The Relational Discursive Loop is made up of three spaces, utterances/interactions, rules/stories, and social structures/systems. The interplay of these spaces is moderated by other intersectional factors. Among them, who is talking to whom; when where and how the conversation is taking place; how each person is listening; where their gaze is in relation to these spaces; also, how and where power is being located by the participants and the larger systems we all exist in (company, culture, nation, etc.). Such larger systems of power are embodied and enacted by the players in any conversation in both spoken and unspoken ways.

While utterances/interactions are clearly present and therefore “visible” in every conversation, rules/stories and structures/systems exert a very powerful influence on how conversations play out. When they go unacknowledged, they become the source of many of our challenges when we try to engage in workplace conversations.

The Relational Discursive Loop reminds us how rules/stories and, even more so, social structures/systems that can seem invisible, still exist in our daily conversations. The Relational Discursive Loop invites us to understand that if we are to grow anti-oppression, diversity, equity, and inclusion , we must better track, acknowledge, and navigate these three spaces equally and with much greater transparency.

The Relational Discursive Loop is made up of:

1. the utterances/interactions by which we relate (words, gestures, tone, actions) and in interactions we co-create understandings,

2. the spoken and unspoken rules/stories that come into being from larger social systems, and

3. the social structures/systems that sustain our social agreements.

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But while the Economist reported the “serious psychological distress” we men feel when our wives take over our breadwinner status, the Economist is less inclined to explore the systems and structures which enforce that distress. So, I’ll just take a moment and do so. Because honestly, it’s not all that big of a mystery

For generations, men have leveraged holding economic power over our wives as a way to insure we don’t have to be accountable/equitable in our dealings with them. It is a pattern reflected in the working world as well.

When we have the economic upper hand, men might choose to be equitable, but such equity can be withdrawn on a case by case basis. We might use offering such equity to claim moral validation for something (equity) which should be baseline.

That all goes away when we earn less than our wive. Men’s resulting mental distress is the distress we feel when we are forced to be accountable to women. When we’re forced to fight for our own right to equity having no longer any economic leverage to rely on.  When the shoe is on the proverbial other foot.

Patriarchal systems fail to teach men how to show up in power hierarchies as anything but fearful when our status is reduced. Of course men feel distress when we make less money than our wives. We set it up to work that way.

Until we do our work to break out of rigid notions of patriarchal masculinity we won’t be allowed to develop our relational capacities. We’ll continue to be blocked from recognizing and living into the much wider range of values and validation we are deserving of as human beings.

But here’s the part you don’t hear talked about much. The more I research incels, the more I realize they are not so far removed from the rest of us. The incel worldview arises from the roots of the same tree, our larger culture of masculinity, where all our ideas about how to be a man originate. Incels may exist on that limb “over there” but the idea that the culture of masculinity that created us is also capable of creating them should be deeply troubling to any man reading this.

Incels declare their anger towards “Stacys,” the idealized and objectified women they want but can’t have because idealized men called “Chads” get all the best partners for themselves. They see hypergamy as “imprinted on our DNA” and playing out in modern society as women pass them over for men of “higher value.” In order to validate their world view, incels must steadfastly refuse to acknowledge men’s capacities for healing, connection, growth, empathy, rich emotional expression and, yes, romantic love. They must also view “higher value men” from the narrow and restrictive frame of dominance-based man box culture.

How Incels and other masculinity extremists construct language is quite telling. Incels talk about “higher value men” and women “controlling the sexual marketplace,” language choices which place the miraculous diversity of sexual intimacy firmly in the realm of the transactional. This should come as no surprise, given that Man Box culture prioritizes roles over relationships and values power created over others vs. power created with others. The cold mechanics of transactions are the man box model for relating to women. “I’ll give you what you want if you’ll give me sex,” thus, bypassing the relational ways of being from which authentic and lasting intimacy, love and sex naturally emerge.

Man box love, ya’ll.

