How We Can Stop Breaking Connection for Our Young Sons

An epidemic of male loneliness is at the root of the violence and aggression threaded though modern masculinity.

NYU Professor Niobe Way ’s research in her book Deep Secrets reveals how boys are trained out of close male friendships by our culture of masculinity. Seeking to prove they are not “little kids, girly, or gay” boys in late adolescence give up close friendships leading to lifetimes of male isolation.

Judy Chu documents this same ongoing process of socialized disconnection among little boys in a two year study of a cohort in a pre-K class. In her book, When Boys Become Boys, Chu’s research reveals how at just four years of age, boys are already being trained to hide their emotional acuity and take on the more stoic performance of masculinity our culture forces on them.

If we are to understand the violence and aggression threaded though modern masculinity, it’s crucial we see this first phase; the systemic process by which boys’ natural capacities for expression/connection are suppressed, isolating boys, making them susceptible to recruitment into hierarchical dominance-based masculinity and its associated retrogressive frames.

Once boys’ connection and expression are broken by lifelong bullying and policing, they are slotted into our dominance-based culture of masculinity and told they must learn to dominate all those around them or lose status, which will increase the number of men who can bully them.

But what is crucial to notice is HOW boys are bullied out of authentic expression and connection. Way’s research points to the language used in decades long hourly bullying. “What are you girly? What are you, gay?” The message is that the need for emotional expression, authentic connection, or close meaningful friendship is childish, feminine, or gay.

Dominance-based masculine culture falsely genders human connection as feminine and then denigrates the feminine to bully boys for decades into lifetimes of anxiety and isolation. Dr. Jean Kilbourne first made this crucial observation in her documentary Killing Us Softly. And it is here that we see the deep harm done to women. This lifelong process of denigrating the feminine as a primary method for policing boys' performance of masculinity brainwashes boys into believing that women and girls are less, often before we are even old enough to understand what is happening. Once boys are convinced that girls and women are less, it doesn’t take much to convince them that different races, sexual identities, gender performances, religions, immigration statuses, countries of origin, also make others less.

Often called Man Box culture, the narrow and limiting rules for being a man in dominance-based masculine culture can be interrupted and counteracted. Parents, teachers, coaches, family members can engage our sons in conversations and invite them to share their rich inner dialogues. We can create a container in which boys remain in ongoing conversations about their world and their lives on a daily basis. We help boys understand how empowering it is to bring their full authentic expression of self with all its contradictions and complexity. Educator and advocate Ashanti Branch has created a powerful model of this work with students as part of his Million Mask Movement.

Men like myself, long trapped on the empty treadmill of dominance-based masculinity, can break out by doing our men’s work, bringing back into focus our full authentic expression and connection. Organizations like The Mankind Project and Gender Equity and Reconcilliation International help men reconnect to our authentic human selves. There are many other ways as well. Therapy, books, podcasts are all paths to healing.

It should come as no surprise that dominance-based masculine culture directly fuels the bullying politics of political extremists like those in Trump’s MAGA movement. It fuels white supremacy, predatory capitalism, environmental destruction for profit, femicide, mass shootings, men’s suicide and more. It's time to end it and create instead a healthy masculine culture of connection.

For generations, men have defined strength as the ability to dominate others. We have been taught to see power as something we create OVER other human beings. This view has lead the human race to the brink of extinction. It’s time for men to marshal our courage and redefine masculine strength as the ability to create power WITH others.

The rage and confusion that millions of men feel is not born out of lack of status or economic power. Those are false notions of what will heal us. We are lost to ourselves because we were long ago bullied into hiding our authentic selves. Our dominance-based culture of masculinity has convinced us to spending lifetimes trying to prove what we are not.

Ourselves.

Want more resources to understand and break out of Man Box culture? Our podcast, videos, books and more are here: https://linktr.ee/RemakingManhood