Men Need to Lead the Way

Both equality and better lives for men depend on it

I briefly hesitated to use an image of an older white guy for this story, because it’s really a call to all men, but the truth of the matter is, in a dominance hierarchy social system like ours, white men still have a lot of institutional power. For better or for worse, people listen to them more than they listen to other demographics.

That’s because a mere fifty years ago white men were the default citizen in the US and everyone else was some form of other, whether by law or by social custom. We’ve come a long way in that time, but the words and actions of white guys, particularly socially dominant ones, still carry a lot of cachet. With that power, comes a lot of responsibility — to other men, but also to the culture at large — although all men can certainly contribute.

A dominance hierarchy (which is what patriarchy actually is, not just a dynamic between men and women) is a pyramid-shaped social system that arose about 6 k years ago. Prior to that time, most humans lived in fairly egalitarian enclaves where personal autonomy was the primary social value.

Western individualism tends to pit each person against others in competition for resources and rewards. It includes the right to accumulate property and to use wealth to control the behavior of others. In contrast, as Tim Ingold (1999) has most explicitly emphasized, hunter-gathers’ sense of autonomy connects each person to others, in a way that does not create dependencies. Their autonomy does not include the right to accumulate property, to use power or threats to control others, or to make others indebted to oneself. It does, however, allow people to make their own day-to-day and moment-to-moment decisions about their own activities, as long as they do not violate the band’s implicit and explicit rules. For example, individual hunter-gatherers are free, on any day, to join a hunting or gathering party or to stay at camp and rest, depending on their own preference. (source)

With the rise of patriarchal dominance hierarchies, social stratification tends to be based on immutable traits, as well as a Might Makes Right ethos. Powerful, elite men control and dominate whomever they can, including less powerful men, women, and children. Rather than valuing the good of the group, individual families try to enrich and aggrandize themselves at the expense of those around them. Gender goes from being a somewhat fluid and flexible thing to a strict binary with rigid roles and norms.

Contrary to what some people might want you to believe, this isn’t a timeless dynamic — it’s an incredibly new one and is not remotely found in every culture. It is, however, the type of social system that was very solidly in place in the US until quite recently — and to a large extent, it still is. The pyramid of power is not so strictly defined any longer, and gender roles are not as rigid as they once were, but the dominance hierarchy aspect is still alive and well. This causes a lot of problems for men but also for everyone else, but we’re seeing, as the inflexibility of this system erodes, some men just don’t quite know what to do with themselves. This is a place where guys need to step up and take the lead.

We all help to co-create the society that we have and no one really gets a free pass on that. If many women didn’t uphold and support patriarchy in a wide variety of ways, it wouldn’t still exist. The things we all do and don’t do, as well as the things that we say and don’t say, all impact what our social system looks and feels like. As much as this culture values individualism, we all either uphold the status quo or we challenge it — often doing a little bit of both. But men can have a vital role in influencing both gender and racial equality, as well as how the lives of men, in general, are going, and I think they need to be doing more on that front.

Research done at Cambridge University indicates that men are more likely to listen to other men — both around issues of gender and race. They are able to present information as well as to confront inequality with much fewer negative repercussions than members of the groups in question.

Research in social psychology and political science confirms that those who are not targets of discrimination often can be more successful when addressing it. In laboratory experiments, men who confront gender discrimination were more likely to change their behavior without facing backlash (Dodd et al. Reference Dodd, Giuliano, Boutell and Moran2001). Similarly, Munger (Reference Munger2017) found that high-status whites were most successfully able to reduce racist expressions in online spaces. Both strains of research demonstrate that allies have an ability to confront inequity without facing negative social costs. (emphasis mine) Furthermore, this work suggests that to oppose prejudice, discrimination, and inequity, we must change social norms around these issues and practices. (source)

In addition, I believe that men have a critical role to play in helping other men — particularly younger ones — who may be struggling with these changes as well as the ones that we still need to bring about. This is both because guys are more likely to listen to information that is coming from other men, but also because women are still highly engaged in their own fight for full equality. As far as we’ve come in the past 50 years, sexual harassment is still ubiquitous and begins for most women in childhood, one in five women will be raped or have it attempted, and women still often have to fight to be taken seriously in professional situations — even at the highest levels. These are just of few of the places where women need to keep focusing on the things that impact their lives most directly.

