by Mark Greene
Our denigration of women, or our choice to remain silent when others do so, takes place in a world populated by the women and girls who must coexist with us, along with the words, ideas and, yes, predators we grant refuge to.
10 /DON’T MESS WITH JOE
One of the strongest forms of support sustaining the Sexual Assault Pyramid is men’s silence around the denigration of women, which is a crucial stage of the normalization of sexual abuse. When men are challenged with this argument, we often push back. “I’m not a rapist, my friends aren’t rapists. You’re calling us all rapists.”
So, let’s be clear. No one is collectively calling all men rapists. What we’re saying is millions of men are choosing to remain silent when women are denigrated and we aren’t even conscious of why we do this.
Twenty-nine million women are rape survivors.
Man box culture links to the base of the Sexual Assault Pyramid in the moment the degradation of women becomes part of our performance of manhood. And even though millions of us don’t agree with this behavior, we are conditioned to avoid conflict with other men when they do this. This is because the men who degrade women are primed to attack us as well. They are the alpha bullies of man box culture, and the first rule of avoiding them is to avoid any defense of women. In this way, men have been conditioned over a lifetime to avoid the #MeToo conversation like the plague.
When Joe, the manager at the office, says, “She’s got a nice ass” to a group of men at the water cooler, we immediately peg Joe as a certain kind of man. And we are confronted with a choice. To call him out or not. “Joe, don’t say that stuff,” is all it would take, but Joe’s public denigration of women tells us who his next target would be. Because Joe isn’t just degrading women at the office, he’s trolling the men around him, testing for who might disagree. He is declaring his politics and his power.
If any among us challenges Joe, he will instantly redirect his contempt from women to us. “Oh, I see how it is. You want to have sex with her? Or are you some kind of feminist?”
In warfare, this is called suppressing fire, designed to suppress the willingness of all the men in the group to call Joe out. Meanwhile, Joe is openly and vocally asserting women’s second-class status, because without that single central premise stringently enforced, his man-box-constructed identity collapses. In the moment that women gain full equality, Joe loses them as symbols of his superior status and he loses them as the central issue by which he trolls and polices men around him.
Meanwhile, we know that challenging Joe can affect our social standing in the office, our long-term professional prospects, our ongoing stress levels and so on, because we know that once Joe marks us as a target, we will stay a target. Accordingly, standing up for one woman can put the financial security of our family at risk. And because our man box culture suppresses any larger conversations, we don’t know what the other men in the circle are thinking. Most likely, “For god’s sake, don’t make waves.” And Joe the Bully wins. Again.
Boys and men are conditioned over the course of their lifetimes by the Joes of the world. In order not to run afoul of Joe, we learn to base our performance of manhood on the anti-feminine, anti-connection model of man box culture, leaving us siloed and isolated and thus, more easily managed in a command and control structure.
But what’s also important to understand is that after years of man box conditioning, we might even grudgingly admire Joe. This is because what Joe is doing feels powerful to us. It seems like masculine strength. We respect the force of this kind of display even as we might deplore the intent. It takes great strength of will for boys and men to set aside our conditioning and directly challenge Joe. It’s much easier to dismiss the Joes of the world and walk away. “Joe is a jerk. Forget about Joe.”
And herein lies the central problem. While Joe’s message about women is public, our refusal to accept it is private. We make no impact. We have no voice, the result of years of suppressing fire we have undergone at the hands of boys and men like Joe.
We have been systematically trained all our lives into silence by men who constantly signal their readiness to escalate any comment in support of women to an attack on our manhood. While this training begins in our earliest years with the denigration of women, ultimately, this suppressing fire extends across a much wider range of political and social issues.
Bias begins with the denigration of women because unlike almost any other bias, anti-feminine bias can be taught globally to boys regardless of class, race, religion, age or nationality. Anti-feminine conditioning then becomes a powerful and universal gateway to inculcating other forms of bias.
When we teach our sons “You are better then girls,” instead of teaching them, “Don’t put others down to make yourself feel better,” we prime their vulnerability to all forms of bigotry.
You are better than gays,
You are better than Blacks,
You are better than Jews,
You are better than immigrants,
You are better than the poor, and so on.
This is why our silence on the issue of the denigration of women is so damaging, leaving those who are the most aggressive and the loudest to define our culture of manhood as a culture of inequality. As men, we must stop saying to ourselves, “I’m one of the good guys. I’m protecting and providing for the women in my family. I will focus on keeping them safe. On empowering them.”
It’s a nice idea, but it simply won’t work.
Because man box culture is threaded through with contempt for the feminine as a primary method for suppressing boy’s emotional and relational development, the end result is, by definition, a culture of sexual abuse for women.
As such, it is impossible to keep the women in our family or our circle of friends safe if we remain silent. As long as we, through our inaction, help sustain the foundation of the pyramid of sexual abuse, one in five women will be raped.
