Why don’t we say “boys will be boys” when a man wins the Nobel Peace Prize?
—MICHAEL KIMMEL
Introduction
Although the news often focuses on the threats of terrorism, natural disasters and nuclear war, there is no greater threat to humankind than our current definitions of masculinity.
It’s a bold statement. If you’ve never thought about it, it may even seem overblown. But before you put this book down, take a moment to put a gender lens on men. In ten years of both academic and media reporting on gender theory, I’ve long focused on the numerous consequences of the patriarchy for women, because there’s no shortage of them. But when I started talking to men about their own gender, I was dumbfounded. It changed my entire outlook on feminism. I started to wonder why the lies that we tell about masculinity aren’t on the first page of every newspaper every single day of the year.
Psychologists have sounded the alarm. For the first time in its history, the American Psychological Association (APA) has created a set of explicit guidelines for practitioners treating men and boys. Their report warns therapists about the dangers of what they call “traditional masculinity ideology” negatively impacting men’s mental health as well as physical health and well-being. Although the APA has often produced guidelines for therapists dealing with vulnerable populations like women, minorities or LGBTQ people, they’ve identified that the falsehoods we’ve all absorbed about men are putting their own health at risk.
And this is not just an American problem. It’s an international crisis. In China, recently a new term has emerged, ???, which translated from Mandarin means “straight man cancer.”
In Iceland it’s eitruð karlmennska, which means “toxic” or “poisonous masculinity.” Hindi people in India refer to it as Mardaangi. In Québec, where I’m from, we call the guy who defines himself through domination of men and women “un macho.” His polar opposite, the man who is in touch with his feelings, is referred to pejoratively as l’homme rose, which translates to “the pink man.”
No matter what continent I visited and conducted interviews with men on, from Scandinavia to North America to Sub-Saharan Africa, I heard the same things over and over again. Toxic masculinity is an epidemic that knows no borders. No society has yet found the cure for it.
It presents itself in subtle ways, such as the way we raise boys differently from girls. It starts when we equate emotion with weakness and direct boys to display strength no matter what. It shows up in the way we expect and encourage girls to show their true emotions while we demand that boys hide them from us. It reveals itself in the way we’re more comfortable with the image of a boy playing with a toy gun rather than a boy playing with a toy doll, because we’re more comfortable seeing a boy hold something that kills rather than something that cries.
While we’ve spent a fair amount of time examining the negative effect of princesses and Barbies on the development of girls’ perception of themselves, we haven’t paused to question the consequences of the video games marketed to boys that have names like “Manhunt,” “Thrill Kill” and “Mortal Kombat.” We don’t blink twice when the NRA releases a free target-shooting video game (one month after the Newtown massacre, no less) and marks it as suitable for boys ages 4 and up. We indoctrinate boys and it starts early.
As Mr. Rogers said during a Senate hearing on PBS funding in 1969, “feelings are mentionable and manageable.” But you wouldn’t know that from the kind of programs targeted to boys today. In fact, Rogers was very critical of the violence both verbal and physical so often contained in the most mainstream shows shown to kids. “I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger—much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire,” Mr. Rogers said. But before a boy can even make a choice about who he becomes, a cozy relationship with violence is encouraged, even rewarded, while proximity with tenderness is penalized. The violent images we feed boys have power. Just ask MIT scientists who were successfully able to create the world’s first psychopathic robot through one simple act: showing it “the darkest corners of Reddit.” They even named it after Norman Bates, the main character in Psycho. Violent men aren’t born; they’re created.
We live in a culture that teaches boys stoicism over authenticity, dominance over empathy, and that if they don’t follow their script, someone will take notice and take their “man card” away. Boys are taught not to ask questions because asking for help would suggest a lack of leadership, instead of being an acute sign of it. Their behavior is highly monitored, their gender constantly surveilled for any sign of misstep or mistake. Boys become fluent in emotional self-censorship. They become anesthetized to feelings to avoid getting caught having any. The love is stripped away from them. As bell hooks argues in The Will to Change, boys learn that “it is better to be feared than to be loved.”