Masculinity Extremists
So-called Men Rights Activists, (MRA’s) Men Going Their Own Way, (MGTOWs) and incels represent the best-known incarnations of extremist masculinity,. I coin this term, along with its inverse, masculinity extremists, in order to mark Incels’, MRAs’ and MGTOWs’ positionality on the outer edges of our larger masculinity continuum. They, like the rest of us, grew up in our bullying Man Box culture. Man Box culture is the context in which boys and men are relationally traumatized, cut off from connection, leading some percentage to adopt masculinity extremists’ violent views of male victimhood.

There is a direct cause and effect between how Man Box culture polices and bullies boys and the resulting male victimhood that underpins violent extremist masculinity. The damage we do to our little sons can be summed up by these two critical factors: 1) We shame and bully boys out of authentic emotional expression and relational connection. 2) We do this by denigrating the feminine.

When we police young boys to suppress the expression of their full range of emotions and “man up,” we do so by saying, “What are you, a girl?” or “What are you, gay?” In this way, we wrongly gender universal human relational capacities for expression as feminine and then hammer away at boys with the message that female is less. By the time they reach adolescence, boys have heard messages denigrating their supposedly feminine need for expression and connection dozens of times a day. Eventually, they give up their close friendships in order not to be “a little kid, girly or gay” (Way, Deep Secrets, 2011.) This leads to a lifetime of anxiety, anger and isolation. And because the denigration of the feminine is central to how we police boys into isolation, many of us look right past decades of brutal bullying at the hands of other boys and men and instead blame women, especially feminist women, for our challenges.

It’s a blind spot of startling proportions, wherein men avoid unpacking ongoing brutality and bullying by other men, but become enraged when women refuse to accept this bullying as well. There is a massive cognitive dissonance in this moment. Women’s rejection of dominance based masculinity, highlights men’s refusal to challenge it. We see our own histories of victimhood as perpetrated by other boys and men laid out before us, and unable to face that trauma and shame, we instead attack the messenger, feminism.

As long as our default culture of manhood is dominance based masculinity, every generation of boys will continue to struggle, expressing their masculinity in dangerous and unhealthy ways. Our little sons and grandsons are at risk for the same disaffected, lonely lives, resulting in the kind of anger and rage that makes them susceptible to extremism of all kinds.

Incels, MRAs and MGTOWs are the canaries in the coal mine of our larger dominance-based culture of masculinity. The distorted rationalizions of Incel victimhood are darkly familiar to many of us. Masculinity extremists’ rage towards women is a by product of our larger collective unwillingness to unpack the isolating trauma inflicted on us by Man Box culture. Too easily, scapegoating voices whisper in the back of all our minds, “Women have all the advantages now. The world isn’t fair to men,” and so on. At some point in our lives most men, including myself, have scapegoated women in order not to have to unpack and deal with the trauma we have been subjected to by other boys and men. “Why won’t you have sex with me?” is a demand to sooth what we as men refuse to directly address, the broken isolated self of modern man box manhood.

The incel world view is steeped in narratives of self loathing. The victimhood incels justifiably feel, a result of the abuse dished out by the alpha male bullies of Man Box culture, gets redirected into an attack on women, who have refused to agree to soothe their pain sexually. It is thinking that reinforces isolation and disconnection. Anyone who encourages boys or men to think this way is doing them intense harm, leading them into a closed loop of more pain and despair. Incel beliefs and other masculinity extremist thinking is a death force, plain and simple.

To remain an incel, boys and men must insure their relationships with others stay broken. It’s a dangerously unwavering commitment to their own victimhood, placing it above every other aspiration they might have, including, ironically enough, sex. I can say from my own men’s work that it takes significant personal effort to finally give up such closely held victimhood. Because men and women alike carry trauma from growing up in our Man Box culture of masculinity, we are all at risk for getting stuck somewhere on the victimhood spectrum. I was stuck for decades.

Man Box Culture
Paul Kivel first conceptualized Ban Box culture nearly forty years ago in his work with the Oakland Men’s Project. His “act like a man box” outlined the narrow and restrictive rules for being a man in American culture and elsewhere. Tony Porter of A CALL TO MEN later shortened Kivel’s language to simply “the man box,” the term we now associate with both men’s work.

