Why Won’t My Brother Talk to Me?
Breaking Through Masculine Family Members’ Silent Exteriors
BY ALLIE PARKER
My brother has always been a reserved person; if there were ever a list of the most introverted people, he would probably be close to the top of it. In his four years of high school, he only had friends over a couple of times. Almost every day after school, he would go straight to his bedroom and close the door. He’d finally come back out around 1 am and make himself a dinner of chicken tenders and Kraft Mac and Cheese. Fruits and vegetables were foreign territories for him at this point. He was always home, but I didn’t see him or talk to him much.
My brother is seven years older than me, so it makes sense that he didn’t share every single detail of his life with me. However, it still amazes me how little I know about him after fifteen years of living under the same roof. I know that he is a picky eater and likes video games, I know that he’s incredible at math but that he didn’t always flourish when it came to schoolwork, and I’m pretty sure he’s a cat person, but that’s about where my knowledge of him ends. I don’t know his favorite color or his favorite show, I don’t know why he was constantly angry and frustrated throughout high school, and I don’t know why he flunked out of college despite being super intelligent. There are some things that I will only ever be able to assume about him, which makes me wonder if there are more factors to his reticence than I know. I believe it is very likely that toxic masculinity plays a large role.
Toxic masculinity is a concept that may hit closer to home than you realize. Chances are, if you have a male family member, you’ve probably grown up around toxic masculinity. You may have witnessed it with your dad, your brother, or your uncle. You may even be that male family member.
While aggression and violence could be what you first envision when hearing the phrase “toxic masculinity,” it’s likely not the most common form of the concept you’ve witnessed. With male family members, you may have observed a more “silent but deadly” form of toxic masculinity. If you’re like me, you feel very uninformed about the lives of your male family members, and you’ve had experiences where you’ve only recently learned something major about one of them. For example, I first learned just a couple of years ago that my dad has anxiety and has been seeing a psychiatrist for about twenty years. You’d think I would’ve guessed my dad was going through something, but it turns out I couldn’t see past the sturdy exterior of a classic dad which consists of randomly breaking into song and having an almost-concerning addiction to coffee and Mountain Dew.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve asked myself what it is that I can attribute my obliviousness to my dad and brother’s struggles. Is it their characteristic of having more private personalities, or just toxic masculinity? I’ve discovered it’s probably a bit of both, but I believe the latter plays a huge role in the dynamics of my family and so many others.