Under the current circumstances we’ve set as a culture, it’s an uphill battle for boys to find and reveal their true selves, and if they do it’s perceived and noted as a flaw. Whether it’s showing sadness or vulnerability, a core part of the human experience, it’s corrected with a simple statement underpinning the poisonous ideology we raise them into: boys don’t cry. And when they act in horrifying ways, when they hurt, beat or assault others in a way that goes against the human spirit, what do we say? Boys will be boys. We are puzzled when boys act terribly, failing to realize that this is precisely the bar we set for them. We have such low expectations of boys that we made up a term for it. What message do these two most commonly used expressions about boys signal to them?
We act as if boys being terrible is inevitable, then act surprised when they fulfill these expectations.
The consequences of this indoctrination have perplexed child psychology experts: while girls go on to become more emotionally mature and literate with age and time, boys become emotionally stunted. Male toddlers emote more than girls, but scientists notice an inexplicable drop in the boys’ emotional expressions starting at the ages of 4 to 6 years, while it remains steady for young girls. It turns out that while parents encourage girls to fully express themselves, boys don’t receive the same treatment. Much of this is largely unconscious and parents of all genders contribute to this. The phenomenon continues into adulthood, where in every age bracket men suppress their emotions far more than women do. Although very little gets universal consensus among academics, they are effectively unanimous that systemically suppressing one’s emotions is one of the most damaging experiences for a human being to endure. What the scientific community has labeled as dangerous and unhealthy is the current model for the way we raise boys. As researchers Tara M. Chaplin and Amelia Aldao, from the Yale School of Medicine and Ohio State University, respectively, put it, “an accumulating body of evidence suggests that when a person is either limited in the range of emotions expressed, or encouraged to express particular emotions to the exclusion of others, there is a greater likelihood of compromised socio-emotional functioning and of risk for developing psychopathology.”
Reductive versions of masculinity are instilled in young boys like a computer chip at an early age. Mounting research on the effects of traditional masculinity indicates that it does irreparable damage to boys and men across every socioeconomic and identity group. A rigid adherence to idealized masculinity is directly correlated1 with lower well-being for men. Research2 has shown that men who have a fear of showing emotions also happen to display the most violent behavior. Men who identify most strongly with conventional masculinity show greater interpersonal problems3 in their relationships than men who don’t. They’re also more likely to sexually harass women.4
When half the population gets trained to block emotions, they lose the ability for compassion. This was best explained to me by David Hogg. He became one of the most well-known gun control activists after surviving a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “A really good way for me to describe it is that I didn’t feel empathy until the day of the shooting,” he told me when we met in Houston. “I didn’t even know what it was like to feel someone else’s pain because I didn’t know what that felt like. I had constantly throughout my life told myself that it wasn’t okay to feel emotion and that I had to go out there and be this ‘lone wolf’ individual. But when I heard my sister crying after the shooting because she had lost four friends that day, I didn’t know why I couldn’t stand to be in the house and it was because her crying made me so uncomfortable because I was feeling her pain. But it took a mass shooting for me to realize that. So I can’t imagine what it makes so many other men across America.”
And because it has been left unchecked and omnipresent, this archaic ideology has been absorbed and encoded into every institution. We have state-sponsored gender roles where policy dictates what men and boys can do, practically erasing the opportunity to know their true tendencies, proclivities or desires. For instance, when President, then candidate, Donald Trump proudly presented a drastic new proposal for family leave, the policy made no mention of fathers. In fact, it excluded men entirely. It guaranteed a measly six weeks of partial pay for new mothers and failed to even mention time off for new fathers (or gay fathers, for that matter). After this drew criticism, they expanded it, but the fact that the policy makers on Trump’s team didn’t even think of including men in parental leave and that there wasn’t a backlash to it shows who we naturally tend to think of as parents: not men. It also sends a powerful message to fathers: your place is at work, not in the home. That’s limiting for women. It’s also limiting for men. The flip side is that when states stop encoding defunct masculinity into their policy making, men naturally start spending more time with their children and working inside the home. We’ve seen public policy offer men more freedom and flexibility in choosing their role in places like Denmark, Sweden and Quebec, setting off a huge transformation in behaviors.
