The Little #MeToo Book for Men

by Mark Greene

  Man box culture is deeply ingrained in us because it begins exerting its influence in the days after we are born. As little boys we begin suppressing our own naturally occurring capacities for emotional and relational connection, thus setting us on a path for a lifetime of isolation. The damage is done before we are even old enough to understand what is happening.

  The list of central relational capacities that man box culture suppresses includes empathy. The suppression of boys’ and men’s empathy is no accident. It is the suppression of empathy that makes a culture of ruthless competition, bullying and codified inequality possible. It is in the absence of empathy that men fail to see women’s equality and many other social issues for what they are: simple and easily enacted moral imperatives.

  It is remarkable that in spite of our man box culture, many men continue to fight for connection, community and equality in the world. But this happens in spite of everything man box culture does to us. Imagine a world where we encourage every boy’s relational intelligence instead of suppressing it. Imagine a world without the man box.

  5 /THE MAN BOX

  I have to give the man box its due. This particular trap we have collectively created? It is a truly nasty piece of work. Man box culture enforces a short, clear set of rules for being a “real man”:

  “Real men” don’t show our emotions.

  “Real men” are heterosexual, hyper-masculine, and sexually dominant.

  “Real men” never ask for help.

  “Real men” always have the last word.

  “Real men” are providers, never caregivers.

  “Real men” are economically secure.

  “Real men” are physically and emotionally tough.

  “Real men” are sports focused.

  The ways in which we are expected to prove our manhood are not about who we are, but about what we do: by what we earn, the points we score, who we bed, how we exercise, when we dominate, succeed, command, lead, fix and control.

  In a world where manhood is based on what we do instead of who we are, men are reduced to the last paycheck we cashed, or the last woman we bedded, or the last ugly, wrenching pain we silently endured. This is the genius of the man box. Our only choice is to keep going, pushing towards an end zone that recedes before us, ever a few more yards away. Ever a few more runs into the bruising defensive line, spread out before us, other men, their eyes fixed on some distant goalposts we can never see.

  In her book, When Boys Become Boys, Dr. Judy Chu of Stanford University documents how our sons are taught to hide their early capacity for being emotionally perceptive, articulate, and responsive. Starting in preschool, our young sons learn to align their behaviors with “the emotionally disconnected stereotype our culture projects onto them.”

  Chu writes, “Boys are taught to hide vulnerable emotions like sadness, fear, and pain, which imply weakness and are stereotypically associated with femininity.”

  In her book, Deep Secrets, New York University professor and researcher Niobe Way shares the results from her years of research interviewing adolescent boys about their closest friendships. Way’s research shows how our sons’ joy in friendship and connection slowly atrophies over time, hammered away at by the message that needing or wanting close friendships is “childish, girly, or gay.”

  In relation to the #MeToo movement, it is crucial that we acknowledge two points here:

  Boys are taught that their desire for close friendships is “girly”

  Boys are taught that “girly” is less.

  In what is clearly representative of the isolating impact of man box culture, boys entering late adolescence are shamed and bullied into seeing their close authentic connection with their best friend as weak (feminine). Accordingly, they slowly disengage from their closest friendships. It is at this time that suicide rates for boys rise, becoming four times the rate for girls (Way, 2011).

  We tell boys to “Man up.” We tell boys, “Don’t be a sissy.” But what we’re really communicating is “Don’t be female, because female is less.” Wrongly gendering the universal capacity for human connection as feminine and then coaching boys to see feminine as less is how we block our sons from the trial and error process of growing their powerful relational capacities, leading to a lifetime of isolation.

  At a time when boys should be expressing and constructing their identities in more diverse, grounded, and authentic ways, they are brutally conditioned to suppress authentic expression and instead cleave closely to the expression of male privilege as identity. And so, men brag about hook-up sex and ghosting women, seeking to bond via the uniformly degrading and contemptuous narratives of locker-room talk.

  The result? Boys are bullied and shamed into being half anti-women and half anti-self, suppressing any authentic expression of who they are, even as they compete to parade their male privilege. The impact of women’s progress toward equality on these men’s core sense of identity cannot be underestimated. It is because women’s equality is antithetical to how man box culture constructs identity that some men are alarmed and angered by women’s progress, engaged in a fierce battle to undo the advances women have made.

  Meanwhile, because the need for close friendships is shamed in boys and men, we settle for friendships of proximity, surface-level relationships at our workplace, at the PTA or the gym. These friendships are interchangeable. If our kids move to a new school we drop that set of friendships and pick up the new ones. “What difference does it make? They all work the same. Just talk sports, avoid anything real.”

  Should men momentarily fail to conform to any of the rules of the man box, we are quickly policed to get back in line. What may begin for us as external policing eventually becomes our internal voice. “I need to make more money. I’m a pussy for feeling unsure of myself. I’m too slow, too fat, too weak.”

