The Little #MeToo Book for Men Read online

  THE LITTLE #METOO BOOK FOR MEN

  “The Little #MeToo Book for Men is a profoundly empathetic guide for men who are navigating a culture that pressures them to bury their humanity. This book is nothing short of a blueprint for men’s liberation.”

  Caroline Heldman, Ph.D.

  Executive Director,

  The Representation Project

  “The Little #MeToo Book for Men is an excellent resource. It offers insight into our collective socialization and how we can break out of the Man Box to promote healthy manhood and help prevent all forms of violence and discrimination against all women and girls.”

  Tony Porter, founder, A CALL TO MEN

  “Outstanding read and great contribution to understanding the current cultural impact on boys and healthy masculine development.”

  Joe Ehrmann, Author, InSideOut Coaching

  “Mark Greene is unique among my activist friends and colleagues in speaking truth to power, but not seeing men and women in opposition.”

  Jed Diamond, Men Alive Now

  “This isn’t just a book, it’s a thunderbolt! A powerful call to end men’s silence on sexual assault.”

  Lisa Hickey, CEO, The Good Men Project

  “With deep compassion for men, Greene calls out to our better selves.”

  Michael Kasdan, Editor, The Good Men Project

  “Greene has compiled his thoughts, perspectives, and masculinity research in a manner that would be helpful for anyone that truly wishes to equip boys and men for a better life. Specifically, it’s highly recommended for school and college administrators, coaches, counselors, and therapists.”

  Byron A. Hughes, Ph.D.

  Dean of Students, Virginia Tech

  “Mark Greene, in seventy five pages, has written perhaps the most important book on masculinity ever.”

  Joseph Losi, Mature Masculinity

  “This is the book that men should be reading to get a thoughtful and concise look at modern masculinity and the man box in which we find ourselves stuck.”

  Matt Schneider, Co-founder, City Dads Group

  “This book is 70+ pages of truth, wisdom, explanation, and understanding. It doesn’t make excuses, but it does give explanations of how we got here and what we can do to change. I was so impressed with the book, I immediately gave a copy to my twenty-something son and asked him to read it as well.”

  EM Bosso, Author

  “Mark Greene has written a timely, compelling book that connects two seemingly disparate issues, the widespread silence about and cultural acceptance of sexual assault against women, and the emotional assault against men that begins when they are boys.”

  Lisa Duggan, Author

  “Mark Greene manages to write in a way that makes a very difficult topic easily accessible. His non-judgmental writing allows men to have a little distance, so they can think through these issues without shutting down. He places society and our culture squarely in the cross hairs and then offers men a path forward and out of the pain we inflict on others and ourselves when we blindly follow the cultural scripts we were born into. I will be recommending this book to my clients as well as friends and family.”

  Jay Sefton, Therapist

  This book is dedicated to Saliha Bava,

  who continues to grow and share with me such joyful,

  powerful ways of living.

  And to Arthur Wellington Greene, Jr.

  “And one more for the pot.”

  Copyright © 2018 Mark Greene

  Published by ThinkPlay Partners

  All rights reserved.

  “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”

  - Elie Wiesel

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  1 /COLLISION

  2 /EPIDEMIC

  3 /COLLAPSE

  4 /WHAT IS LOST

  5 /THE MAN BOX

  6 /ANGRY VOICES

  7 /BILLY THE BULLY

  8 /EPIDEMIC OF ISOLATION

  9 /METOO

  10 /DON’T MESS WITH JOE

  11 /FALSE ACCUSATIONS

  12 /SUPPRESSING FIRE

  13 /MAPPING OUR SILENCE

  14 /COURAGE

  15 /THE ART OF RELATIONSHIPS

  16 /MEN’S POWER

  INTRODUCTION

  The Little #MeToo Book for Men is a critique of our dominant culture of manhood in America, framed through the lens of a single challenging question. Why is #MeToo such a source of alarm for so many men? This book is the result of ten years of my writing and speaking about manhood as a senior editor for the Good Men Project. It is written from the perspective of a white man raised in the United States, but I am told these issues resonate globally, that men and women are dealing with versions of these issues everywhere.

  For millions of men, manhood can seem like a foregone conclusion, mapped out for us by universally understood rules for being a “real man.” These rules determine how we walk, how we talk, what we think and do, what we view as our responsibilities and most importantly, how we pursue or fail to pursue our deepest needs, wants and desires.

  These rules of manhood become so central to what we believe as to render the distinction between ourselves and our culture of manhood invisible to us. When millions of men live our lives subject to the rules of a culture we are not fully conscious of, it can be damaging for our families, our communities, our collective quality of life, and even our longevity. As such, this book seeks to encourage a conversation about how boys and men arrive at what we believe.

  If this conversation can reveal even the slightest glimmer of daylight between our dominant culture of masculinity and our own daily choices as men, my hope is we will find, in that space, a more vibrant and authentic connection to our agency, our power and our humanity.