Toxic definitions of masculinity don’t just show up in policy—they reveal themselves in our education system and in the growing disinterest boys and young men have in it. Men are the minority in colleges. The gender gap that once advantaged men has reversed completely. The US Department of Education projects that by 2026, 57 percent of the college population will be female. The majority of bachelor, master’s and doctorate degrees across the country are held by women, and since 1982 they’ve earned more than 10 million more degrees than men.
Although men lagging behind in education often spurs a salacious debate about whether schools are too “feminized” for boys, we fail to see that in that very question rests our own faulty assumptions about what boys need. When we subscribe to innate differences in genders we run the risk of encoding discrimination in the way we teach them, which is exactly what we are seeing across the United States and all over the world. One school in Pittsburgh integrated “stories for girls about princesses and fairies and uses tea parties, wands and tiaras as learning incentives.” Boys, however, regardless of their interest in sports, were taught with difficult physical challenges “through a modified basketball game,” where they had to match words with phrases “while running relays.” We codify gender roles in the way we teach children, with no evidence that doing so has any benefits for them.
This discriminatory sex-specific approach to teaching is a million-dollar business. The Gurian Institute, an organization whose principal mission is to tailor education based on gender, receives thousands of dollars from different school boards all over the country, propagating unsubstantiated claims about the difference between what boys and girls need. According to their website, they’ve already trained sixty thousand teachers in two thousand schools across the United States.
The founder, Michael Gurian, believes the “pursuit of power is a universal male trait” while the “pursuit of a comfortable environment is a universal female trait.” He has advocated giving boys NERF baseball bats to “hit things” to help them learn better. Dr. Leonard Sax, the founder and executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE), peddles similar advice to teachers. He instructs teachers to look girls in the eyes but avoid eye contact with boys and even avoid smiling at them. He also directs educators to abstain from asking boys about the emotions of characters and engage in “strict discipline based on asserting power over them” and justifies corporal punishment like spanking for boys while for girls he instructs teachers to “appeal to their empathy.” Gurian recommends that boys who don’t like sports should be coerced into them. Although a recent trend (mostly argued by people outside the realm of education) asserted that the gap between girls and boys is due to schools being “too girly” and that all male students need to be approached in more aggressive ways, that hasn’t been backed up by any data. In fact, Stephanie Coontz, the co-chair and director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, strongly urged against it in a 2013 briefing paper on the topic: “Making curriculum, teachers or classrooms more ‘masculine’ is not the answer […]. In fact, boys do better in school in classrooms that have more girls and that emphasize extracurricular activities such as music and art as well as holding both girls and boys to high academic standards.”
The discrepancy between boys and girls is not due to inherent differences in brain skills. As the authors of the paper, professors of sociology at Columbia University Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann, wrote, “Researchers agree that it is not because girls are smarter. In fact, while boys score slightly higher in math tests and girls score slightly higher in reading tests, overall the cognitive abilities of boys and girls are very similar. The difference in grades lies in effort and engagement. On average, girls are more likely than boys to report that they like school and that good grades are very important to them. Girls also spend more time studying than boys. Our research shows that boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity than with anatomy, hormones or brain structure.”
Their research shows that while girls have a core understanding of how doing well in school is tied to greater opportunities in the job market, that link is less salient for boys. This may be a persisting relic from a time when future success in the workplace for men was tied to manual labor jobs and physical ability, which made grades feel peripheral for boys. For many of them, the correlation between getting good grades and future professional as well as financial success later in life is not highlighted in the way that it is for girls.
Perpetuating the falsehood that boys’ natural rambunctiousness is antithetical with school environments might be a seductive solution that sells books and gets clicks. But if it were true, this gender gap in education would be persistent across all economic groups. It’s not. Indeed, the gender gap in education practically vanishes in schools that are blessed with resources. Economists who looked at test scores and suspension rates in Florida found that boys and girls were on equal footing in the best schools. It’s in the worst schools that boys started to lag behind the girls. We see the same trend in households. Economic policy reporter Jeff Guo found that the gap between boys and girls is almost nonexistent with well-off families.
“[E]arly-life adversity causes boys to struggle much more than girls,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “It’s not yet clear why girls are so tough, but they seem much better suited to the challenges of modern childhood.”