  The low-level anxiety this internal policing creates is so consistent it becomes baseline for us because in man box culture we can never have enough success, confidence or security. There will never be enough of anything. Maybe getting more money or sex will help. And back on the wheel we go.

  For the record, man box culture is not traditional masculinity. The two are not equivalent. The man box refers to the enforcement of traditional masculinity. This is a crucial distinction. For some men, traditional masculinity is a good fit. Man box culture rears its ugly head when traditional manhood is forced on the millions of men for whom it is not a good fit, seeking to stamp out the vast universe of wider ranging masculinities.

  For the courageous men who push back against man box culture, doing manhood differently can get them ostracized, dumped, shamed, fired, beaten or murdered. And even when we try to conform to the man box, there remain thousands of ways to falter, to fail, to miss a step.

  Man box culture is not designed to let men succeed, to let us win. It is designed to keep men policing, and bullying, and ultimately, fearing each other.

  6 /ANGRY VOICES

  As men age in the man box, we realize with growing anxiety that we can’t keep proving our manhood forever. Maybe the paychecks aren’t coming, or our knees are failing, or the one-liners aren’t working, or whatever. Eventually, the system of manhood we bought into dumps us by the side of the road and barrels on, fueled by a new generation of younger, more hungry men; new dogs to chase the rabbit, more hamsters on the wheel.

  Our winner-take-all man box culture eventually delivers on its promise. It has always told us what it is. Maybe we weren’t listening? A few people at the top win, the rest get erased.

  And it’s only getting worse. A central component of 1950s America was a booming post-war economy and job security for men (not women), which underpinned for millions of working men the central man box role of being a provider. But the dog-eat-dog ethos of the man box ultimately led to an America where off-shoring jobs, short selling sub-prime mortgages, and creating predatory healthcare business models are just examples of someone doing the man box right. This means millions of m
en have been robbed of our primary role as providers within the very model of manhood that makes “providing” a central marker of our success. The result? Unemployment and economic hardship is driving alarming rates of suicide among older working-age men.

  And so, as the curtain falls, aging American men are ditched, isolated and disconnected, left to express the only emotion we have ever been granted permission to express: anger. And true to our man box training, we attempt to direct our anger at anyone other than ourselves.

  To admit we have been tricked would go against every rule of man box culture. It would require that we acknowledge our own agency in all of this. It would require we admit that our steadfast reliance on dominance and certainty, our obsession with America’s cult of bootstrap individualism, has ultimately failed us. It would require a reassessment of our priorities, our beliefs and our view of others. Most of all, it would require self-reflection, a capacity we were never taught by a culture of manhood that does not care who we are. And when our anger ultimately turns back on ourselves, men commit suicide in ever growing numbers because we don’t have a robust community of men and women we can turn to in a crisis.

  How have men been cheated? We look up one day, and we discover we have been robbed of the authentic relationships and robust community that for hundreds of thousands of years, literally from the dawn of humankind, have given human beings their purpose and meaning. Instead, we sit in our gated communities before our big screen TVs and we are alone, distrustful of others, and fearful of anyone different, anyone who is not us. We have been bullied by the man box into swapping the fundamental joy of human connection for an empty, isolating, alpha male pecking order. We become like dogs chained up alone in the back of the yard, howling and crazy.

  The constant drumbeat of male rage that floods our media and surges up in our national politics is rooted in the collective self-alienation and social isolation that defines our man box culture of manhood. The result for men is epidemic levels of divorce, depression, addiction, suicide, violence, and mass shootings.

  We got cheated. Yes, we did. And everyone else is paying the price.

  7 /BILLY THE BULLY

  Woke Daddy blogger Ludo Gabriele published a blog post titled, “The Sordid (Yet Insightful) Tale of a Panic Attack.” It’s a glimpse into one man’s collapse into terror. It implores us to look more closely at how the man box operates for men in our culture. Even woke men. Even me.

  The internalized voice of the cop-in-our-head that Ludo describes (he calls him Billy the Bully) generates the low-level anxiety that many men feel daily as we look over our shoulder, watching to see if we’re being judged, about to be called out. “What are you, a sissy? What are you, a pussy?,” and so on.

  When the constant stress and fear of being policed within the man box gets to be too much, when booze or drugs or sex won’t calm the anxiety any more, the cop-in-our-head offers us a “get out of jail free card,” an instant pass to the front of the line. We can simply vent our anxiety, by shaming and policing someone else. Bully a skinny kid. Beat up a queer man. Ghost a woman. The abusive, locker-room talk component of the man box is its most insidious component. In one simple act, we both enforce man box culture and reinforce in our own minds that we deserve to be next if we fail to conform adequately.

  Sooner or later, this ugly loop of policing gets located entirely within ourselves. Other men don’t even have to call us out anymore. The cop-in-our-head, Billy the Bully, reminds us daily that we can fail at any moment, that we are being watched. To prove to Billy we are with the program, we batter our more connecting, joyful human sides into submission. “See, Billy? I showed him.”

