominant white, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class culture of America. It includes “nice in relationships, thinness, modesty, domestic, care for children, romantic relationship, sexual fidelity, and invest in appearance.”