The rules of Man Box culture teaches our sons, beginning in infancy, to never show our emotions, to always be a leader, to always be dominant, to make a lot of money, to a provider not a caregiver, to assert control over women, to never be gay, to talk about sports, nothing deep, and so on. These narrow and conformist rules for being a man are enforced through constant bullying and violence, eventually suppressing the powerful relational capacities we are all born with.

The rules of Man Box culture may vary across different regions and populations, but the exact rules themselves are secondary to Man Box culture’s primary purpose which is to instill in boys and men the dominance model of masculinity. Dominance masculinity is authoritarian, moving power and control ever upward on the pyramid of control it maintains. But reliance on domination in any personal or professional relationship, is inherently isolating, and it is the resulting epidemic levels of loneliness that are at the heart of men’s collective anxiety, depression, addiction, divorce, violence and suicide.

Men in Man Box culture end up like dogs chained up at the back of the yard alone and howling; highly social animals who are traumatized into isolation. In a masculine culture of connection, men and women’s true strengths would include not only toughness and leadership but also the ability to express emotionally, feel empathy, connect across difference and create the communities of authentic friendships which resource us in challenging times.

Instead, we block boys from doing the trial and error relational work over the course of years that they need to learn to form authentic, nuanced personal and professional relationships. Boys, cut off from connection, are left with little choice but to align themselves with dominance masculinity, quickly learning to police and punish other boys’ failure to conform.

The Silence of Men
The result is millions of men who, because they have been stripped of central relational capacities like empathy, can no longer recognize simple moral imperatives. Why else would millions of us remain silent as women call out for us step up and join them in the fight for equity and basic human rights? While we are clearly not all masculinity extremists, men’s collective inaction maintains the container in which these more virulent versions of dominance masculinity thrive and grow, driving catastrophic levels of predatory capitalism, environmental destruction, forever war, poverty, racism and all the other expressions of domination masculinity. Men’s collective silence on #MeToo and other women’s issues is a result of the headwinds of the anti-women conditioning Man Box culture subjects all boys to. The tragedy is, not only will we not stand up for others, we won’t even stand up for ourselves.

Once you teach boys and men that women are less, they are primed to believe that other groups are also less.

Incels, MRAs, and MGTOWs have been shown to directly overlap with white nationalism and other weaponized notions of white male victimhood. Because we suppress men’s conversations or self reflection about our fears, loneliness or grief, a vacuum is created by which male victimhood conversations erupt at the extreme ends, steeped in anger and threats of violence. Coldly calculating individuals then use male rage to recruit disaffected young men into violent masculinity extremist causes, saying “Yes, you should be angry at women and here are some other groups you should be angry at, too…” sewing their racism, religious bigotry, hatred of LGBTQ people, hatred of immigrants and all the rest.

Occasionally incels declare themselves to be persons of color. It is often impossible to verify because incels don’t show their faces online. Many of the incel voices urging violence on the internet are just as likely foreign actors in well funded troll farms seeking to sew political discord in the west. Or they are white supremacists using masculinity extremism as a gateway to recruit angry disaffected young men.

Incels lack close male friendships. We know this, because most men do. Niobe Way, in her book Deep Secrets, documents how our culture trains boys by late adolescence to abandon their close friendships, friends who these boys openly say they “love.” The boys Way interviews also say they “would go crazy” without their close friendships. But by the time they reach late adolescence, these same boys are convinced to abandon their close friendships in order to prove they are not “little boys, girly, or gay.” It is at this time, that boys’ rates of suicide become four times that of girls.

In reviewing this article, my thought partner Saliha Bava also pointed out how men have now come to be objectified in the media in the ways women have been for decades. This hyper self objectification of men has resulted in the looksmaxxing trend of men like Clavicular.

Boys and men are now subjected hourly to images of masculine perfection that we can never attain, adding to the litany of ways we can fail in man box culture, because this is exactly what man box culture does, it keeps men striving for a version of manhood that is unattainable.