In our silence we are culpable.
11 /FALSE ACCUSATIONS
People who are alarmed and angered by the #MeToo movement are actively working to undermine it. The most prominent strategy they use is to raise the specter of false rape allegations.
The Joe the Bullies of the world are working overtime to stoke our doubts by loudly questioning women’s stories of assault and rape. “Did she remember correctly? Is she giving all the details? Is she confused? Was she drinking? What was she wearing? Why was she there alone? Why didn’t she report it sooner? Who can confirm her story?” And the most horrendous of all, “We believe she was assaulted, we just don’t think she’s remembering correctly who it was.”
I have spoken about masculinity to rooms full of thoughtful, considerate people who are willing to talk about the most challenging issues we face, yet many still raise their hands and ask, “What about false sexual assault allegations?”
How is it that men are able to doubt allegations of sexual abuse after growing up in our man box culture? We know the violence it’s capable of only too well. This large scale questioning of women’s recollections, motivations and honesty could only take place in a world where the majority of men fear to question or challenge those who defend abusers. Instead, we look for excuses to avoid owning our own silence. We latch on to the slightest bit of doubt generated by the false-accusations-of-rape argument and give ourselves permission to look away.
There are no legitimate statistics that support the myth of widespread false rape accusations, but here are statistics on rape as reported by RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network). Out of every 1000 instances of rape, thirteen cases get referred to a prosecutor, and only seven cases will lead to a felony conviction. Conclusion, most rapes are not reported to law enforcement at all.
Being concerned about the very unlikely possibility of false rape allegations instead of our epidemic of rape and assault is immoral. Believe survivors, boy and girls, men and women, alike. The supposed threat of false rape accusations is a smokescreen designed to sow enough doub
t that men remain silent. That’s all abusers ask of us, to remain silent.
And there is that word again. Silence. As if every aspect of man box culture ultimately triangulates on a single male capacity, our voices, replacing our authentic expression with bullying scripts against other men and women. Raising the very real threat that if we speak up in defense of common human decency we will be shamed and attacked.
While some men complain that women won’t let “men be men,” what is astounding is how meekly these same men accept the daily and even hourly policing of our manhood by other men, seemingly without complaint. “Oh, sorry,” we say. We tuck our tails when the alpha male bullies order us about and we accept domination by men who are stripping from us our most basic of human rights, the right to live our lives as distinct and authentic human beings.
Ultimately, it isn’t the bullies who control American manhood. It is the silence of the sizable majority of men, who carry enough trauma that we avoid standing up for ourselves and the women in our lives. We are collectively silenced, confused and suppressed, traumatized into sacrificing ourselves, our families and our communities on the altar of man box culture.
And the powerful people at the top of man box culture are laughing at us.
12 /SUPPRESSING FIRE
Let’s do a little thought experiment.
Women earn about eighty cents for every dollar earned by men, for equal work. The gap is often larger among higher-paying jobs.
How many men have a life partner who is a working woman (or will have one at some point in our lives)? Yet, collectively, men accept a 20% shortfall in our partners’ income level, simply because, you know, …girls.
That’s a new car. That’s a vacation. That’s a dishwasher. Why isn’t every man with a working female spouse or life partner out in the streets demanding that equal pay become the law of the land? Forget fairness for women. Forget morality or ethics. These are our families’ bank balances we’re talking about.
Over a decade or two, this 20% gap can be the difference between borrowing for or paying cash for a child’s college costs. It can be a retirement fund. It can be a rental property or health insurance. Yet we continue to live in a nation in which men accept lower pay for our own family members, wives, sisters, and mothers, which is clearly yet another example of male silence playing out. How do we know this? Because if all the men who have a working female spouse got behind pay equity tomorrow, it would be the law of the land the day after.
Instead, we collectively shrug.
“Oh, yeah, that’s a thing. Women get paid less. But what are you going to do?” isn’t going to cut it. And as much as it should be framed as an issue of simple fairness, that’s not the point I am making here, either.
That millions of men are voluntarily giving up such a sizable sum of money must mean we’re exchanging it for something we value more.
Are we truly exchanging our child’s college fund for the illusion of status over women? Can we really be that easily manipulated? Or have decades of suppressing fire from Joe the Bully left us unwilling to challenge his dominant narrative that women are less. And because men in man box culture don’t talk about this stuff (Sports only, boys!), do we assume general agreement with Joe the Bully even though collectively, men might actually support having more money in their families’ bank accounts?
It’s no accident that many voices in media and politics model the angry bullying voice of the man box, suppressing men’s willingness to challenge demonstrably terrible policies for fear that the men in our networks will “kick us out of the club” or worse, that we will be shamed and abused all over again. Man box culture has bullied us into silence. As a result, any potential collective support for more progressive policies, even in our own immediate social circles, remains hidden from us.
