Check out this story by Mark Greene which speaks to what I'm saying. Here are a few excerpts:
"We can avoid feeling the grief of women’s pain by getting defensive. We give into the almost automatic urge to say “Boys and men are suffering, too.” We give in to the urge to say, “What about women who do violence?”
But we can only do this particular form of self-protection by invoking a false binary. Yes, boys and men are suffering. Men’s trauma must be addressed.
But men’s trauma and our violence against women are intertwined in the most horrible and intimate ways. It can never be an either/or. It is an all or nothing.
For us, as men, the key to understanding our own trauma lies in first recognizing its primary source. In our generations old dominance-based culture of masculinity, other boys and men bully and police us beginning in infancy to conform to a narrow set of rules for how to be a man.
The result of such rigidly enforced conformity is that men face catastrophic levels of isolation and disconnection, oppressed by a culture of masculinity which pits us against each other in cycles of relentless competition and bullying to enforce the so-called rules of Man Box culture. Rules like don’t show your emotions, always be tough, never ask for help, and so on. And because we are bullied via the denigration of the feminine when we fail to conform, (What are you, a sissy? What are you, a girl?) we are also taught from infancy that girls and women are less."
