How to Spot a Male Supremacist
It’s in the victimhood narrative.
Men’s Rights Activists weaponize men’s trauma to drive male supremacy narratives. Weirdly, both male and white supremacists lean heavily into male victimhood narratives. “We’re being erased.” It’s a crucial piece of how they convince their populations to justify violence.
Make no mistake. Men are in pain. We do need advocates. This is the work I do, advocating for boys and men. Men are dealing with very real and ongoing trauma inflicted by our dominance-based culture of masculinity. As boys we are stripped of emotional expression and connection and then slotted into our bullying dog-eat-dog hierarchical masculine culture, which is both violent and deeply isolating.
The very same men who accrue power by using bullying and violence to enforce dominance-based masculinity, then weaponize boys’ resulting trauma against women. Its a nasty slight of hand that far too many young men fall prey to.
The solution? We need to intercede daily in the lives of young boys before our culture of masculinity strips them of their natural, joyful, deeply human capacities for emotional expression and relational intelligence. We can invite them to share what they are observing and confirm their authentic expression of self. We can insure every day that young boys feel seen and heard. In these ways we validate everything that makes them fully human.
When we abandon boys to the larger culture, boys are convinced to hide much of who they are. Lifelong anxiety and isolation is the result. This new study published in Journal of Affective Disorders about men’s anxiety confirms the challenges created by conformity to so-called masculine “norms.” The study is titled Men’s anxiety: A systematic review.
From the article summary:
• Men reported unique constellations of anxiety symptoms.
• Men oriented to self-reliance over formal help-seeking for anxiety disorders.
• Men employed problem-based coping strategies for anxiety disorders.
• Masculine norms contradicted with help-seeking and the experience of anxiety.
Conforming to restrictive masculine norms (Man Box culture) results in lifetimes of deep anxiety for us as boys and men. Man Box culture’s rules against admitting weakness or seeking help means men lean into dominance behaviors in order to maintain illusions of masculine control, further eroding our personal and professional relationships, leading to epidemic levels of self-medication, isolation, anxiety, violence, suicide and other drivers of early mortality
Why is being a witness to boy’s experiences such a powerful counter agent? It creates a container within which boys can explore their full range of authentic expression and identity. This leads to a tipping point where our dominance-based culture of masculinity’s narrow, brittle version of masculinity no longer holds any appeal. “Why would I chose to live that way?”
1) We can insulate boys from abandoning their powerful capacities for authentic connection.
2) We can invite men back into connection via men’s work with organizations like The Mankind Project or via therapy. The solutions are there. We just need to act in our immediate circles.
I advocate for men’s issues. I oppose Men’s Rights Activists because those voices push male victimhood narratives that encourage men to blame women. Want to tell men like me apart from MRA’s? Look for the victimhood narratives. Look for the blaming of women.
Here is an animation on dominance-based masculinity we recently released.
Mark Greene is the author of The Little #MeToo Book for Men and Remaking Manhood in the Age of Trump. These and more of Mark’s books are available here: amzn.to/3iTG69H
Mark is co-host of Remaking Manhood, The Healthy Masculinity Podcast
Mark is available on Twitter and Instagram @RemakingManhood
Mark’s website is RemakingManhood.com