Guo concludes that worsening income inequality could lead to greater contrast between boys’ and girls’ performances in schools. So the gender education gap is less about recognizing that boys are inherently uninterested. To the contrary, it’s about recognizing that boys are more vulnerable than girls in poverty and low-resource environments and that they need more intimate attention, not less.
In other words, when we let our gendered biases about boys dictate conversation about their needs, we fail to see what they actually need to succeed. Often our solutions to the problems of men are tainted with our own faulty assumptions about what boys and men are like. Those assumptions may make us feel comfortable and offer quick fixes for big problems, but there is no evidence they lead to sustainable change.
Boys also learn that “real men” don’t ask for directions. Any woman who’s ever driven with a man knows the agony of driving in circles rather than asking for directions. But the consequences of this lone-wolf masculine ideal have repercussions beyond shouting matches between women and men in the car and being late to brunch.
It means that men are less likely to communicate with their doctor or health professional. It explains why men’s skin cancer deaths have increased while women’s haven’t. Men wear less sunscreen, are less likely5 to wear a seat belt, visit the doctor less often and receive less preventative care. And when they do visit the hospital, they leave earlier than women. These are not biological differences—how often you think you need to go to the doctor is purely rooted in learned behavior. And men have inferred that asking for advice is not for them. Mix an inability to cope with emotions with a reluctance to seek help and you have the perfect—and lethal—mix for a mental health crisis. The way we raise boys and men is a recipe for disaster. And a disaster it has become.
Not all emotionally stunted men go on to do bad things, but the men who go on to commit crimes often have difficulty coping with emotions and a reluctance to ask for help. After all, it makes sense: men don’t have the tools to deal with something they’re not supposed to feel in the first place. For instance, men who become perpetrators of domestic violence often exhibit emotional ineptitudes. One study on men who were being treated for domestic violence found that “men who reported experiencing affect that was difficult for them to manage are more likely to abuse their partners and also tend to believe that men should not share their emotions or ask for help.”
Leaving the way we are raising boys and men unexamined has created a mental health crisis and female partners have become the first line of defense. As therapist Terry Real puts it, millions of men are living with “covert depression,” which he warns is a “silent epidemic in men.” Most of the behaviors that we most associate with men like anger issues, alcohol or drug use and abusive behavior are often attempts to escape mental illness. Men feel compelled to hide depression from their partners or their own families because it clashes with expectations of ideal masculinity of self-reliance and strength. “Many men would rather place themselves at risk than acknowledge distress, either physical or emotional,” Real writes.
Toxic masculinity turns men into a threat to women. Men’s violence against women is a worldwide epidemic. No country, community or society has found a way to stamp it out. For many women across the world, the men in their lives are the biggest threat to them. Male partners are the second leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States. Every single day three men will end up killing their girlfriend, wife or ex. Nearly half of all women who end up murdered are killed by a current or former romantic partner—98 percent of those partners are male. Homicide, primarily carried out by men, is one of the top leading causes of death for women under 45. In the first nine months of 2018, there were three mass shootings in Texas, all motivated by and targeting a woman who rejected the shooter’s advances. One researcher who examined fifteen school shootings between 1995 and 2001 found that romantic rejection was one of the most common features in gun-related incidents. As Michael Kimmel has noted, “righteous retaliation is a deeply held, almost sacred, tenet of masculinity: if you are aggrieved, you are entitled to retribution. American men don’t just get mad, we get even.”
That aggrieved entitlement stemming from the falsehoods we circulate about masculinity showed up in all its awful colors in the chilling manifesto left behind by Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old student who killed seven people during a mass-shooting rampage at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The video he posted online a mere few hours before the massacre, where he vows to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see,” describes his intention to murder women as a form of retribution for his inability to attract them. “I don’t know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime,” he said, before erupting into a satanic kind of laughter. “I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true Alpha Male.”
If Rodger were in a movie, his performance would be too on the nose. His motivation for the killing of innocent people is what happens when dangerous definitions of masculinity are left unchallenged. Instead of being castigated, he has been hailed as a hero, glamorized by hundreds of men’s rights groups and online forums. One of those devout followers praised Rodger in a Facebook post hours before ramming his van into a crowd of people for over a mile in Toronto, killing ten people and injuring fifteen. He described himself as an “incel,” short for involuntary celibate, a term men’s rights activists use to describe men whom women don’t want to have sex with. Although these are considered fringe men’s movements, the beliefs that underpin their ideologies aren’t that uncommon among regular men. For instance, a Glamour survey found that although 77 percent of men believe consent is always necessary during sex, a whopping 59 percent of them simultaneously believed that husbands are entitled to sex with their wives. After all, it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that it became illegal to rape your wife.
