by Liz Plank
It could be fairly easy to eradicate oppressive norms, because in order to exist, norms need to be applied. A social norm is only powerful to the extent that people are willing to respect it. When a culture sets up specific rules about men, they don’t need to be imposed by a higher power because men end up imposing them on one another. They police others in an effort to express their respect of the code that our culture has established.
Transphobia is a striking example of the way that masculinity-restoring activities can quickly escalate and become ritualized violence against others to prove something about themselves. Although there are all kinds of perceived threats to the male status quo, nothing rattles us quite like a man who is perceived to be acting like a woman. And that discomfort is clear in the way transphobia is directed toward trans women. “I think there is a specific kind of vitriol from cis men,” my friend Robyn Kanner told me. As a trans woman, she noticed a more vindictive kind of rejection from her male friends after she transitioned. One close male friend in particular saw her identity as a threat to his. “He thought me being trans betrayed his manhood and our friendship,” she told me. “My womanhood somehow invalidated his manhood. I tried to keep our friendship normal, but he just pushed and pushed me away.” The way that she explained men’s reaction to her is that she became what they had been taught to fear the most: a woman. Because men are constantly being messaged that the worst thing they can do is act or behave like a woman, Robyn embodying womanhood became intolerable for him. “Cis men have vitriol towards trans women because they see how a person like them could become something they resent becoming.”
We see this reaction modeled in our popular culture. Men’s backlash against Caitlyn Jenner being recognized as one of the Glamour Women of the Year in 2015 was a stern reminder of the way transphobia and misogyny often combine forces and work hand in hand and deny the humanity of transgender people. “Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more deserving than this man?” said James Smith, whose deceased wife had been one of the Glamour Women of the Year in 2001 after she was the only female police officer to die in the 9/11 attacks. Smith was so incensed he returned his wife’s award in protest. Joe Rogan has obsessively dedicated entire stand-up routines and episodes of his podcast to Caitlyn Jenner’s genitalia. InfoWars “reporter” Joe Biggs described the military covering sex reassignment surgery as paying “$100,000 for some guy to chop his dick off and tuck it in.” When men take huge issue with being forced to witness transgender people daring to exist within their vicinity, the focus of their rage is disproportionately toward trans women, the justification being that they are not acting like “real men.” All transgender people are disproportionately marginalized and misgendered, but the weaponized vitriol reserved for transgender women, particularly those of color, feels particularly venomous when it’s coming from cisgender men. Why are these men so bothered by what another human being chooses to do? Why do they perceive it as such a threat?
This profound discomfort with men having flexibility when it comes to gender performance is at best cumbersome and at worst lethal. The vast majority of people who kill trans women are cis men. And the murders of trans women are especially graphic. To name one particularly disturbing case, in 2016 a former navy sailor was found guilty of murdering Dee Whigham, a woman he was on a date with. After she revealed she was trans, he stabbed her 119 times, slashed her throat, took a shower and then left her for dead. This is only one of many cases that have been part of this rise in violence against trans women, particularly when it comes to women of color. When the number of reported murders of trans women almost doubled from 2014 to 2015, gender theorist Judith Butler told Broadly that we need to pay attention to the identities of those being murdered but also those doing the murdering. “Killing is an act of power, a way of reasserting domination, even a way of saying, ‘I am the one who decides who lives and dies.’ So killing establishes the killer as sovereign in the moment that he kills, and that is the most toxic form that masculinity can take,” she explained. For Robyn, cis men’s violence against trans women is a clear act of reasserting their manhood in the most quintessential masculine way possible. “They do it because it targets their masculinity—anytime their masculinity is targeted they go to the tool they have and know how to control: power.”
3 Masculinity Is Under Attack
There are many symptoms of what I call the masculinity moral panic. The perceived fear of men acting like women is so strong that it’s also used to bully cisgender men out of having a thoughtful, nuanced conversation about masculinity. When we create a cultural environment where men can’t ask questions about masculinity, any interrogation of masculinity is interpreted as an admission that one is not a real man.
We’ve seen the panic take many forms. For instance, when Oregon University proposed holding a “healthy masculinities conference,” conservative writer Todd Starnes warned that “universities across the fruited plain are trying to convince men to grow lady parts.” As I’m writing this book, I’m noticing that Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been increasing the severity of his fearmongering, dedicating entire segments of his show to the idea that “men seem to be becoming less male.” He even went so far as to launch a male-empowerment series, which coincidentally aired every week of Women’s History Month in 2018, where Carlson concluded that men “are pretty close to being destroyed” by women because “manhood is under attack.”
