by Liz Plank
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
—EDMUND BURKE
13 Compassion As the Antidote to Hate
Sammy Rangel joined his first gang when he was 11 years old. He survived a race riot at a maximum-security prison and to this day holds the record as the most violent inmate in the state of Wisconsin. Suffice it to say Sammy is not who you’d expect to be leading one of the most prominent peace and reconciliation organizations in the United States. The organization Life After Hate, which he co-founded with several ex–white supremacists, has helped rehabilitate some of the most dangerous perpetrators of extremist hate across America and across the world.
Sammy spent most of his life trying to cope with his own pain. One of his earliest memories is his uncle raping him immediately after raping his older sister. He was three years old. Sammy wasn’t fed very often. His mother deprived him of sleep, making him sleep on the floor at the bottom of her bed, preventing him from going to the bathroom. He says that when he would inevitably end up relieving himself, she would take his soiled underwear and forcibly thrust it in his mouth. If he would start to gag or throw up, she would beat him. In an attempt to escape the harrowing trauma, Sammy abandoned his family. “I was only 11 when I ran away, and I made a vow that I would never allow myself to be hurt that way again,” he said. “You go through these crazy steps, any length to cover up any signs of weakness, any signs of fear, you put the best parts of yourself away.”
Sammy described joining a gang the same way someone would describe falling in love. Although it was connected with pain and trauma, he said that being part of the gang felt like the acceptance and care he had been so desperate to find but had never received. For the very first time in his life, he felt like someone was looking out for him. Members of his gang would ensure his survival, come and check up on him, even sometimes in the middle of the night, to make sure he was safe. “I finally had people that seemed to care,” Sammy said. Because he depended on them for safety, he quickly began to feel indebted to them. Like any abusive relationship, it’s designed to trap its victim into a state of codependency. Destructiveness became the easiest way to cover up his trauma. “The violence is prevalent because it’s the main language we know how to speak out pain through,” Sammy said. “The only outlet you have is to speak to violence. You spend your whole life sending a message: you can’t harm me. It was to hide my brokenness, it was to hide my vulnerabilities. No one knew that my behaviors were symptoms.”
Although Sammy has firsthand experience about what can lead a man to fall into the cycle of organized violent crime, he also has a deep understanding of what a man can get out of it. For him, it had come from the most unexpected place: the entirely platonic and unconditional love of another man. “When you create defenses, you’re prepared for certain kinds of attacks,” he said. “But the attack you’re not waiting for is the one that comes from empathy and compassion.” That dose of empathy came when Sammy was at his lowest point, from a man named George, a prison case worker. At this point, Sammy was in a triple-max prison, in the basement of the segregation unit, in solitary confinement, where the only physical human contact he could recall was guards handcuffing, disciplining or force-feeding him. His cell was kept behind three different kinds of hard steel walls, with a bright flickering neon light that was turned on twenty-four hours a day. Given Sammy’s atrocious living conditions, he was convinced nothing could shock him anymore. But George managed to stun Sammy by doing this one simple thing: knocking. Before entering each of the three steel layers of his cell, he, to Sammy’s surprise, asked if he could come in first. “That subtle feature started to change my life,” Sammy said.
Being met with George’s compassion was so unsettling at first that Sammy accused him of brainwashing him. Sammy told me that he started feeling something that had become foreign to him: guilt. While he knew George disapproved of his actions, he did something unique that no one else in Sammy’s life had done: he dismissed what Sammy did, not who Sammy was. “No matter what you do, no matter what you’ve done, I won’t stop loving you,” George told Sammy while he was still incarcerated. “If it wasn’t for George,” Sammy’s voice cracked, “I can wholeheartedly say I wouldn’t be here today.”
Sammy’s journey crystalized how preventable men’s individual and systemic acts of violence can be. “Based on my experience, men are primarily responsible for well above 95 percent of the violence that happens in the U.S.,” Sammy said. But instead of chalking it up as a biological inevitability for men, Sammy described it as a form of addiction. “I grew up in gangs, and the mentality, the lack of empathy, the hatred, the focus of energy and time, a lot of it is similar with addiction.” Sammy said that gang members don’t even need drugs to get high. “They can become addicted to a lifestyle. It doesn’t require substance, because you’re triggering certain moods and reactions in the body that are highly addictive.” Joining a gang is an individual act, but when you start looking closely, there are collective similarities.
But it’s worth asking, if we saw men’s violent behavior as a predictable and treatable chronic condition, could we be better at tackling it? That’s what Adam Baird, a research fellow at the Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations at Coventry University, concluded when he conducted research and interviews with past gang members of several gangs in Latin America and the Caribbean. In his work, he notes that 90 percent of global deaths don’t occur in war zones, which means that even making a small dent in the number of men who join extremist and organized gangs could fundamentally reduce the amount of violence across the world. Baird argues that a person’s likelihood of joining organized violence is intrinsically tied to a desire to perform ideal forms of masculinities. He calls gangs an “aspirational site” for many young, poor and marginalized men because it becomes the way they can achieve and perform the economic power and independence they are denied by poverty. When a culture assigns masculine value to violence, it becomes a proxy through which men who become estranged from normative paths to employment and status in their families or communities earn power. That’s why Baird describes gangs as a literal “tool to contest emasculation.”