Toxic definitions of masculinity show up in the way that mass shootings are a uniquely white male disease. Although we focus on their mental health problems, what ties mass shooters together isn’t mental health illness (one study of two hundred shooters found that only half of them had clear evidence of mental health issues prior to the act); it’s narcissism, a sense that they’ve been wronged and a sense that they are the victim of injustice. Ironically, it’s not refugees who can’t find settlement, LGBTQ people who can’t get health insurance or African-Americans whose communities are terrorized by police who feel a sense of injustice so great they feel the need to kill others—almost every single mass shooting in American history was perpetrated by a white man or men. Everyone experiences hardship, but only one demographic has been indoctrinated to medicate with revenge.
Although these shootings become fodder for debates around gun control and bullying, rarely does the conversation turn to why they’re almost always done by men. Newscasters might not notice, but gun manufacturers certainly have. Their marketing is often explicitely designed to prey on young men’s insecurities. For instance, gun manufacturer Bushmaster put out an ad that equated gun ownership with renewing one’s “man card” only a few days after Adam Lanza used one of their semiautomatic rifles to shoot his mother in the face and go on to murder twenty innocent young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. For a period of time, the company’s website even contained a feature that allowed men to send each other notices that their man card had been revoked to facilitate peer pressure between men to buy more guns. The suggestion is that your masculinity can be taken away at any time (by other men) and that carrying a violent weapon that kills people is a surefire way to get it back. In a case won by some of the families of the Sandy Hook shooting, their lawyer argued that the gun manufacturer “may have never known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years.”
Toxic masculinity also turns men into the greatest threat to themselves. Men aren’t just more likely to carry guns; they’re also more likely to die from guns. In every single country around the world, male homicide rates are higher than the female homicide rate, and overall, men make up 79 percent6 of homicide deaths. When men end up being tragically murdered, they are most often killed by another man. Although politicians spend a lot of time trying to spin the gun control debate around racial lines by speaking about so-called black-on-black violence, the more glaring demographic pattern in homicide is male-on-male crime. If we were to tackle the problem of men harming other men, we’d make a dent in crime rates across every continent.
But despite mass shootings and murders capturing more media and national attention, the highest incidence of gun deaths is as a result of suicide—86 percent of the people who kill themselves with a gun are men. American men are quite literally stockpiling guns. They are three times more likely to own guns than women and are six times more likely to kill themselves with it. Wyoming, the state of the iconic masculinized image of the lone cowboy, has one of the highest male suicide rates in the country, and incidentally one of the highest rates of gun ownership. Despite these worrying statistics about men’s willingness to take their own lives, we are reluctant to see men as being able to suffer. There’s a presupposition that maleness and dominance are undistinguishable, leaving no room for any other narrative of being a man. It’s so antithetical to view men as victims that the FBI never even included them in their definition of rape until only very recently. The result is that young men are the demographic the least likely7 to seek mental health help while also being the group who would benefit the most from intervention, given they are also most likely to die by suicide. Men who subscribe to traditional masculinity ideals tend to have worse health outcomes than the men who don’t. Men who believe in macho ideals of masculinity are less inclined to seek mental health help. They’re also less likely to use condoms, and view impregnating a woman as a strong marker of a man’s masculine capabilities. Young men who don’t see themselves as able to fulfill the male economic provider role are the ones who put the biggest emphasis8 on sexual prowess and toughness. The correlation is clear, and yet we do nothing.
Toxic definitions of masculinity also make it harder for men to develop and maintain simple relationships. If you aren’t trained to understand your own emotions, it’s fairly predictable that you’ll have difficulty understanding the emotions of others. Because men are encouraged to play games that center on competition rather than relationships, emotional intelligence is a muscle that never gets developed. Research from Dr. John M. Gottman, one of the world’s foremost experts on relationships, has found that a man being emotionally intelligent is one of the greatest predictors of a successful romantic relationship. Gottman finds that while it’s a crucial skill, it’s not always taught to boys. One of the biggest ways it shows up in his research is men resisting their wife’s influence by not attending to her feelings and desires. When a man resists his partner’s influence, Gottman says there’s an 81 percent chance the marriage will not survive.