Another part of incel distress is the fact that they have to sexual relationships to flaunt as a marker of status before other men; a desire conditioned into them by the ugly competitive models of Man Box masculinity which then shames and punishes them brutally for this “failing.” What Incels frame as women’s hard and fast rule of never accepting anything less than attractive male partners, are clearly projections of their own objectified view of women. “I want a super model, so women want a super model.” It would be comical were it not so utterly destructive.

The Right to Say No
To be an Incel, you must declare over and over how ugly a person you are, while refusing to entertain even the slightest notion of how to grow or change for the better. By sucking up all of the oxygen in the room, the incessant “me, me, me” of incel’s self loathing narrative seeks to obscure a single moral absolute, one that is central to our most basic notions of human autonomy and individual freedom.

No one owes anyone sex.

In a sane society, the right to say “no” to any request for physical or emotional intimacy is paramount.

Meanwhile, women are becoming more empowered. They and the men who are their allies are creating a world where abusive men are being challenged. This is leading to a crisis in masculinity. Angry retrogressive voices are calling for open war against women, LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants, religious minorities and others and the outcome of this battle is by no means guaranteed to go well. Already women have lost core rights to control their own bodies, facing the criminalization of abortion, being arrested for miscarriages,

Masculine extremists are coldly weaponizing the trauma of boys and men brutalized by Man Box culture to drive their ugly political and social agendas.It is an assault on our larger democratic institutions clothed in the rage of sexual frustration and hate. And ultimately, it’s nothing new. Girls and women have been the victims of men’s sexual frustration and rage throughout the history of the world.

It’s well past time for millions of men to shake off our silence and actively support the battle for equality. We must stand and fight for the simple moral imperative that all people are created equal. That all human beings are deserving of autonomy, safely, respect and opportunity, equally. We must break out of man box culture and leave our centuries old domination masculinity behind, creating in its place, a masculinity of connection. We must use our power and our privilege to partner with women to heal our world.

Man Box culture is killing us and those we love, and it’s not going to go away unless millions of men end our silence and take action.

If you are man seeking to break out of Man Box culture, a man who is sick of feeling alone, reach out to The Mankind Project or another men’s organization. Men are waiting to help us each do our work and find the human connection we all deserve. You just have to make the choice to begin

.Photo by Rolf Dietrich Brecher

According to the Webster Dictionary, some people hate women and some people hate men. Taken simply in terms of their definitions, misogyny and misandry can appear to be equal and opposite ideas. “Both sides are doing this,” and so on. But when we look at these terms through the lens of systems and structures, we see the context and history in which each idea has emerged. It’s an important to understand the power of so called “systems thinking” as there are well-funded, well organized efforts afoot to restrict us from examining systems and structures across a range of social issues.

Refusing to acknowledge or discuss how systems and structures impact our lives is an intentionally political act. This insulates those systems and structures from change. Out of sight is, in fact, very much out of mind.Discursive processes, that is, the conversations that make up our social relationships, have the power to shift the systemic and structural. Open and robust conversations about systems and structures can shift them in positive ways.

This is why the Republican Party is so focused on silencing the teaching of the racism, or sexism or sexual identity. They are actively demonizing so-called Critical Race Theory because conversations about race are one way to put a spotlight on the long standing systems (the felt but often invisible larger processes) and structures (codified systems which have become sedimented into institutional practices) that are sustaining economic and physical violence against women, BIPOC, LGBTQI+ people, immigrants, people of non-Christian faiths and more.

Acknowledging systems and structures represents a powerful tool for locating where power resides.

It can illuminate the where, how and why of confusing or contentious issues. It can help us see who is leveraging conflict and for what purpose. We can apply exactly this systems thinking frame to misogyny and misandry.

Misogyny (hatred of women) is demonstrated in the most explicit ways by male supremacists, members of a clearly visible social movement with leaders, literature, and beliefs. In this article titled Male Supremacy from the Southern Poverty Law Center, we see that male supremacists and white supremacists have clear overlap in their memberships and share recruitment with each other. Like white supremacy, male supremacy is a product of our dominance-based culture of masculinity, a system which enforces longstanding structural advantages embedded in legal, religious and institutional advantages to keep white men at the top of its strict hierarchy. Another term for this system of power and advantages for men is patriarchy.