It’s not that we don’t care about men and their very real problems, but frankly, we’ve got our hands full. It’s other men who must figure out how to mentor and assist the next generations, even if they haven’t yet got it all figured out themselves. The Manosphere and the Right Wing like to point a finger at women and at feminism for causing all sorts of problems for men by disrupting “traditional” norms, but if your sense of yourself as a man is predicated on having unearned power and privilege, that in itself is an issue. If you want a Stepford Wife rather than a partner and don’t want to have to compete professionally with someone for no other reason than their immutable traits, how strong are you actually? Not very, by my calculations. Many men don’t buy into this stuff, but enough still do to make it a problematic social dynamic.

This is one of the primary reasons that masculinity in this culture needs to be reimagined — because a patriarchal dominance hierarchy model has insecurity built into the operating system. If you have to always be in competition with everyone around you, including the person you are romantically involved with, for some kind of imaginary status in an invented pecking order, how happy or confident can you ever be? There’s always going to be somebody “better” than you, or somebody trying to step on you to get ahead. How can you ever be close to anyone, not even the woman in your life, under those circumstances? The patriarchal dominance hierarchy isn’t good for anyone, except maybe for a few elites at the very top of the social pyramid.

Loneliness is an epidemic in American life, but for many men, it is at crisis levels. Substance abuse, depression, and suicide are all rampant for men, and the more they adhere to outdated norms of masculinity (the Man Box), the more this is the case. Jordan Peterson and his ilk want you to believe that unfettered patriarchy is the solution, but in truth, it’s the very thing that is disempowering and even killing a lot of men.

Young men’s mental health is in a worrisome state. Their bravado masks deep insecurities, depression, and frequent thoughts of suicide. Men in the Man Box in the US and UK are statistically significantly more likely to meet a screening standard for depression than men outside the Man Box. Furthermore, all young men’s rates of suicidal ideation are troubling, with particularly high rates among men in the Man Box. (source)

Newsflash guys, women, and society at large are not going back to the 1950s, or even the 1990s, no matter how much complaining there is about that, and you are going to have to figure out how to adapt. I suggest you assist each other with that, rather than the expectation that some men seem to have that women make themselves smaller and less equal again so that guys can feel more comfortable. According to Darwin, those who are most evolutionarily fit are not the strongest or the toughest, they are the most adaptable.

Women have been reinventing themselves — in the face of continued discrimination and backlash — for more than 100 years. Nobody has given them much sympathy or assistance or empathy on a societal level, and so I think most women feel that men ought to carve out their own new place in the world themselves — even if it’s hard, even if it’s uncomfortable, even if there is some resistance to that — because, well, join the club…

And, I’ve heard some men say, “Well if women won’t put their focus on men’s problems then you’re just driving them to Peterson and Tate.” But that sounds like blackmail to me and it’s also not realistic. First off, what those guys are offering is attractive because it’s a lot easier to create scapegoats than it is to actually do the hard work of self-inventory and reflection. Boys and men started turning to the gurus of the Manosphere because they’d been asked to confront the ways that the patriarchal dominance hierarchy harms them as well as women — and they didn’t want to do it. Asking them in a more empathetic way seems unlikely to me to elicit a new result.

These guys already wanted someone to tell them they should cling to the dominance hierarchy because patriarchy is “natural”, so I don’t really buy that anything women do or don’t do truly influences their thinking all that much. In my personal experience with these types of men, a woman kindly pointing out to them the ways that patriarchy hurts them too and asking them to help create a more egalitarian system for the benefit of us all isn’t going to be taken very seriously.