It’s not just men’s relationships with women that lag behind; it’s their relationships with one another, too. Men have fewer friends and less in-depth friendships and become increasingly isolated with age. Loneliness is a disproportionately male problem. In the UK alone, there are 2.5 million men who report having zero close friends. The increase in aging isolated men has become such a crisis that governments in the UK and Denmark have launched emergency task forces to tackle the crisis. Aging men are more likely to be lonely than their female counterparts and less likely to have regular contact with their friends or family. Since men are instructed that intimacy is a sign of weakness, they don’t develop strong friendships that can sustain them. Loneliness is one of the main predictors for middle-aged white men, the most at-risk demographic for taking one’s life.
Lonely men are ignored while violent men are glamorized. Almost all of the top-ten highest-grossing films of 2017 had a white male protagonist who uses violence as a means of self-expression. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Beauty and the Beast, The Fate of the Furious—all of these movies have one thing in common. When do you become a hero? When you kill the bad guy. What does that tell us about what we value in men?
In so many of the most popular movies of late, almost all of the main characters who engage in violent behavior are, in fact, “good guys.” Beauty and the Beast is a perfect example. The Beast kidnaps and terrorizes Belle, his romantic love interest, as a way to build an emotional connection with her. And the story teaches us that this is not only acceptable, but hey, it works! It’s hard to think of the plot of a single Disney movie the millennial generation grew up with that doesn’t have a seriously questionable subtext normalizing men as predators. We often talk about how the princess trope teaches girls that they need to be docile, unambitious, unidimensional, rescued or controlled by men.
But what did those same movies teach young boys? We act surprised when grown men don’t understand consent when the most iconic and popular stories send very mixed messages about it. Whether it’s Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, the takeaway is that you don’t need permission. Consent is assumed, not affirmed. In fact, not getting consent doesn’t make you the villain; it makes you the hero. The guy who does it doesn’t assault the girl; that’s how he saves her.
This begs the question: If boys are taught that violence is the path to seduction and even redemption in movies, why are we surprised when they engage in it in real life?
Our culture also glamorizes white male violence in the way it is handled by the media. Although the vast majority of acts of domestic terrorism since 9/11 have been committed by white men, the media’s narrative is often one of shock at a troubled person whose life just took a wrong turn. Of course if these men weren’t white, their treatment would be different. We grade male violence on a curve—men of color receive far greater punishment, scrutiny and collective attention, while violence perpetrated by white men is far more invisible and still considered unexpected. The violence of white men can even be perceived as justified, especially when it’s against people of color. We see it in the case of the white police officer who killed Philando Castile for reaching into his glove compartment, or in George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin, a black teenager coming back from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles.
We see it in the way genocidal white colonialism is systematically glamorized in school curricula—a romantic version of mass murder of indigenous people encoded in the millions of history books our children read. We see it in the way state-sponsored violence and wars against other countries filled with black and brown people are left unquestioned and that any critique is delegitimized as unpatriotic. We see it in the careful selection of the people we allow or don’t allow in our country and in the fact that one of the most powerful men in the world calls these places “shitholes.”
There is empathy for the violent white man, a desperate attempt to “understand” him or figure out where he went wrong, as if white men hadn’t been responsible for the vast majority of the violence that occurred in the United States, from the slaughtering of entire populations of native peoples, to the enslavement of African-Americans, to segregation, the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, to the detainment of Asian-Americans and in new modern-day permutations with white-supremacy groups.
The gap left by the absence of a conversation or identity around positive masculinity has been filled by hate groups who offer men a missing sense of belonging and sense of identity. It’s no coincidence that experts have warned about a dangerous new uptick in the proliferation of extremist and white-supremacy groups not just here in the United States but all over the world. These groups have preyed on isolated young men who have been made vulnerable by a culture that indoctrinates them to believe that connection can be achieved through violence. Because it’s so hard for us to see men as victims, their vulnerability is often invisible.
