There's all kinds of danger in the world, and certainly Black people are subjected to a whole lot more than whites. But, we also live in a culture that glorifies male violence (against both women and men), that overtly believes men have the right to control women, and where rape dynamics are sometimes hard to truly distinguish from heterosexual sexuality more generally. Nearly 40% of women who are murdered in America are killed by a current or former male domestic partner. About 4% of men are, and at least some of those are self defense.
Pretending like Man Box masculinity isn't a huge problem is just living in denial.
"My review and analysis draw especially on research and theory that highlight the connections between sexual violence and normative (rather than strictly aberrant or toxic) heterosexuality and masculinity (e.g., Cahill, 2014, 2016; Gavey, 2005; Mardorossian, 2014). This work contends that there is a common ground between normative heterosexuality and sexual violence (what Cahill, 2016 refers to as the “heteronormative sexual continuum”) — not that they are one and the same but that hegemonic heterosexuality functions to obscure clear “distinctions between what is [sexual violence] and what is just sex” (Gavey 2005: 2, emphasis original). In other words, as I and others have demonstrated elsewhere, Western hegemonic heterosexuality is often male-centered and patterned in ways that can support and obscure men’s sexual violence against women." (Sage Journals)
“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.
The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.”
