Mainstream masculine socialization in this culture drives violence- against women and men, it drives sexual predation against women and men. Pretending that bad stuff happens due to “bad apples” is false. There’s nothing wrong with men; but masculine culture in this country is bad for men and for everyone else. Calling that out is important and necessary. It’s not bashing men or anything else of the kind. Patriarchy is alive and well and hurting us all, men too. But although women uphold patriarchy too at times, men are the primary beneficiaries of it as well as the primary stewards of it. The culture needs to do better and men should lead the way on that. Until they do, feminism needs to keep up the pressure on harmful masculine culture. Even the guys who don’t really buy into it still benefit from it. Unless they too are speaking against it, they are complicit. It’s as simple as that.
“In most western settings, including prisons, it’s “traditional” masculinity that is dominant. Aggression, hardness, physical power and emotional reticence — not love and compassion — are the qualities most highly valued. These values are intimately connected to, and manifest in, power and systems of domination — governmental, financial, military and domestic — by which a small number of men secure the natural and economic resources of the planet for themselves, and protect their privilege by any and all means, including imprisonment, slavery and force of arms.
Many men who are raised to believe in these values, but who are denied access to the rewards such values supposedly offer — and who live without encountering alternative narratives — are angry, depressed, violent and destructive.
These are the young men who fill our prisons, who fight in the streets and in pubs, who beat their partners and their children, who fill the internet with misogynistic hate. Historically, they are also the men who are enlisted to fight for other men’s power. When we talk about finding new heroes and new models of masculinity, we have to talk about dismantling these systems of domination.”