The question is often posed, why do Americans so consistently vote against our own self-interest? Equal pay legislation is one example of this, bogged down as it has been for years in the U.S. Congress. In a pattern that plays out over and over across a wide range of issues, men are conditioned to act against our own communities, our families and ourselves. And for what do we give up so much?
This is the power of man box culture, that it can convince men to live shorter, more isolated, more impoverished lives in exchange for the illusion of status over women.
13 /MAPPING OUR SILENCE
Author and researcher Niobe Way has this to say about the first rule of the man box. “The simple message that to be a man you have to be emotionless; … emotionless in the sense of invulnerable, is traumatic. And that leads to essentially everything else.”
Our dominant culture of manhood is generations old, reaching far back in its scope and scale. It has been internalized by men and women alike, asserting itself almost universally from the earliest moments of our childhood.
In her book, When Boys Become Boys, Judy Chu writes about her time embedded in a pre-K classroom. Her research there lasted two years, following a group of children through to the end of their kindergarten year.
She tells the story of a four-year-old boy who revealed to her that, “All of the girls in the class are my friends, but I act as though they aren’t … because if Mike, the leader of the boys’ club, finds out … that I like the girls, he’ll fire me from his club … That would be a real bummer ’cause then I won’t be in a club.”
The challenging part of this four-year-old boy’s story isn’t just that he can’t have girls as his friends. That’s problematic enough, eliminating crucial years of learning how to relate and form friendships in authentic and respectful ways across gender. The central issue here is that at age four, this little boy is already taking parts of his more authentic relational self and silencing them out of fear of being kicked out of the boys’ club. He is tracking and accommodating an alpha boy in a hierarchical structure that he is already accustomed to operating in.
And who is the leader of this boys’ club? Even into adulthood, we always know who he is. Man box culture elevates him from an early age, winking at his transgressions and, when he goes too far, noting with a shrug that, “Boys will be boys.” We grant him the heady and narcotic experience of controlling others in the name of being a leader. But we don’t teach him what responsible, inclusive leadership is. And so, he very likely ends up becoming Joe the Bully, attacking and harassing any who challenge his position of dominance.
Meanwhile, the boys under his sway suppress their capacity to collaborate, co-create, innovate, empathize and bridge across differences with the children around them. His message to not talk to the girls is part of the first wave of silencing for very young boys, stripping them of the years of trial and error exploration of expression that is key to learning to relate and connect.
In this way, the gulf of difference, predicated on our cartoonish gender binaries, is introduced and fostered. Boys’ emotional acuity and joyous social natures are falsely gendered as feminine, shamed and suppressed. Girls are herded toward the garish gender stereotypes of the Disney princess, ironically awaiting a prince who, when he finally arrives, will likely have contempt for them.
Our sons’ and daughters’ natural capacities for connection fail to be developed via the relational back and forth by which humans develop nuance. Simplistic, limiting rules for performing gender are hammered home, enforcing a gender binary which, above all else, is about silencing our children’s natural capacities to connect and relate. Then we declare the resulting dysfunction biological. We say that this is just how boys and girls are hardwired.
For men, silence becomes central to our performance of manhood. Silence becomes the strategy by which we protect our hard-won professional and social gains. But it’s a strategy that will fail. Our society may have once been a place where men could avoid risking their status by simply staying quiet, but as our 1950s culture of inequality falters, the bullies and the alphas are asserting themselves. Threats of violence and abuse, even at the highest levels of government, have become com
monplace. The assault on more civil discourse is growing. Our cultural tipping point on manhood can go either way, toward a culture of equity for all, or dramatically away from it.
Accordingly, our families and our communities require not silence and survival from us, but our shared risk and leadership. If men, buffered as we are by our relative safety, remain silent at this crucial point, seeking to avoid conflict with the bullies and demagogues who are rising in this liminal space, something far uglier will take hold. Something that amplifies the man box so dramatically that our families, our security and everything else we hold dear will be at risk.
14 /COURAGE
I’m uncomfortable writing this, telling other men to step up. My culture has taught me not to do this, not to have this conversation. If you’re a man, you may be uncomfortable reading it. But I can only offer you this. My condemnation of our culture of manhood is NOT a condemnation of men. I do however, hold us responsible for our damaging culture of masculinity if we fail to create something better.
Collectively, men still have a simple but important lesson to learn. Some of us learn this lesson at great cost, after a crisis of our own making, the loss of our careers or the collapse of our marriages. It’s a lesson reflected in the voices of broken men at AA meetings. It’s visible there in the shining eyes of fathers cradling their newborn children. It’s a lesson reflected in the ancient philosophies and religions of the world.
The lesson is this. Despite what we have been taught, our power as men does not lie in how well we are able to dominate and control those around us. Our man box culture of competitive dominance is, in fact, a recipe for early stress-related diseases, unhappiness, and violence. It is a direct threat to our families, our society and our world. Moreover, it is deeply and fundamentally isolating. And isolation is death.
