Extremist men are coming for our rights and our freedoms.
The reason men in the manosphere are so angry at women? Because empowerment for women requires accountability from men. For men, being held accountable, and moreso, holding ourselves accountable in relationships where women have equal power requires self-reflection.
For men raised in our bullying dominance-based culture of masculinity, self-reflection is forbidden, punished. Who we authentically are doesn’t matter in Man Box culture. We are trained instead to model our identity on a narrow set of rules for how to be a man. The rules of Man Box culture.
- Don’t show your emotions.
- Be tough, never ask for help.
- Be heterosexual.
- Never talk about anything deep.
- Be a breadwinner not a caregiver.
- Have control of women and girls.
- Have lots of sex.
All these rules require we show dominance over those around us, expecially over the women in our lives.
Living by the generations-old rules of the Man Box means asserting dominance in little and big ways in every interaction. Our response to pushback? Double down on bullying, etc. It’s a system predicated on women, LGBTQ, people of color, and immigrants having little or no power.
But those days are gone.
In our retrogressive dominance-based culture of masculinity boys and men grow up being blocked from developing our universally human relational capacities which are required to self-reflect, to create community and connection. These natural relational capacities are bullied out of us beginning in infancy, severely limiting how we construct our masculine identities
When hierarchy and dominance are the core mechanisms by which we develop our identities, being told that others refuse to be dominated feels like an attack on our identity. Panic of loss of self rises which accelerates the urge to dominate and control others to unprecedented levels.
For men to break out of Man Box culture, we must first accept that we do not have the right to dominate and control others. For some of us, that realization is a great relief. But for some of us, it feels like the loss of core identity and so our panic and violence accelerates.
Men who cannot self-reflect, chose to make their trauma-informed identities the hill they will die on, demanding over and over their “right” to attack and control others. These are MRAs and incels raging against women in the manosphere. These are MAGA Republicans, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, Trump.
For extremist men raised in Man Box culture to self-reflect would require they fully and completely see that the trauma they seek to tamp down and hide came from the boys and men in their own lives. Not women. Not POC. Not immigrants. Many men don’t have the willpower to do this work.
These are the Republican men who are coming for us in the next election. The ones who don’t have the strength to do their men’s work and come out the other side. Because women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks are pushing back with ever-increasing effectiveness and power, these men are going mad.
Which means Republican extremists are now at their most dangerous. Millions of powerful woman, LGBTQ people, people of color in the world are collapsing the core construct of some men’s MAGA identities, which is that white men deserve power over everyone. And they have only one response. More dominance. More violence.
This is the battle of our generation. The battle between our work to grow inclusive human progress and the MAGA movement’s open retrogressive spiral into authoritarianism. The mechanism that drives MAGA extremist men is deeply rooted in their identities. They will not yield.
Those of us who do men’s work are ready to work with any man who wants to change. But first, we have to end the immediate threat millions of these men represent. We must vote in overwhelming numbers for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in every local, state, and national race.
If we don’t utterly defeat the extremist Republican party, these MAGA men who do not self reflect, who do not hold themselves accountable, the white supremacists and Christian nationalists will bludgeon the rest of us into lifetimes as their victims.
#BlueWave2024 #Roevember2024
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Previously Published on Medium
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