  And because the man box trains us to suppress our need for human connection and authentic male friendships, we have lost the central mechanism by which we can ask for support, by which we can move past our challenges and grow. We have our authentic connection in the world beaten out of us, leaving us alone in the dark with Billy the Bully.

  And Billy wants us dead.

  8 /EPIDEMIC OF ISOLATION

  A 2010 AARP study estimates that one in three Americans aged 45 and older (that’s 42 million people) are chronically lonely, up from one in five Americans ten years before. Cigna released a 2018 study, which shows that “Nearly half of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone.” The Cigna study goes on to say, “Generation Z (adults ages 18–22) is the loneliest generation and claims to be in worse health than older generations.”

  Our isolating man box culture is a central contributor to our epidemic of loneliness, and loneliness is a killer. Chronic loneliness is as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking, increasing the likelihood of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, depression, and a raft of other illnesses. Cancer metastasizes faster in lonely people. For millions of men, loneliness is killing us before our time.

  Jay Sefton, a licensed mental health counselor, recently made the following observation regarding opiate addiction on the website, Medium:

  “The culture of male suppression is often a key underlying issue for men struggling with addiction. I see it frequently in my practice and it's true in my own battle with alcoholism. The pressure to adhere to cultural roles and scripts for males in our society is so pervasive that we generally don't notice it running in the background.

  It's like the quiet that descends during a power outage — we're not aware of how loud ambient electricity is until it is gone. Perhaps someone is treated for an injury and didn't realize the psychological pain that was present until the pain medication relieved it. Once we finally get relief, we never want the pain back again. Unfortunately, drugs and alcohol always fail in the long run to deliver on the promise of removing pain caused by the toxic elements of our culture. We must instead rely on radical compassion and love to offer real healing.”

  9 /METOO

  Lisa Hickey, the publisher and CEO of the Good Men Project has a simple point to make about #MeToo.

  The #MeToo campaign was originally created in 2007 by activist Tarana Burke in response to stories of sexual assault she was hearing from girls and women. #MeToo had a huge upsurge in prominence on October 15, 2017, when the actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “If you have been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ in response to this tweet.”

  The resulting outpouring of #MeToo stories exploded across social media, eventually numbering in the millions. For Hickey, the singular intention of Milano’s tweet was fulfilled — demonstrating the scale of the problem.

  #MeToo is about witnessing and solidarity among victims of sexual harassment, abuse, assault or rape. Any person who takes issue with #MeToo is taking issue, first and foremost, with people saying “Yes, this happened to me, too.”

  Now, take a look at this:

  While men are often victims of sexual assault and rape, for this discussion we will be talking about how our dominant culture of manhood leaves women vulnerable to sexual assault. And how we, as men, can change this.

  In 2012, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control report revealed that nearly 1 in 5 (18.3%) of women reported experiencing rape at some time in their lives.

  Based on the current U.S. female population of 133 million women, this means that twenty-nine million women are rape survivors.

  Twenty-nine million in the U.S. alone. Globally, that number is much higher.

  There are some men who will insist that these numbers are inflated. Some among us actually wish to debate how many millions of rapes are actually taking place. Is it actually twenty million? Ten million? What kind of culture of manhood is capable of hosting a debate on rape framed in terms of how many millions are actually being raped, instead of how to stop it?

  Imagine ten women you know personally. Statistically, two of them are likely to be rape survivors. Which two? We don’t know, do we? Now imagine your child’s or any child’s classroom. Picture any ten of those little girls. Which two of them will be rape survivors? Are we there, yet? Are we feeling a
little sick?

  Because this is the place men need to get to on the question of #MeToo.

  As catastrophic as many of the concepts are on the Sexual Assault Pyramid, the word men should also pay attention to is at the bottom right. We need to pay attention to the word normalization, for it is here that men’s agency for creating powerful change lies.

  While the actions at the top of the pyramid would be instantly opposed by most all of us, the actions at the bottom of the pyramid, actions like locker-room talk or catcalling, take place publicly, often without comment from those of us who are within earshot.

  When a man at the office says to a group of men around him, “She has a real nice ass,” it’s important to understand this kind of public statement for what it is, for the function it serves in our culture.

  Of course, good guys like us are rolling our eyes or walking away thinking, “Some guys are jerks and will say stuff about women, but what the hell, I’m not going to get into it.” And in our silence, we allow to remain in place the ongoing assertion that the degradation of women is just part of manhood. “Some men are just that way.”

  A while back, a guy posted this on my Facebook feed: “Locker-room talk is just that. It is all talk and does not make you a predator.” The idea being, that locker-room talk is harmless. It’s just what men do.

  Engaging in locker-room talk doesn’t make us predators, but it most certainly perpetuates a culture in which predators can hide. The term “locker-room talk” is literally designed to grant permission, even encourage to men to speak in this way, as if locker rooms, are somehow magical man-only spaces. No space exists that does not have an impact on women’s lives. Our words go with us, change us, inform what we do next.