  Mark Greene

  November 2018

  New York City

  1 /COLLISION

  We cannot understand why #MeToo is so alarming for men without also understanding manhood in America. The two are inescapably intertwined. We must look at how our dominant culture of manhood is constructed, what it creates in the world and how it impacts people’s lives.

  No culture is immutable. Cultures are fluid and ever changing. Our dominant culture of manhood coexists and overlaps with a multitude of others, each rising and waning across generations. Cultures can be religious, corporate, political or social, and based sometimes on rigid delineations of, and at other times the intermingling of, class, race, gender, creed and other categories of social identity.

  What then, is culture? Culture is a collective agreement on how we should behave, integrated into how we construct our identities, and reconfirmed daily in our actions. Those with more power and resources often have more say in how we define culture. Those with less power often resist those definitions.

  Our collective agreement about how men should behave has been shaped and reshaped over time. Whenever we are ready to do so, we shift towards a new collective agreement, changing manhood, sometimes by great leaps and bounds, sometimes by only the slightest of degrees. This process is ongoing, caught up in the push and pull of generations, gender, race, sexuality, religion, politics and the larger culture.

  The more dominant a culture, the more those who have internalized it will fight in defense of it. The more archaic and inflexible a culture, the more it will be challenged as it increasingly fails to meet the needs of those it impacts. What has always been and what is coming next eventually come into direct conflict. Hence the term, culture war. The resulting collision can be chaotic, alarming and filled with challenges, creating great uncertainty daily
or even hourly, disrupting our sense of who we are and how our world operates.

  As women take up the banner of #MeToo by the millions, many men are feeling conflicted, alarmed, angry, and even disheartened. How is it that men are challenged by a movement which says, “Don’t rape, sexually harass or abuse other human beings”? These are ideas we can all get behind, right? But it’s not playing out that way.

  The uncertainty and alarm this movement creates for men can be profound, lurching up from within our socially constructed identities, from within the process by which we experience and express who we are, and from within the structures by which we are assigned our status.

  Men have our own #MeToo stories, when we ourselves were sexually harassed, assaulted, or raped. These stories, which men have been shamed into hiding or denying, are just one more example of why this earthquake called #MeToo shakes the ground beneath all our feet. #MeToo challenges from multiple angles men’s sense of control over, and confidence in, who we are. “Life used to be simple. Now it is complicated. Men and women used to know our place. Now we do not. I do not want to think about this.”

  #MeToo will go down in history as one of the most powerful cultural/political flashpoints in American history. While #MeToo calls out to our better angels, it also compels men to make a fundamental reassessment of everything we have suppressed, denied or taken for granted about our own masculine identities. Which makes talking about #MeToo the single conversation many men do NOT want to have.

  The dangers of acknowledging, much less advocating for women within our social circles is well known to us. There are terrible and dark sides to the world of men, where alpha males display their strutting locker room dominance, daring any to challenge their open contempt for women, and then blithely heading home to their wives and daughters to sit down for Sunday dinner.

  In this way, generations of men have been bullied into averting our eyes from the ugly and abusive duality of our relationship with women. But it is precisely the dark disdain for women, threaded through our initiation into manhood, that has led us all to #MeToo.

  2 /EPIDEMIC

  In the early 1980’s, Paul Kivel, Allan Creighton and others at the Oakland Men’s Project developed “the Act Like a Man Box” in their work with adolescents in public schools around the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1992, Kivel documented their workshop process in his book Men’s Work: How to Stop the Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart. As Kivel explains, it was here that they first framed their man box concept.

  “We invited boys and men to explore the cultural rules by which they had been socialized to conform to narrow definitions of masculinity, police each others’ manhood and use their power and privileges to enforce gender-based exploitation, violence, and abuse against women, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups.”

  Following years of doing men’s work in penitentiaries and other challenging spaces, Tony Porter, the founder of A CALL TO MEN, rephrased Kivel’s term.

  “Paul was on it, no question about that,” Porter says. “He was on it. But the way he was saying it would not work for the men I was talking to. So, I took that term, ‘act like a man box,’ and I shortened it down to ‘the man box.’”

  Then, in 2010, Tony Porter’s explosively popular TED Talk titled “A Call to Men” was seen by millions, driving the man box into our collective public consciousness.

  Kivel’s act like a man box refers to the enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man. These rules are enforced through shaming and bullying, as well as promises of rewards, the purpose of which is to force conformity to our dominant culture of masculinity.

  Because the man box begins impacting boys at birth, by age three and four they are already engaging in a pecking order of bullying as proof of their manhood. The result is our sons buy into bullying and abuse as central mechanisms for forming and expressing male status and identity.

