That’s because in a patriarchal dominance hierarchy everyone is encouraged to play by the same rules of “might makes right” and “eat or be eaten” — even racial minorities, even women — because we’re all steeped in that system. But white men are at the top of the pyramid. This isn’t just me saying this either (I’ve already quoted you one article). Plus, it’s what guys themselves say about what is expected of them to be “a real man.” Of course humans are also highly geared towards cooperation but masculinity in America is very centered towards demonstrations of domination in order to establish pecking order. PUAs and other manosphere types routinely “teach” men how to be more dominant and coercive so they can be “an alpha.”
Mark Greene, who has studied this topic extensively talks about the culture of bullying in men here:
“Man box culture encourages boys/men to vent any stress or anxiety they feel through the expression of anger and dominance of others. That is the only acceptable expression of emotion they are allowed.
So even the smallest failure to properly perform man box culture’s rules for manhood, can unleash violence and bullying against us because bullying is THE release valve for male isolation anxiety. This is why I threat track men. Because we all do it. We know men go off.”
Paul Kivel conceptualized the “Act Like a Man Box” in the early 1980’s, by asking high school boys what the rules were for being a man. It turned out the rules were pretty straightforward. They included:
• Hide all emotions
• Treat women as less, have control over women
• Be tough, never admit self doubt, fear
• Police and bully other boys who don’t conform
Another study done more recently with men in the US, the UK and Mexico found pretty much the same thing. They asked men questions and held focus groups, so this stuff is coming right from “the horse’s mouth” so to speak.
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.
The fact that bullying doesn’t read as leadership to you does not belie the fact that it’s a central aspect of what looks like leadership to a lot of the culture. Again, I give you Donald Trump as exhibit A. He didn’t actual stand for anything other than a return to the much more overt dominance hierarchy of the 1950s where men and whites need not worry about “offending” others lower down the pecking order. And that’s why he’s still so popular now with certain people.
From a sociological perspective, this is how the dominance hierarchy works, and although there are “mean girls” and other female manifestations of this dynamic, in general femininity is centered in being compliant and “nice.”
“Another study shows that as they enter adolescence, the pressure to be “feminine” greatly affects how girls speak and state their opinions. They feel the pressure to be “proper, pleasing, quiet, and nice,” and are afraid of coming off as disruptive or “too loud.”
Of course, this tendency to self-deprecate does not exist in all female students, just as assertiveness is not a quality associated with all male students. There are students of both genders that completely defy this trend and characterization.”
But something doesn’t have to be universal in order to be pervasive and it doesn’t have to be in your experience in order to be a known sociological dynamic.