This is nothing new for the network, which has been quietly preparing for this moment by peddling a gender panic for years. One particularly memorable segment that aired on the morning talk show Fox & Friends back in 2014 with hosts Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Clayton Morris featured the colorful chyron “‘Wussification’ of Men: What Happened to Guys in America?” The segment included author Nick Adams telling viewers about the need to “educate everybody about the importance of being a manly man as opposed to being an effeminate metrosexual.” In what seems to be a strangely accurate prologue to the 2016 election, when Hasselbeck asks him if this feminization of men is a “threat to national security,” Adams argues that “wimps and wussies deliver mediocrity, and men win. And what America has always been about is winning.” In one simple slogan: make masculinity toxic again.
But nothing makes the current new wave of the masculinity moral panic more undeniable than the practically overnight celebrity status of Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology who became a bestselling author after publishing a book called 12 Rules for Life. In the book, as well as in online lectures, Peterson hands out advice like “say only those things that make you strong” and instructs each member of his primarily young male audience to stop being “a girlie man.” Peterson glorifies men who display aggressive behavior, arguing “the best men I’ve ever met are very dangerous.” Peterson is opposed to encouraging men to practice more empathy, saying “there’s nothing more horrible for children, and developing people, than an excess of compassion.” But he does argue that women should have compassion for men they don’t want to have sex with and that having sex with those men could prevent national tragedies. For instance, he asserted that the domestic terrorist who described himself as an incel who rammed his van into people on the streets of Toronto in the spring of 2018 could have been prevented if women agreed to have more sex with more men.
“The cure for that is enforced monogamy,” Peterson told Nellie Bowles of The New York Times when he was asked about the incident. “That’s actually why monogamy emerges.” In addition to collectively blaming women for terrorist attacks like the one in Toronto, Peterson also manages to make women responsible for Hitler’s and Stalin’s genocides, positing that their mothers must really be the reason they executed and killed their own people. “Was something amiss in their crucial relationships?” Peterson writes in 12 Rules for Life. “It seems likely, given the importance of the maternal role in establishing trust.” As a serious intellectual, he has also taken a very important political stance
against the Disney movie Frozen because of its radical agenda of letting female characters have this dangerous thing called agency. Peterson is skeptical that a princess can save herself, because consciousness is something that belongs to men. “In any case, it is certain that a woman needs consciousness to be rescued,” he wrote in connection with the movie. “And, as noted above, consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time.”
He also opposed a Canadian bill mandating the use of transgender pronouns for transgender or nonbinary people. In a video that received millions of views where he is seen debating this issue at the University of Toronto (where he teaches), he complains, “I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest, and that’s that!” before crossing his arms over his own body the same way my niece does when I won’t let her dip her hot dog in her orange juice. According to a New Yorker profile, when a transgender student got the courage to come see him after a lecture one day and asked why he insisted on using the wrong pronouns, the student says that he answered, “I don’t believe that using your pronouns will do you any good, in the long run.”
In addition to receiving millions of hits online, Peterson’s sold-out book tour has been composed of primarily young men who often wait in line for hours to speak with him. Currently, his book is Amazon’s most read (and most sold) nonfiction book, which makes him one of the most read Canadian authors alive. Profiled by almost every single major newspaper and magazine, Peterson has been called “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now” by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Although Brooks calls Peterson’s advice “harsh” he also claims that for “millions of young men, it turns out to be the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which they are raised.”
To his credit, Peterson has tapped into the truth that men are lost, but he has capitalized on this moment to advise them to “toughen up” and double down on the ideology that got them here in the first place. In addition to believing that parents should raise their boys to pursue what I would call faux masculinity, Peterson believes that parents should avoid any discussion about equality with them. In fact, he advised parents to pull their kids out of school if their teachers dare teach them about the injustices that exist in the world. “If you have your children in a school and they talk about equity in his class and they talk about equity, diversity, inclusivity, white privilege, systemic racism, any of that, you take your children out of the class,” Peterson told Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “They’re not being educated; they’re being indoctrinated.”
The masculinity moral panic has long been an undercurrent of our cultural landscape, but because of the rising power and place of women’s movements in popular culture it’s been experiencing a new and stronger wave. The magnitude of anti–sexual assault movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp has seeded fear in the minds of young men that they are being discounted, replaced and denigrated, while women gain more momentum and recognition. This mirrors the same kind of backlash we are seeing as white supremacy is increasing as movements like #BlackLivesMatter get traction and white people are predicted to become a minority by 2045. The message these men seem to be absorbing is that if marginalized groups have more rights, they will have fewer, which is of course not at all how human rights work.
