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. /2
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. /3
Cultures can be religious, corporate, political or social, based sometimes on rigid delineations of, and at other times the intermingling of, class, race, gender, creed and other categories of social identity. /4
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. /5
Those with less power often resist those definitions. /6
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. /7
This process is ongoing, caught up in the push and pull of generations, gender, race, sexuality, religion, politics and the larger culture. /8
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. /9
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,... /10
... disrupting our sense of who we are and how our world operates. /11
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”? /12
These are ideas we can all get behind, right? But it’s not playing out that way. /13
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. /14
#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.” /16
...about our own masculine identities. Which makes talking about #MeToo the single conversation many men do NOT want to have. /18
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. /19
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. /20
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. /21
This is the second chapter of The Little #MeToo Book for Men, what Dr. Caroline Heldman, Executive Director of The Representation Project calls "A blueprint for men's liberation." Available online at Barnes & Noble: barnesandnoble.com/w/the-little-m… 
Also at Barnes & Noble online. Free Shipping. barnesandnoble.com/w/the-little-m…
barnesandnoble.com/w/remaking-man…
barnesandnoble.com/w/remaking-man…