Women and non binary people are fighting back against men’s systemic advantages, demanding equity in the workplace, seeking legal redress in the courts, and calling for physical safety and autonomy. While this is increasing power for women, there is no historic female equivalent of patriarchy which created generations of systemic and structural legal oppression against men by women. That never happened and isn’t happening now. (White) men have always had the right to own property, vote, and engage in financial transactions. Women have not.

For example: Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, women needed their husbands signature to get a credit card. It wasn’t until the signing of the Women’s Business Ownership Act of 1988, that federal law put an end to state laws that required women to have male relatives sign business loans.

To this day, fundamentalist Christian churches as well as other faiths define women as subservient to men. There has never been a major world religion that defines men as subservient to women.

In the US, long standing systemic, coordinated subjugation of women by fundamentalist Christian extremists is playing out right now with the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Laws passed in many states, forcing underage girls and women to take pregnancies to term, even in the case of rape, incest or medically dangerous pregnancies. Collectively, men’s failure to stop this systemic attack on women’s rights and autonomy speaks volumes to our collective indifference to the impact we have on women’s lives. It’s happening because collectively men are passively letting it happen or actively encouraging it to happen.

Men’s Rights Activists and other male extremists point to our family courts as equivalent levels of systemic or structural disadvantages for men. Such supposed disadvantages are born out generations of neglect and abuse by fathers. Prior to our current family court system, men walked away from their families at a time when women were also kept out of the workplace, leaving mothers to fend for themselves and their children with no resources.

My own grandfather, walked out on my father’s family. In the 1930’s depression era Richmond, Virginia, there was no family court to require he pay child support, and so, my grandfather went his own way, starting another family a few counties away. The resulting impact on the life of my three year old father, his mother and his younger sister was catastrophic.

What takes place in the family courts is legal redress for long histories of wrong doing by men against mothers and children. I have been through that system myself, having been divorced from the mother of my then four year old child. It was not fun, but what it required of me on behalf of my son was easy enough to understand.

From child marriage across the US, to acid attacks in India, to epidemic levels of domestic violence, rape and femicide against women globally, to ongoing efforts to block women from leadership roles in business and politics, the list of inequities against women is global, generational and ongoing. If there is widespread anger and resentment against men by women and non binary people, it is born out of generations of ongoing systemic violence and oppression directed by men against those populations. Put simply, no one likes their abuser.

Which begs the question, what then is misogyny, the hatred of women, born out of? In the absence of an equal and opposite history of systemic and structural inequities leveraged by women against men, what is the source of men’s anger toward women? Using a systemic/structural lens which can be applied to track power in hierarchies, misandry and misogyny are both seen to be rooted in a single source: in how we train boys into our dominance-based culture of masculinity.

In dominance-based masculinity, otherwise known as Man Box culture, we bully boys beginning in infancy out of emotional expression and connection. When a boy shows emotion or too much need for connection, he is bullied back into the Man Box by questioning his masculinity. (What are you a sissy? What are you a girl?) In this way, we train our young sons out of universal human relational capacities such as empathy, care-giving, compassion, and connection across difference, slotting them instead into our dominance-based hierarchical culture of masculinity in which we must dominate those around us in order to maintain our status and validate our masuclinity. If we fail to do so, we lose status. The result is a culture of ongoing policing, bullying and violence. Those boys and men who stray too far from the strict rules of Man Box culture are murdered.

Boys are systemically bullied into lifetimes of loneliness and disconnection via the ongoing denigration of the feminine. In this way, we are also taught daily, even hourly, that girls and women are less. Most of this anti-female conditioning is cemented in place before we are even old enough to know what is happening.

For boys and men, misogyny isn’t a reaction to systemic oppression by women, it is the result of Man Box culture which requires we denigrate girls and women daily in order to validate our masculinity. In Man Box culture we are expected to display power over women and girls.