The most important question is: Where is the version of a feminist movement, but for men?
If you stop to think about it, you realize how astounding it is that we all innately understand the fact that men are responsible for the vast majority of violent acts across the world as inevitable. But what if we wrote a different script for men? How could we better prevent our world’s darkest problems if we addressed the link between men’s isolation and their disproportionate radicalization? If we viewed their violent outbursts as a weakness, rather than a strength, perhaps we’d properly pathologize rather than normalize the astronomical amount of male violence across the world.
Our toxic definition of masculinity presents itself in not-so-subtle ways. It presents itself in the election of an alleged sexual abuser to the highest office of the US government. History books will not skip the part where a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women by grabbing their genitals and who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct by nineteen women was elected and became the leader of the free world. It is now a part of American history that a man who has repeatedly made incestuous references about having sex with one daughter, fantasized about the future breasts of his other daughter when she was a newborn and barged into the changing rooms of teenage girls at the pageants he held was elected president by the American people.
Toxic definitions of masculinity even pose a threat to the livelihood of our planet. Scientists have started warning about a recycling gender gap. The data shows that men are less likely to practice behaviors that are eco-friendly, like recycling, than women and are more likely to engage in behaviors that hurt the environment, like littering. In fact, research shows that both men and women associate those eco-conscious behaviors with femininity and a repudiation of masculinity. So in other words, it’s not that men don’t care about the environment; they’re just taught to care about threats to their masculinity more. How different would the world look if men had the freedom to care about their planet as much as women do?
Because it’s at the root of so many institutional problems, altering the way we raise men and boys could literally change the world. Although the concept of world peace feels so impossible that it only comes out of the mouths of beauty pageant contestants, researchers who have examined wide and extensive global data sets have found that one factor seems to act as a shield for violence and warfare: gender equality.
Gender equality is often presented as a side effect of world order, but it’s rarely presented as the cure to political instability—despite mounting data that it is inversely correlated with it. When we ignore gender, whether it’s in the exclusion of women’s voices or the way that masculinity constructions can increase conflict, we limit the opportunity for lasting peace. Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad F. Emmett, the authors of Sex and World Peace, argue that “neither a meaningful decrease in societal violence nor a sustainable peace amongst nations is possible in human society without an increase in gender equality.” The authors, through their research, posit that rates of men’s violence against women are a better predictor of peace in a country than the level of sophistication of the country’s democratic development.
Even when nations recognize the importance of programs tailored toward gender equality, very few are focused on men. Although programs that focus on positive masculinity are rare, one group in Chicago, Becoming a Man, helps at-risk male youth develop mindful masculinity, challenges gender stereotypes and is focused on boys’ emotional development. Amazingly, it has brought down arrests and increased young men’s graduation rates. Imagine the dent implementing programs like that could make in the reduction of mental health problems or suicide and divorce. When we offer more freedom to men about who they really want to become, the possibilities are endless.
It fascinates me that politicians don’t talk about masculinity every single day. Given how intimately toxic definitions of masculinity are connected to the most pressing issues facing our world, it’s curious it has never received a mention in a major political speech and that it rarely shows up in the lexicons of government leaders and policy makers. Although State of the Union speeches have mentioned the importance of tearing down gender barriers and norms when it comes to women and girls, men and boys don’t get that message. Many world leaders erroneously assign barbaric characteristics to entire ethnic groups and religions as a result of repeated tragedies such as terrorism. It’s worth asking, if we started calling toxic masculinity a religion, would politicians start paying attention to it? If we started seeing idealized masculinity as a public health crisis that could be avoided, how differently would policy makers approach it? After all, it’s a disease that doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter where you’re from. It’s an illness that doesn’t care how much money you make. It affects all ethnic groups and races.
I want to make it clear that talking about masculinity is not a distraction from the problems of women—rather, it’s the most effective way to properly address them. The biggest lie is that the fight to address male suffering is separate or at odds with the battle to liberate women. We all experience gender. We are all limited by oppressive gender stereotypes. We must transcend the myth of the gender war. We’re all on the same team.
Here’s how reclaiming masculinity could serve all of us.
Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Plank