  This culture of bullying has a deeply isolating effect on boys, shutting down their authentic expression, emotional acuity and suppressing their relational development. The isolating impact of man box culture is at the heart of men’s epidemic levels of loneliness, addiction, depression, violence and suicide. Until we wake up and understand that our disconnection in the world is quite literally killing us, it will continue to kill us every damn day.

  Which is why this conversation about manhood has to happen. If we as men cannot do this for ourselves, caught up in our indecision about simple moral imperatives, angry and defensive, then we must summon the courage to have this conversation for those we love. We must find the strength to create a healthier, more diverse culture of manhood for our children and grandchildren, who deserve to grow up in a world free of the brutal inequality that we, by our collective indecision, are maintaining.

  For men, to self-reflect about #MeToo is both life affirming and deeply challenging. To be able to question and reconsider who we are and what we believe, is a capacity that has never been valued by our culture of manhood. Yet here we stand, confronted with a choice. We can avert our eyes from the hard truths of #MeToo or we can engage and, in the process, unpack years or even decades of conditioning, the price of which has likely been the loss of our authentic connection in the world.

  Rethinking our role as men holds the very real promise of improving every single metric by which we measure quality of life, up to and including how long we will live.

  The days when #MeToo was somebody else’s problem are long gone. No one is a bystander any more. Too many men are being manipulated into attacking women, opposing progress and abusing each other. Our fathers, brothers and sons are literally dying from a lack of community and connection in the world. It turns out that the war on women is also a war on men.

  It’s well past time to pick a side. And what are the sides? The sides are simple: equality, yes or no. We are confronting a moment of truth based on a simple moral imperative: that all human beings are created equal.

  3 /COLLAPSE

  Ask most men, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, and they’ll tell you. Something feels off. Something is not right. Daily we feel it, a surging dislocation, a weary dissatisfaction, and a restless sense of growing anxiety. It’s the kind of discomfort you feel as you slowly realize the game you have been playing is rigged. All their lives men have been cheated, and they are starting to understand this in ever greater numbers.

  From some quarters, men’s voices are angry and reactive. They say that men are not allowed to be men; that women are taking over. Others feel deeply uncertain, wondering how to engage, even support movements like #MeToo without getting caught up in the binary crossfire of our culture wars.

  The fight for women’s equality is creating upheaval that is explosive in its implications for men’s core sense of identity. #MeToo is a particularly timely earthquake, coming at a liminal moment in history when much of what once underpinned men’s identities, both social and economic, is collapsing.

  Go to any middle school or high school classroom in America. Ask the boys there to tell you the rules for being a man. They’ll all tell you the same things. Always be tough. Always be successful. Always be confident. Always have the last word. Always be the leader. But one of the first rules of manhood these boys will tell you is that “real men” don’t show their emotions.

  The implications of this single prohibition run deep, informing nearly every aspect of men’s, and by extension, women’s lives. To this day, we coach our sons to present a facade of emotional toughness and our daughters to admire that facade in men. Even in infancy, little boys are expected to begin modeling stoicism, confidence, physical toughness, authority, and dominance. The strong and silent type remains a central American symbol of how to be a “real man.”

  These rules for being a “real man,” often referred to as man box culture, are the reason why nostalgia for a bygone 1950’s era America is so compelling for some men. That earlier America, where large numbers of women accepted their sta
tus as second-class citizens, provided the cultural container that made man box culture seemingly rewarding for men, and its catastrophic personal costs relatively invisible.

  But now, after a century or more of women’s hard-fought battle towards equality, the remnant of our retrogressive 1950’s era cultural container is collapsing. As it does, the brutal and isolating costs of man box culture become more evident to men, minus the countervailing benefits it once provided when women (and people of color, and LGBTQ people, and immigrants, and so many others) had no choice but to play along.

  It is in this liminal cultural space between what was and what will be, that men are experiencing deep uncertainty. Long reliant on the predictable command and control hierarchy of male culture, we have never been taught to manage uncertainty, while women, who have historically been subject to the whims of men, have had to manage it all their lives.

  Because men’s man-box-constructed identities are based not on creating and maintaining authentic relationships and communities, but instead on a strict adherence to hierarchical roles, the loss of the cultural container that validates those roles feels like a terrifying loss of core identity.

  4 /WHAT IS LOST

  For generations, men have been conditioned to compete for status, forever struggling to rise to the top of a vast Darwinian pyramid framed by a simple but ruthless set of rules. But the men who compete to win in our man box culture are collectively doomed to fail, because the game itself is rigged. We’re wasting our lives chasing a fake rabbit around a track, all the while convinced there’s meat to be had. There is no meat. We are the meat.

  The slow realization that we can never win is the unspoken and unacknowledged source of the male panic and rage surging through our culture. Like many men, I’ve wasted decades of my life trying to perform the man box model of manhood, which by design leaves us struggling to prove our manhood while forever failing to completely do so.