Because the fear of being emasculated is so potent, parents often end up pushing unhealthy ideals of masculinity on their own children because they are led to believe that this protects them. When I discussed this with a progressive and self-described feminist dad, he told me about a recent incident where he went to visit his parents with his daughter and son. When he saw his 5-year-old son holding the bouquet of flowers they had brought as a gift, he swiftly reprimanded him, ordering him to give them to his sister. The man said he felt bad doing it but felt like it was the right thing to do. Of course, as a father he isn’t trying to harm his son; he’s trying to save him from the abuse society reserves for boys who transgress the male code. The system works because it’s not questioned. The system works because men think they are passing it down out of love, when of course denying boys the full experience of their humanity is what truly loving them would look like. The problem is not boys; it’s us. Flowers don’t harm boys; it’s the labels we ascribe to those things that do.
When you take a moment to let it sink in that it’s 2019, but we are still terrified of letting boys hold flowers, Jordan Peterson and other masculinity moral panic warriors as a phenomenon makes a lot of sense. Their voices are resonating with so many men because those men are experiencing real pain and they are in desperate need of guidance. It would be easy to assume that this speaks to the strength of Jordan Peterson’s message, but unfortunately, it’s nothing new. It’s an old message—but it’s now reaching a crowd that is desperate for a justification to explain the pain they are in. Ultimately, the masculinity moral panic speaks more to the sadness and need for guidance among young men—it offers a simple solution to a complicated problem.
The bill of goods it is selling is a short-term fix for men. The more nuanced and time-consuming project of challenging the system requires more energy, but it will also reap more rewards. Instead of offering a path to healing from noxious notions of masculinity, Peterson conditions his young male fans to further entrench themselves into it. Instead of persuading men to have compassion for themselves and others more, he is instructing them to lean into rugged individualism, fear and rigidity. Instead of embracing vulnerability, he instructs men to run away from it.
Although most of the feminist criticism around this masculinity moral panic is that it’s insulting to women, I would argue it’s just as insulting to men because it’s rooted in a deep-seated lie about men: that they have no agency over their attitudes and behaviors. Which brings me to my next point.
4 Men Are Slaves to Their Bodies and Their Nether Regions
Let’s get this out of the way right now: men and women share more commonalities than differences. The concept that we are more alike than we are different is called the Gender Similarities Hypothesis. It was coined and discovered by Janet Shibley Hyde when she performed a review of forty-six meta-analyses of peer-reviewed studies that examined sex differences. After closely studying dozens of research papers, she found that when it comes to psychological characteristics, women and men are more alike than they are different over the entire course of their lifetime.
Although she did find differences in motor performance (how far and how hard one can throw), she found almost insignificant differences in psychological traits like aggression, language ability and mathematical skills as well as assertiveness and self-esteem. Most interestingly, she found that in studies designed to suppress the importance of social norms, people were more likely to engage in the opposite way we would expect their gender to act. For example, when subjects were told their gender would not be identified in the results and wouldn’t be known by researchers, men acted in ways that were more passive while women were more aggressive, implying that social perceptions shape our behavior and heavily restrict our perceived or actual freedom to act willfully.
Hyde’s research prompted the American Psychological Association to release a statement warning against the dangers of extrapolation of biological differences. The APA, in reaction to Hyde’s research, backed up her assertion that: “The claims [of gender difference] can hurt women’s opportunities in the workplace, dissuade couples from trying to resolve conflict and communication problems, and cause unnecessary obstacles that hurt children and adolescents’ self-esteem.” The APA also argued that “studies show that one’s sex has little or no bearing on personality, cognition and leadership” and that “Mars-Venus sex differences appear to be as mythical as the Man in the Moon.”
But using biological essentialism to pigeonhole people into gendered behaviors is not new. In fact, it used to be fairly common and acceptable to assert that women’s behaviors could be explained by their hormones. Although many people
still believe that women are more emotional, hysterical and unstable because of their menstrual fluctuations, saying it publicly now causes quite the backlash. Believing in biological determinism has been around for a long time and it’s always been a popular position both inside and outside of academic circles, but the false truths that it produces are dangerous. For instance, in 2008 when Bill O’Reilly posed the outrageously sexist question of what potential downsides of having a female president could arise, his guest Marc Rudov answered, “You mean besides the PMS and the mood swings?”
Although some people still believe this, at least now it’s widely perceived as sexist to engage in that kind of dismissal of women’s behavior and agency. But if it’s unfathomable to blame a woman’s behavior on her hormones, why is it more fathomable to blame a man’s hormones for his? If we believe that women can experience hormonal fluctuations and still exert the self-control not to let it run their lives, why don’t we think the same applies to men? If we stigmatize those who use biological determinism to make assumptions about women as a class, why do we tolerate it when it happens to men? Although we’ve spent time and energy debunking a lot of the myths about women’s nature by defying stereotypes like the idea that women are not as rational or high achieving or as able to lead as men, what about the myths about men?