No shit! But men love to talk about that as if it were true. It's a click-bait title, and it got you to read. But yes, men can and must change the harmful norms of masculinity in this culture that are the root cause of violence, sexual predation, and abuse of women - but also of other men. Women have to support that, but it's widely accepted that mainstream norms for men such as domination, aggression, stoicism and control of women are highly problematic (but also not universal). They are indoctrinated in and reinforced by media, peers, and others and are completely and entirely fungible. Other cultures have different norms for men, and our culture has had different ones at early time periods.
Man perform masculinity primarily for other men. Ergo, it's up to men to shift them into something healthier. Einstein was a genius, but also a huge misogynist who was deeply unkind to both of his wives. And, as far as I'm aware, he wasn't a social scientist or psychologist so he was pretty ill equipped to solve the problems of harmful gender norms.
A few years back the American Psychological Association published new guidelines for working with men and boys intended to support them by acknowledging how harmful mainstream "traditional" masculinity is to males - and to everyone else.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/ce-corner
Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.
“Though men benefit from patriarchy, they are also impinged upon by patriarchy,” says Ronald F. Levant, EdD, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and co-editor of the APA volume “The Psychology of Men and Masculinities.” Levant was APA president in 2005 when the guideline-drafting process began and was instrumental in securing funding and support to get the process started.
Getting that message out to men—that they’re adaptable, emotional and capable of engaging fully outside of rigid norms—is what the new guidelines are designed to do. And if psychologists can focus on supporting men in breaking free of masculinity rules that don’t help them, the effects could spread beyond just mental health for men, McDermott says. “If we can change men,” he says, “we can change the world.”
All I’ve said is that men are socialized into norms that hurt them and drive other problems in our culture — and that men can and should be leaders in changing that. If you find that hateful for me to state the well established fact that Man Box masculinity is literally killing men , I don’t know what to tell you. It sounds a lot like “protesting too much.” No man is responsible for how he’s been socialized but each and every man is responsible for what they do or don’t do in response to that. Women have to do their part, but they can’t take the lead because history has shown us that men don’t want to listen to what women have to say about masculinity.
What is perhaps even more disturbing is that in this society, many people see gender violence as a problem of sick or damaged individuals and not as a social phenomenon the causes — and solutions — of which lie in much larger social forces. That is why, for example, many men will declare that rapists should be severely punished, but then respond indignantly to the idea that widely held beliefs and norms about gender, sex, and power — including cultural ideas about manhood — are implicated in the ongoing sexual assault pandemic. So let me be clear. There is no such thing as an isolated incident of rape, battering, sexual abuse, or sexual harassment. These are not merely individual pathologies. It is not enough for us to ask in each case: “What went wrong in his life?” “Why would he do something like that?” These problems are much too widespread for us to think about them in such narrow terms.
Katz, Jackson. The Macho Paradox (p. 26). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.
