Men, Deprecated.

Please Update or Uninstall

Girl, Interrupted is definitely a sagittarius. It is a coming of age movie based on Susanna Kaysen’s memoir that was released during the winter break of my second senior year at UIC. In case you missed it, the story is about a rupture in the expected arc of becoming. The female characters have been locked away in a psych ward, just at that age where they are expected to become young women and those symptoms are diagnosed and pathologized, disrupting their inevitable growing up. The interruption is systemic, relational and institutional.

The way girlhood transitions into womanhood seems to always have been mysterious and dysfunctional, and most of us have a distinct memory of trying to hold on to the protections we are supposed to have as girls, while blooming into the containment of womanhood. That moment where we are no longer who we were and still somehow not yet who we’re supposed to be is a purgatory that many of us never get to leave.

Instead, we crowd the spaces where healing and growth happen, forever trying to become. Retreats, therapy offices, and meditation centers are overflowing with women. In the sex-positive world where I live, co-ed cuddle puddles, intentional erotic spaces and conscious kink events are almost exclusively all women. I went to a Salsa class recently and it was ALL women. It is almost as if the men don’t want to be taught anything new.

Men were never framed as interrupted, they just have a slow, collective drift away from growth. They quietly deprecate. Emotionally absent and disconnected, their development is arrested and that is normalized. There are many spaces for women to reflect and be witnessed, to see ourselves held through crisis and the grief of all that interrupted us, but men? They pile up outside of the doors where growth and change are fostered, hemming and hawing about how there are no spaces for men. Their absence is becoming the new normal. Instead of being held, they’re left to lag behind the update cycle.

If you are a man reading this, pause. Ask yourself “when was the last time you took a class that was specifically about your becoming?” and “How often are you in mixed gender healing spaces (and if its often what’s that ration like?”

Maybe Girl, Interrupted is not a good comparison here, because there is a before, during, and after in the storyline. With Men, Deprecated there is no ward, no diagnosis, no clear entry point and no clear exit. There is just an ongoing failure to update. An older, depracated version of men, in a culture that keeps moving. The old systems are still running, but no longer compatible with the future.

editors note: In technology and software, deprecated means a feature, function, or library is still supported for backward compatibility but is no longer recommended for use, per google.