The ongoing oppression of women is enshrined in religious, legal, political, educational, and employment systems and structures. An equivalent level of systemic and structural oppression has not been experienced by the current generation of white men in America. Meanwhile, women’s healthcare and bodily autonomy are under renewed attack with the reversal of Roe v. Wade.In this we can see the ongoing systemic and structural assault against women’s rights playing out in real time. There is no equivalent loss of rights for men.

Misandry then, is women’s anger against their oppressors. Misogyny is men’s anger against those they oppress.

MRAs, Incels and other male supremacists seek to give the word misandry parity with misogyny, declaring their own victimhood as part of a fundamental strategy common to extremists of all stripes. It can be defined in its most brutal terms as “the act of stabbing someone while loudly declaring they are stabbing you.” When white and male supremacists amplify victimhood frames, IE: “we are being erased,” they grant themselves permission to do violence. “Look what you made me do.”

Violence up to and including genocide against underrepresented groups becomes widespread and normalized in cultures and societies where the critical examination of the systems and structures which control our lives has been silenced. In the US, look for the Republican Party to continue to shut down all teaching and discussion of race, gender, sexual identity, and religious bigotry.

False equivalencies and weaponized victimhood are effectively countered by discussions of systems and structures. The discursive, the process of discussing the systems and structures that impact our lives gives us the power to shift those structures to make a better world.

Photo by Garry Knight

To the boys and men who identify as incels:

First and foremost, understand you have been raised in Man Box culture. Our dominant Man Box culture of masculinity is hierarchical, violent, demands rigid conformity, and its number one rule is “don’t show your emotions, except for anger.” From birth, whenever you showed emotions, you were bullied and shamed for it. Sadness, fear, pain, giddy joy, need for friendship, love, all of this was shamed. And it was shamed via the denigration of the feminine. IE: “What are you, a girl? What are you a sissy?”

First conceptualized by Paul Kivel in the early 1980’s our generations old 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, never homosexual, hyper-masculine, and sexually dominant.

• “Real men” never ask for help.

• “Real men” have control over women.

• “Real men” are providers, never caregivers.

• “Real men” are economically secure.

• “Real men” are physically and emotionally tough.

• When we talk to other men, “real men” talk about sports or cars, never anything deep.

These rules by which we are expected to prove our masculinity are not about who we are, but about what we do: by what we earn, the points we score, who we bed, how athletic we are, when we dominate, succeed, command, lead, fix and control.

In a world where our masculinity is based on what we do instead of who we are, men are reduced to the last paycheck we cashed, the last woman we bedded, or the last ugly, wrenching pain we silently endured. It’s a rat race. And it’s designed to insure we never win the race. Ever.

Man Box culture was never designed to let men succeed, to win. It was designed to keep men competing with, policing, bullying and ultimately fearing each other. And we wonder why we’re lonely.

When we force boys to hide their emotions, we break their connection in the world. The ability to express emotionally in nuanced ways is a key component for connecting in authentic relationships with others, friends, co-workers, romantic partners, everyone. Because of the bullying enforcement of Man Box culture, you were blocked from growing the capacity for nuanced emotional expression and the authentic connection which it creates. We all were.

Instead of having the years of trial and error work required to grow our emotional self regulation/expression, fundamental human capacities for relational connection are wrongly gendered as female, shamed and blocked. We get bombarded with messages that both strip us of crucial human capacities for connection and condition us to see women and the feminine as less.

The emotional volatility you feel is a direct result of being raised in Man Box culture, which encourages anger as the only acceptable emotional response for men. An emotional response created, not coincidentally, by a lifetime of being bullied and blocked emotionally in Man Box culture. It’s an anger generating closed loop and it is a killer.

Man Box culture says to us: “We’re going to screw you over emotionally and then we’re going aim your resulting isolation, grief and anger at women.”

Anger when we don’t get sex is the same as anger when we don’t get anything else we want. As human beings, our job is to manage our baser emotions and grow emotionally to the point where people feel safe around us. And what makes them feel safe? When we display the ability to emotionally self regulate.

