Rural toxic masculinity

As we watched Beyonce's CMA performance with the Dixie Chicks, I repeatedly thought about toxic masculinity. While the song Daddy's Lessons progressed, "Daddy's advice" ranged from "shoot," "don't cry," and simply but tellingly, "be strong." The lyrics made me think of men's propensity for violence and bottling up of emotions. But at the time, I was unsure how to relate these ideas to rural lives. 

While thinking about how masculinity affects rural lives, I stumbled upon an exciting article on this question. While discussing Nina Simones's rural upbringing, the author Leah Hampton posits a very revealing thought experiment. Leah suggests closing your eyes and imagining a rural city. 

When I engaged with this question, I almost exclusively thought of dry dirt roads, plotted farmland, and big trucks. 

Leah then begs the question, when imagining rural landscapes, "Are there women in your mind, seated at pianos, playing jazz? Are there any women at all?" She further asks, when imagining the rural land, did you think of any greenery? "does the rural terrain roll and teem? Do the animals and trees live in symbiosis?" Or, like me, did you imagine only dirt roads and barren lands? 

With her thought experiment, Leah posits that culturally, we associate rural lands with places that radiate and perpetuate toxic masculinity. This rural-masculine association is echoed in Professor Pruitt's Gender Geography & Rural Justice. 

This cultural perception of toxic masculinity and its perpetuation leads to a wide array of gendered disparities. For starters, when men are consumed by masculinity, they see themselves as entitled to certain respect and submission, particularly from women. This entitlement leads to feelings of possessiveness that have consistently turned into violence against women and empowerment over them. 

A masculinity study from 2021 on over 17,000 men found that men in rural communities are more likely to have such feelings of possessiveness over women. This increase in possessiveness is likely related to increased intimate partner violence, where rural women report higher levels of intimate partner violence than women living in urban areas. Further, intimate partner violence in rural areas is recorded as more severe, and rural women also have less access to life-saving resources because of rural landscape's spacing and isolation. 

The statistics are grim, and sadly, it should be kept in mind that this violence often goes underreported. 

Unhealthy expressions of masculinity also deeply affect the men that adhere to them. The same 2021 masculinity student found it is less socially acceptable for rural men to be "softer" or express their feelings of depression, anxiety, or general emotions. 

This social pressure on men to not be perceived as soft leads to repression, negatively affecting men's mental health. As reported by the CDC, men are four times more likely to attempt suicide than women. The rates of suicide, however, are even higher for rural men.  

Finally, it is also interesting to consider how the association between masculinity and rural America shapes our perceptions. Does our inclination towards masculinizing rural America lead us to believe rural America is strong enough to handle its problems on its own? What else might we be inclined to think when we associate rural America with conservative toxic masculinity?