Mark, I'd love to support the work more as a researcher in the area of gender, but I struggle to get around the fact that so much of the popular discussion of masculinity that happens on places like Medium is so cultural ethnocentric. There is not ONE form of masculinity. Even in the US (I was born there, but live in Australia), there are multiple forms of idealised masculinity.

I kind of cringe every time I read the expression 'man box' and blanket declarations about what masculinity (singular) 'IS' as if this was so clearly a single thing, not subject to change, and more interesting then just 'masculinity bad.'

I'd encourage you to look at some of the writing on multiple masculinities, just to even show that there are solutions out there that don't require this kind of 'all or nothing' approach to masculinity. You can seek to shift to other forms of masculinity that are already better than a very specific emotion-denying, fragile-ego, inexpressive masculinity that is NOT the uniform experience of men, even in the US.

For example, Latino cultureS have multiple different ways of inflecting masculine ideals (not all of them 'better' in some easy way); the same can be said about many ethnic and religious, even regional groups in the US (and again, I'm in Australia, where it's different again). The goal is not to say that some one group or other is 'the best' or is 'right,' but to show that there are multiple options, various paths we can choose to take to develop different parts of our personalities, and just more freedom than the 'man box or out' approach makes invisible.