The logic that underpins men’s participation in gangs can often help us understand why they join terrorist groups, and yet when policy makers take the weight of masculinity scripts seriously, it’s seen as outlandish. For instance, when the Trump administration announced an investment of $600,000 into research to “explore gender identities of boys and men in Kenya and how terrorist organizations were exploiting the pressures on Kenyan men ‘to be tough, heterosexual, aggressive, unemotional, and achieving’ to recruit them for radicalization,” conservative commentator David Webb called for a government shutdown over it. Elizabeth Harrington, a writer with the Washington Free Beacon, criticized the program for making mention of gender but not “radical ideology,” as if toxic masculinity wasn’t one, too.
There’s an ease, an almost irresistible comfort, in erroneously assigning certain barbaric characteristics to entire ethnic groups and religions as a result of repeated tragedies or terrorist acts. It’s still incredibly common for politicians and public figures to wrongly blame all Muslims for individual acts of terror. President Trump’s unconstitutional travel ban barring travel from five Muslim-majority countries is just one example. His then national security advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, even once explicitly described Islam as “a vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people” that “needed to be excised,” when the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and never commit acts of terror. But it’s worth asking: if we started calling toxic masculinity a religion, would we start paying attention to it? If we started seeing idealized masculinity as a radical ideology rather than inevitable, would we approach it differently?
Throughout this book I’ve argued that isolation can lead to personal hardship and poor physical and mental health for men, but what often goes unnoticed is that this also makes men m
ore vulnerable to predators who capitalize on that poor emotional integration to recruit them for violence. The rise of groups like the alt-right, the Proud Boys, neo-Nazi groups and even ISIS takes advantage of the vulnerability that outdated masculinity beliefs impart on the modern man. Rarely discussed is how radicalization explicitly relies on men’s unique emotional isolation for recruitment. The more I researched, the closer I came to the conclusion I already knew, that “toxic masculinity” is not just a phrase that feminists use—it’s a war tactic.
When we hear foreign policy experts talk about ISIS, it’s common to hear them obfuscate an obvious fact: that these groups are largely led by and made up of only one gender—men. If suddenly the vast majority of terrorists were female, you bet we’d be discussing their gender. There would be entire taskforces dedicated to targeting vulnerable women and rigorous research into trying to understand why. But for some reason when it comes to the link between men and terrorism, gender is completely dismissed. Of course, almost every single magazine has run its own tantalizing “women of ISIS” cover story when the truth is that the vast majority of terrorists have one thing in common: they’re primarily men. Although politicians focus on finding (often faulty) consistency in the religion or the ethnicity of terrorists, very few pay attention to the glaring commonality of their identity as men. Politicians single out countries, ban specific religions and declare arbitrary danger zones, when in fact they could probably more effectively clamp down on terrorism if they just banned men. This would be a ridiculous solution! But if we are so determined to solve a systemic and severe problem like terrorism that countries are spending millions on its prevention, it’s curious that so little attention is paid to the way that men are more vulnerable to recruitment. Despite politicians and pundits debating whether Islam makes you more violent, the gender of terrorists is rarely raised, discussed or politicized while their ethnicity or religion is fair game. It’s curious that political leaders and pundits are quicker to blame an entire religion for a problem (especially since it’s factually incorrect) than recognize that statistically, gender is a bigger determinant of terrorism than one’s religion. Why is it so easy to ignore one of the most glaring, consistent problems in our society?
One of the first groups of people who would be destabilized if we started to challenge faulty definitions of masculinity would be ISIS, because they rely so heavily on outdated models of what it means to be a man to lure vulnerable men into their ranks. In fact, the more experts I spoke to, the clearer it became that the biggest tool for recruitment is tapping into male feelings. “Emotional predation is used to recruit individuals […] it’s all about getting the person to feel like they are a part of a community,” Alejandro J. Beutel, a researcher for Countering Violent Extremism at the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, told me. As one of the only experts who studies the intersection of terrorism and gender, he warns how technological advances have not only exacerbated propaganda but also have made recruitment easier, making it much more emotional and personal. “Propaganda is to get people curious,” he said, “but when they start talking to recruiters, they stay for the sense of community.” When I asked Beutel what was the most common trait that could predict whether someone falls prey to extremist violence recruitment, he said two words: “emotional pliability.”
