Mark Greene argues that traditional masculinity is built on domination and hierarchy, enforced through the "act-like-a-man box" that teaches boys to suppress emotions and control others. He traces how microaggressions like calling boys "sissy" shut down empathy and relational capacity, leaving only dominance as an outlet. Greene calls for a masculinity rooted in connection and caregiving instead.
Chapters
A lot of my work in masculinity is around the question of our culture of masculinity, and I think whatever view we have of gender has been badly distorted by a culture of masculinity which is based on on domination and on hierarchical expression of masculinity. So for hundreds of years, our definition of being masculine has been primarily based on how well we can dominate those around us. And this— a lot of the ideas that I have around gender are born out of work of a guy named Paul Kivel in the early '80s in California. And he talks about what he called the— he conceptualized what he called the act like a man box. And this is a very narrow set of rules for how to be a real man that he came up with. And one of the primary rules is— I mean, these rules are familiar to us as men, especially in Western culture. Rules like don't show your emotions, make a lot of money, always be in control, be in control of women and girls. Be heterosexual, don't be homosexual. And these rules in man box culture are enforced in order to create this hierarchical domination-based version of masculinity. So this has distorted everything we understand about gender by making it, instead of a collaborative, connecting, relationship-based expression of masculinity, a masculinity of connection, if you will, It's a masculinity of dominance. And one of the things that's really important to understand is how we go about training boys into this. And the primary way that we train boys into this begins very early, right shortly after they come out of the crib, is that we denigrate the feminine whenever boys express in ways that are theoretically not masculine. So if a boy shows empathy, if a boy shows emotional expression, if a boy shows too much need for connection, We say, "What are you, a girl? What are you, a sissy? What are you, gay?" And these microaggressions go on hourly for young boys. Ultimately, what it does is it shuts down our emotional expression, which emotional expression is of course born out of relationships. It's not something that just appears inside of us. It's born in the back and forth of relating. So when you tell a boy, "Don't show your emotions," you're essentially ending his ability to form authentic relationships and to do these things which are wrongly gendered as feminine, which is show empathy, connection across difference, caregiving, all of these things. And ultimately the only thing he's left with is the expression of dominance. So whatever gender really is for us, we have a long way to go to get rid of all of these rules, these dominance-based rules of masculinity, and lean into connection enough that we can truly even begin to see that.
