Disability, Mental Wellbeing, and the Need to Belong
Movember Is About More Than Physical Health
Every year, Movember encourages important conversations about men's health. Public discussion often centres on physical health, cancer screening, exercise, and prevention, and rightly so. Yet men's wellbeing cannot be reduced to physical health alone. Mental health, relationships, self-worth, social connection, and a sense of belonging are equally important determinants of quality of life.
Recent discussions about men's wellbeing have increasingly focused on loneliness, social isolation, and declining social connection. At the same time, broader debates about masculinity have become more prominent, particularly as many men seek guidance and community in a rapidly changing social landscape.
What is often absent from these conversations, however, is the experience of men with disabilities, chronic health conditions, neurodivergence, and long-term mental health difficulties. Their absence is notable not because disability represents an exception to masculinity, but because it raises important questions about the assumptions that often underpin contemporary understandings of what it means to be a man.
The issue is not whether men with disabilities can embody resilience, achievement, responsibility, ambition, or strength. Rather, disability invites us to consider how these qualities are defined, whose experiences those definitions reflect, and whether dominant ideals of masculinity adequately capture the diversity of men's lives.
Masculinity as a Social Ideal
Masculinity is often discussed as though it represents a fixed set of personal characteristics. Increasingly, however, researchers and social commentators have approached masculinity as a cultural ideal: a set of values, expectations, and assumptions that shape how men are encouraged to understand themselves and how others understand them.
Within many Western societies, masculinity continues to be associated with independence, self-sufficiency, control, competence, physical capability, and economic productivity. None of these qualities is inherently problematic. Difficulties arise when they become the principal framework for evaluating male worth.
Such ideals rarely emerge in isolation. They are reinforced through media, education, workplaces, popular culture, social relationships, and, increasingly, digital spaces. Over time, they can shape not only how men are perceived but also how they perceive themselves.
This matters because ideas about masculinity are not merely descriptive. They establish expectations about who belongs, who is recognised, and whose experiences are considered legitimate.
Disability and the Question of Belonging
Questions of belonging are central to both mental health and identity.
A growing body of research suggests that social connection and a sense of belonging are among the most significant protective factors for psychological wellbeing. Equally, experiences of exclusion, marginalisation, or social isolation can adversely affect both mental and physical health.
From this perspective, disability raises important questions about the relationship between masculinity and belonging.
Traditional masculine ideals often place a high value on autonomy and self-sufficiency. Yet the realities of disability, chronic illness, and fluctuating health frequently challenge simplistic distinctions between dependence and independence. The experience of requiring support, adapting to changing circumstances, navigating inaccessible environments, or managing ongoing health needs can expose the extent to which relationships of mutual reliance shape all human lives.
This is not a challenge unique to people with disabilities. Rather, disability often makes visible aspects of human experience that are universal but frequently overlooked.
The ideal of complete independence, for example, tends to obscure the fact that everyone's life is sustained through networks of care, support, relationships, institutions, and communities. Human beings are fundamentally interdependent. Disability makes this reality harder to ignore.
Seen in this light, disability offers an important opportunity to reconsider the assumptions on which some conventional models of masculinity have been built.
Masculinity, Vulnerability, and Recognition
Another assumption frequently embedded within traditional understandings of masculinity concerns vulnerability.
Despite growing public discussion about men's mental health, many men continue to encounter cultural messages that associate vulnerability with weakness, dependence with failure, and emotional openness with inadequacy. Such messages can make it difficult for men to acknowledge struggles, seek support, or discuss experiences that fall outside dominant expectations.
For men with disabilities, these dynamics can be particularly complex. It is not uncommon for public narratives to cast people with disabilities either as objects of pity or as sources of inspiration, while leaving little room for the ordinary complexity of lived experience. Both positions ultimately reduce individuality and can reinforce the sense that certain lives exist outside conventional ideas of adulthood, competence, or masculinity.
The consequence is not simply social exclusion. It is also a question of recognition.
Whose experiences are understood as compatible with masculinity?
Whose lives are represented within cultural narratives of success, confidence, strength, or achievement?
And who remains largely invisible?
These questions are increasingly relevant at a time when growing numbers of men are seeking guidance on identity, purpose, and belonging.
Why Are Men Turning to the Manosphere?
One response to these questions has emerged within online communities collectively referred to as the manosphere.