A lot of these men who end up in organized groups aren’t inherently bad to begin with, but they are easily influenced, through emotional tactics that promise access to high-status masculinity, to commit horrible acts of violence. Beutel told me that this is precisely why rehabilitation for terrorist recruits often starts with redefining their masculinity before anything else. “We can’t ignore the fact that toxic masculinity is used as a pain point for malicious actors seeking the recruitment of people for violence,” he said. To demonstrate how pivotal gender identity is in not only recruiting but maintaining ISIS members, he pointed to the work of Usman Raja, an ex–cage fighter who now leads a deradicalization program for ISIS recruits in the UK. Beutel explained that Raja is known for beginning every session with a new group of ISIS recruits the exact same way: by breaking down their assumptions about what it means to be a man. Once Raja challenges the expression of manhood through violence and destruction, the healing process for these men can begin.
While Neo-Nazis and ISIS groups have pretty dissimilar goals, the tools they use to recruit men to commit mass acts of violence are strikingly similar. “When you look at a group like ISIS or a white supremacist group, notions of masculinity are central to the propaganda that’s out there,” Beutel told me. During our conversation, he talked about one common thread: all these groups portray men as protectors of their communities, and justify violence through that messaging. Violence can easily be explained away if you’re doing it for the common good. “Beheadings are a presentation of an emasculation of the state,” he explained. Beutel cited the graphic murder of American journalist James Foley by ISIS. His captors made him say, in essence, “The US state government could not protect me,” before laying him down and slaughtering him. “The power dynamics that are trying to be communicated is emasculation and dehumanization,” Beutel said. “The fear of an entire body politic is projected on that victim.” The link Beutel draws between masculine gender socialization and terrorism recruitment is supported by research performed by law professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin. In an essay for the anthology Using Human Rights to Counter Terrorism, titled “The complexity and challenges of addressing the conditions conducive to terrorism,” she writes that ISIS will use “hyper-masculine images to portray its fighters” to lure them. She also notes that ISIS promises “access to sexual gratification, marriage and guaranteed income as a reward for the glory of fighting.” She describes it as an explicit strategy to “attract marginalized men whose capacity to access any similar social capital or status in their own communities will be extremely limited.” Christiana Spens, a PhD candidate in international relations at the University of St. Andrews, also finds that public beheadings conducted by ISIS were one of the first direct, purposeful and gross acts the group used to define their reign of terror on a world stage. She argues that it’s hard not to interpret these as public performances of hypermasculinity against the United States. Spens describes the war of images between ISIS and the United States as a form of masculine peacocking, the images of beheadings as a direct response to grueling dehumanizing and bloody images of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein’s or Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi’s capture in Western papers. Even Osama bin Laden framed Al Qaeda’s war on the West as a fight against “the weakness, feebleness and cowardliness of the US soldiers.” In a 1998 interview with Al Jazeera, the mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attack said that Western leaders “have been deprived of their manhood. And they think that the people are women.” So it’s not just individual men who reassert their masculine identity through acts of violence; the scale can be much wider.
When idealized masculinity scripts go unchallenged, emasculation doesn’t just become a tool of the state against foreign enemies, it can become a weapon the state uses against its own people. One example of this took place during the unsuccessful 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, where an anti-government protester, Majid Tavakoli, was kidnapped—the photo of him wearing a woman’s full-body-covering veil, the chador—was published by news agencies. Although the government insisted that he had used the women’s dress to go undercover and avoid arrest, figureheads of the revolution argued that the photo had been doctored by pro-government forces in an attempt to emasculate him, to stagnate the movement he was leading. One Iranian blogger described it as a way “to humiliate [Tavakoli, using] an old practice by the government to prove to the public that the opposition leaders are ‘less than men,’ lacking courage and bravery.” Iranian men reacted to the event within hours, flooding the internet with pictures of themselves sporting women’s veils to counter the attempt at his degradation.
Even within
the United State’s borders, toxic masculinity becomes the prism through which national security strategies are evaluated and analyzed. Conservative figures like Sarah Palin played the part of the opposing party while Obama was in power, implying that he wasn’t man enough to combat terrorism because of stereotypical feminine characteristics like “mom jeans.” New York Times columnist David Brooks pegged the former president’s policies on his lack of masculinity. “Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a—I’ll say it crudely—manhood problem in the Middle East,” he said on Meet the Press in 2014. “Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad or somebody like Putin?” Putin, who of course, proved his masculinity by staging a shirtless-in-Siberia photo shoot where he does very manly things like ride a horse and kill fish. During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump implied that Obama’s lack of masculine showmanship meant he was himself a terrorist. “We’re led by a man who either is not tough, not smart or has something else in mind,” he said on Fox and Friends. Trump later went so far as to call President Obama the founder of ISIS, taking his toxic masculinity to a whole new level by combining it with a healthy dose of racism, the same he trafficked in when he accused the first black president of not being born in the United States. And who can forget President Trump’s attempt at emasculating North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by saying his nuclear button was “much bigger” than his, adding “And my button works!” to make his metaphor with impotence crystal clear and the most on-the-nose as possible.