It’s going to take other men changing the metrics of what masculinity looks like before guys like this are going to pay any attention and before the lives of men are going to improve in this culture. They need to hear from the men they admire that expanding or dispensing with the small acceptable box of “traditional” masculinity means more personal freedom and self-expression. In addition, they need to know that men who live in more gender-equal countries have better health, longer lifespans, and a higher level of happiness.

“As countries make greater progress towards gender equality and women are afforded the opportunity to participate more fully in in political, economic, and social life, the whole of society reaps the rewards.”

“Even high-income countries — where substantial progress has been made to address gender inequalities in recent years — investing in gender equality may still benefit life expectancy, particularly for men. This study confirmed what we had already seen for countries in the EU using a different index, reinforcing the validity of our findings.” (source)

I recently read Jackson Katz’s book The Macho Paradox, and I think he’s got some good ideas about trying to reach high-visibility men (such as athletes, and other guys that men tend to look up to) and enlisting them in this work as a way of demonstrating leadership. For me, that’s the direction that we need to concentrate on. Men need to connect with and provide support for other guys in adapting to a culture where gender roles are now functionally irrelevant and where the “traditional” societal hierarchy gets flattened more with each passing year.

As Katz and many others have pointed out, the things that women face as far as safety, as far as discrimination, and sexual violence go — those aren’t actually women’s issues — because they are problems that are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men acting on scripts of masculinity as it is constructed in our culture. And, those are the huge problems that they are in large part because the men who don’t do those things nonetheless still uphold or turn a blind eye in a system that allows for them. These are, in fact, men’s issues and men need to take the lead in shifting that.

We have the culture that we allow for and accept. In some places, rape functionally does not exist, because it is not tolerated and it’s seen as a very unmasculine thing to do. Conversely, in dominance hierarchy cultures, rape may not be condoned, but it is still a normalized part of how the system operates.

“Rape may be a way of proving one’s manhood, an important concern for adolescent males.” In rape cultures, dominance and control over women become aspects of achieving and experiencing masculinity, and rape, while not condoned, becomes part of the culture at large.

And that’s only one example of how our culture’s norms and values need to change to benefit us all. We really need all men, not just the ones with a lot of social power, to take on reinventing masculinity to be less dominance oriented and restrictive. After all, most violence against men is also perpetrated by men. We need men to champion equality and to become leaders in helping other guys feel confident and empowered around doing that.

We need women to support this reinvention and to grapple with any place where they have internalized The Man Box as the only appropriate way for guys to behave. There’s certainly plenty of work for women to do on themselves, but aside from working at being good human beings, we can’t change the culture to make it better for men. You guys are going to have to do that — from the inside out. Men aren’t the problem, but masculinity, as it is currently constructed, comes with a lot of issues that need your attention.

The Man Box is an enormously violent place, with negative repercussions for young men themselves, for young women, and for others in their lives. Men in the Man Box in the US and UK are as much as six or seven times more likely to report having perpetrated acts of online or physical bullying against male peers than men outside the Man Box. Men in the Man Box in Mexico are also three times more likely than their peers outside the Man Box to report having perpetrated sexual harassment. In the US and UK, men in the Man Box are six times more likely to report perpetrating sexual harassment. (source)

The Equimundo survey of men in the US, UK, and Mexico did find that overall, young men somewhat distance themselves from the Man Box rules, but they don’t disavow them outright. “Some men may be able to reject restrictive and negative social pressures related to masculinity, but a great many embrace these pressures and the version of manhood that they promote.”

It’s going to take a plurality of men who are serious about creating a healthier culture for that to gain real momentum — for the benefit of men, and for us all. Bullying, sexual violence, physical violence as a way to maintain control or solve problems, emotional isolation — these are all functions of a dominance hierarchy culture. They are not “human nature” and they are not inevitable.

We have the culture that we allow for and tolerate. Let’s get serious about doing better on that front. We need men to lead the way.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2023