I’ve said this before and usually have gotten a ton of crap about it, but yes – I think it IS all men. ALL men. Even though there are plenty of guys like me who work daily to end this bullshit against women and kids, the reality is that we are ALL capable of it. The fact that I haven’t or wouldn’t beat up, rape, or murder women and children (or other men) for whatever reasons, doesn’t mean (for any practical purposes) that anyone could ever be certain that I can’t or won’t. Context matters. Women can’t tell, and their biological hard-wiring to build connection and relationship makes them always vulnerable. Plus, a woman has no way to discover the difference between me and a guy who will harm her without her getting too close to react effectively before it’s too late.
If you listen to felons in support groups in prisons they will all admit that it takes at least a year of faking it before they will start hitting a woman with fair confidence they can maintain control and keep her from leaving. This is a prescriptive pattern, not happenstance or a one-off.
And when it comes to sex, most guys are just looking for the relief of a few squirts in the dark, but every woman without exception is literally putting her life at risk with every single occasion of intercourse. If you don’t believe that, just look up the stats for eclampsia and other pregnancy-related causes of death among women. We have profoundly different perspectives on the sexual experience. This also speaks to the old cliche – “Women need a reason to have sex. Men only need a place.” In other words, most women will not be willing to have sex unless they feel safe and affectionate or unless they are driven to it by complex and deeply unmet needs. Most men are willing to have sex simply because it’s Tuesday and they want pizza for supper.
And part of the difficulty for women is they need to choose a mate who is violent enough to provide and protect without being so violent or psychologically damaged that he will turn that violence inward and on to her, on to the family, his tribe, or his community. In this day and age, with so many deeply damaged men who have no idea what it means to be a man, this gets really really tricky and dangerous for women and kids, as well as for other men. This is part of the reason so many women get trapped and badly damaged by their attraction to the “bad boy” stereotype. Women can’t tell the difference between a “good enough” bad guy and an actual bad guy, and too many men are very good liars, or are too damaged to self-manage effectively. Men are competent in self-regulation, distress tolerance, executive function, and interpersonal effectiveness. Boys are not. Men own their responsibilities. Boys do not.
As a species we humans are pack-hunting apex predators and obligate meso-carnivores scoring higher on the carnivore scale than wolves but lower than cats. Look at our prey – we kill and eat everything from bugs to blue whales. We are fat-seeking meat-eaters and massive ecosystem engineers who alter every landscape we inhabit. And while women can certainly be violent, human males are the most lethal apex predator ever to walk this planet. If T-Rex still lived we would have fast food Dino-franchises in every country on the planet, and the ads would swear he tastes like chicken. Until we take steps as a global culture to reckon with that innate violence potential among human males – to own it and take real responsibility for it – nothing else we ever do will come to much beyond our own extinction.
The human male capacity for violence is extraordinary, and the only thing I know capable of taming it in any case is to awaken empathy and build a strong ethical structure in place in the young male before his capacity for violence gets set in concrete during and after puberty. This is tricky, because too much empathy makes a man too weak to kill an animal for food or too weak to defend his family when real violence is required. Too little empathy makes him arrogant, selfish, unkind, and overly brutal to others, especially to those weaker than he is. In the old days, the rest of the men in the tribe would just get together and kill an arrogant, abusive, bully male – take him out into the woods and make him climb the honey tree. It doesn’t quite work like that anymore, at least not in a society of laws.
That behavioral difference – too much or too little empathy – is also the distinction I personally make between a soldier and a warrior. A soldier is compliant, submissive, and obedient, and will follow orders without regard for any moral or ethical stance. A warrior owns his strength and knows his weakness. He lives and acts in service to his tribe. He is morally and ethically responsible for the expression of his power and his capacity for violence. He will provide for and protect his tribe and his family, and he will not permit or tolerate cruelty visited upon the weak. This is how we evolved as a species. Who did men protect women and children from? Other men. Predators.
We humans must learn to integrate that awareness of our capacity for violence so it doesn’t run us as a species. Embrace the shadow. You cannot manage that which is undistinguished – therefore it runs you. As long as we pretend we are harmless and deny the human capacity for violence it will continue to spill over onto everything we touch, including women, children, and all of the natural world. These are our kin – each and every one – from maggots to maples to men of other tribes. These are all our relations.
All our ancestral societies had methods and rituals to channel the predilection for risk-taking, adventure and achievement, and the innate violence of young men so they could learn how to protect and provide before those drives got misdirected and started to hurt the boys themselves or the tribe around them. We have lost that. We need to recreate it. One of the writers I have read about this topic says that men are wired for the three Ps – to Provide, Protect, and Procreate. To that I would add that we need to install self-mastery as an inescapable requirement for all males graduating from boyhood to manhood. If you cannot effectively manage yourself then you have no business managing anything or anyone else.
Another significant point about this which is likely utterly invisible to most men – over a couple decades of work in my emotional intelligence workshops when I have asked the men in the group what they do on a daily basis to protect themselves against sexual assault there is usually dead silence and puzzled looks. Eventually some wise guy in the back of the room will snicker and say he works real hard to not get arrested and sent to prison. All the other guys chuckle and guffaw. The first invisible thing here is that this too is an expression of the reality of male-pattern violence.
When I ask the women in the group that question (I have by now spent a couple days building trust and safety in the room) they get really nervous and after a bit of hesitation share volumes of experiences, many including descriptions and stories of specific sexual assaults that have happened to them personally, many women having had more than one experience. While the women are sharing this the men get very quiet and look completely stunned.
Understand, out of three workshops of about 40 people each (usually 50/50 or close to it) there will be one woman who has NOT had these experiences, and more than a third of the women had these experiences while they were still children, before they passed through puberty. Most of those women never reported the assaults to the authorities. In those cases where the assaults were reported, most of the perpetrators never went to prison or were held accountable.
The men have no idea. Most men don’t get it. It’s not part of their lived experience. The good ones are appalled and outraged and want to help. The guilty ones defend themselves, cast doubt, criticize, attack, invalidate, and deny.
And sad to say, too many men remain utterly blind to the reality. And thus they interpret women’s natural defensive reactions to men as hate. Nope. It’s about trust and safety. Women want us to step up, to do well, and to be the men they need. And… They want us to stop molesting, raping, beating, and murdering them. Feminism is about women having an equal voice, an equal vote (in all things), and being heard. That you don’t get that and that you misinterpret all of it is the perfect demonstration of why it is still so essential.
This is a real thing, it’s everywhere, and it’s inexcusable. And we men need to fix it. Women can support and help of course, but this is real men’s work.
I highly recommend these essays by Rob Henderson, by Jay, and by Jordan Peterson as well, where they talk about some of the same issues with young males, the differences between males and females, and some of the larger social conversations about what it means to be male:
Rob Henderson – Young Male Syndrome
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/understanding-the-young-male-syndrome
The Male-Warrior Hypothesis
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-male-warrior-hypothesis
Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity: The Meaning Behind The Meme
https://www.musclehacking.com/blog/reject-modernity-embrace-masculinity
Comment on the APA Guidelines for the Treatment of Boys and Men
Political Correctness – Beware the Ideologues in Psychologists’ Clothing
Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly
Masculinity – Dr. Roy Casagranda (about 2 hours)
We (in the human domains of knowing) understand a lot about how all this works. We even know how to fix it. We simply lack the political will to make it so.
Carmine Leo
04/02/24
https://www.carmineleo.com/
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