The manosphere is not a single movement but a broad digital ecosystem encompassing influencers, content creators, podcasts, forums, social media communities, and self-development platforms focused on masculinity, relationships, dating, fitness, confidence, and personal success.
Public discussion often approaches the manosphere principally through the lens of controversy. While concerns about some areas of the manosphere are important, focusing exclusively on its most extreme elements risks overlooking a more fundamental question: why are so many men drawn to these spaces?
Research commissioned by Movember suggests that many young men engage with online masculinity content not because they are actively seeking misogynistic or extremist beliefs, but because they are looking for guidance, connection, confidence, community, and direction. In many respects, the popularity of these spaces reflects unmet social and emotional needs.
The desire to understand one's place in the world is not unusual. Questions concerning identity, relationships, self-worth, and belonging are central features of human development. What makes the manosphere noteworthy is not the existence of these questions, but the particular answers that some communities offer.
When Belonging Becomes Conditional
One of the tensions within parts of the manosphere is that while they often respond to genuine experiences of exclusion, they may simultaneously establish new criteria for belonging.
Movember's research has highlighted how content related to fitness, self-improvement, discipline, and personal growth often coexists with narratives equating masculine worth with wealth, status, physical attractiveness, dominance, emotional stoicism, or complete self-reliance.
The issue is not that achievement, confidence, or ambition lack value. Rather, questions arise when these characteristics become prerequisites for recognition, respect, or belonging.
This has implications not only for women but also for many men whose lives do not align with such expectations.
Men with disabilities provide a particularly useful lens through which to consider this issue. Not because disability is incompatible with achievement or success, but because the experiences of many men with disabilities reveal the limitations of definitions that privilege physical capability, independence, or conventional measures of productivity above all else.
From this perspective, the question becomes less about whether individual men live up to masculine ideals and more about whether those ideals can accommodate the diversity of men's experiences.
Relationships, Power, and Human Connection
Discussions of the manosphere also intersect with broader debates about relationships, power, and gender.
Researchers, advocacy organisations, and practitioners have expressed concern that some online narratives frame relationships through concepts of hierarchy, dominance, status, and control. It is important not to assume that all communities discussing masculinity promote such views, nor that engagement with manosphere content inevitably leads to harmful attitudes.
Nonetheless, these concerns highlight an important distinction between power and connection.
Relationships grounded in mutual respect, autonomy, trust, and reciprocity differ fundamentally from those organised around control or dominance. From a psychological perspective, genuine intimacy depends not on power over others but on recognition of their autonomy, subjectivity, and equal worth.
Violence, coercive control, intimidation, and emotional abuse are not expressions of healthy masculinity. Rather, they are harmful behaviours that undermine trust, autonomy, safety, and wellbeing within relationships.
The significance of this point extends beyond questions of gender. It speaks to a broader issue concerning the kinds of social relationships that support human flourishing and those that undermine it.
Towards a More Inclusive Understanding of Masculinity
The purpose of questioning traditional masculine ideals is not to reject ambition, responsibility, perseverance, competence, or achievement. These qualities remain meaningful to many people and can contribute positively to individual wellbeing.
The challenge lies in resisting definitions of masculinity that elevate particular forms of achievement while marginalising other equally valuable ways of living.
A more inclusive understanding of masculinity would not require a single model of how men should think, behave, relate, or contribute. Instead, it would recognise the diversity of men's experiences and create space for different expressions of identity, capability, vulnerability, and strength.
Such an approach acknowledges that dignity is not contingent upon physical ability, economic productivity, social status, or independence. Nor should belonging depend upon conformity to a narrow cultural ideal.
A Different Question
This Movember, conversations about men's health should undoubtedly continue to include physical health and prevention. However, they should also make space for broader questions about identity, belonging, and wellbeing.
Rather than asking whether men with disabilities fit conventional expectations of masculinity, a more productive question may be whether those expectations are sufficiently expansive to reflect the realities of men's lives.
Ultimately, a masculinity that can accommodate disability is not a special category of masculinity. It is simply a more complete and humane understanding of what it means to be human.
And perhaps that is where the conversation about men's well-being should begin.
References:
World Health Organization. (2025). From loneliness to social connection: Charting a path to healthier societies: Report of the WHO Commission on Social Connection.
Nicholas, L., Clark, S., Agius, C., & Cook, K. (2024). Antifeminist, manosphere and right-wing extremist sentiment among men who use domestic and family violence: Masculinism, misinformation, and the justificatory logics of violence. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/18902138.2024.2430513