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And whose job is this exactly? Not women. Men need to step up and offer compassion to men. Some women will do so, but the responsibility is on men. Additionally, any compassion offered to us as boys or men must include accountability for our actions or it becomes something entirely negative, fostering entitlement. That said, accountability without compassion is equally likely to fail. We need both.

Retrogressive men need a world in which women are second class citizens in order for their patriarchal male status markers to operate successfully. Women aren’t accepting second class status, so for those men, these times are increasingly alarming. Accordingly, millions of such men are fighting (and too often winning) a battle to strip girls and women of their economic, political and human rights. For women and girls this assault by men it is catastrophic.

My compassion isn’t offered to men who insist on reinforcing and weaponizing retrogressive masculine beliefs. They can access compassion by ending such behaviors.

But we also need to understand where such men get their harmful ideas. And more importantly, what cultural drivers are stripping men of crucial relational capacities including empathy, emotional expression, care-giving and the compassion they lack. The cultural driver of men’s aggression, violence and disconnection is Man Box Culture.

The rules of the Act Like a Man Box, first conceptualized in the early 1980’s by Paul Kivel and later brought mainstream as the Man Box by Tony Porter of A Call to Men, include:

• Be a breadwinner not a caregiver

• Don’t show your emotions

• Be tough, don’t ask for help

• Never talk with other men about anything deep

• Be heterosexual not homosexual

• Have lots of sex

• Make lots of money

• Have control over women and girls

Training boys into Man Box culture begins early. Researcher and author Judy Chu (When Boys Become Boys) studied a Pre-K class for two years. Chu discovered that four-year-old boys were already hiding their emotional acuity and taking on the stoic performance of masculinity our culture enforces on them.

Little boys are taking on the rules of our Man Box culture, rules which suppress expression and connection in hopes of being allowed into the boys’ club, of having belonging and friendship. It is a bait and switch of the worst kind.

The result by late adolescence is loneliness, born out of the bullying narrow confines of the Man Box, forcing boys and young men to hide our authentic selves in a culture that does not care about who we authentically are.

We can activate our compassion for men when we acknowledge the trauma and isolation young boys experience as they are bullied out of their robust and naturally occurring relational capacities for emotional expression and connection and slotted into our dominance-based culture of masculinity. A culture which breaks boys’ joyful human connection, leaving us all to deal the challenges which result, in our own lives and in the lives of others.

While we must hold men accountable to break out of the Man Box, it is offers of compassion and community that will enable us to successfully do so.

And it is also compassion in raising boys that will protect our sons’ joyfully human expression and connection, insuring they don’t fall prey to Man Box culture in the first place.

For men seeking connection and compassion, come join our walks or start your own at walkingtalkingmen.org.

For decades, Professor and author Niobe Way has been researching what she calls boys’ “crisis of connection.” She published her findings in her book Deep Secrets.

Her research reveals that boys in early adolescence have deep and meaningful friendships that they say they would “go crazy without.” By late adolescence, boys give up their close friendships because our culture tells them that wanting or needing close friendship is not what it means to be a “real man.” Young men give up their close friendships, and their suicide rates become four times that of girls their age.

Maybe just take a moment with that, yeah?

Per Way’s research, boys give up their close friendships in order to avoid being labeled as being “little kids, girly, or gay.” By late adolescence, boys are convinced to self-isolate, putting themselves on the path to lifetimes of loneliness. This is the impact of what many researchers call our Man Box culture of masculinity, which for generations has enforced a bullying and hyper competitive set of rules for how to be a man.

The relational dysfunction, anxiety, and aggression which results from the epidemic levels of loneliness Man Box culture creates, drives every major social and political challenge we face, including ever increasing levels of economic, political and sexual violence against women.

Decades of data compiled by organizations like A CALL TO MEN, Equimundo and Movember confirm that our Man Box culture of masculinity is a primary driver of male loneliness.

If you take nothing else away with you from this book, here are a couple of the central points. First: when we talk about an epidemic of male loneliness, it is assumed by too many of us that the problem boys and men face is a lack of romantic relationships. It is not.

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