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Mark Greene

17 Aug, 35 tweets, 6 min read

THREAD: Chap. 23 from Remaking Manhood in the Age of Trump, Collected writings in the battle against dominance-based masculinity 2017-2021--
"We’re All Incels on This Bus"
Because we’re raised in Man Box culture, we all contain fragments of extremists’ world views /1

Incel stands for involuntary celibate. Incels declare openly that men who don’t get selected by women for sex are justified in responding with anger and violence. /2

Incels wrongly argue that women’s choices in sex partners are completely determined by hypergamy – choosing partners based exclusively on bettering their financial or social position, which includes only dating men who are attractive to look at. /3

Incels have committed multiple mass shootings. An incel drove a van onto a busy sidewalk in Toronto, killing ten and injuring sixteen others. /4

The more I research incels, the more I realize they are not so far removed from the rest of us. The incel worldview arises from the roots of the same tree, our larger culture of masculinity, where all our ideas about how to be a man originate. /5

Incels may exist on that limb “over there” but the idea that the culture of masculinity that created us is also capable of creating them should be deeply troubling to any man reading this. /6

Incels direct their anger towards Stacys, the idealized and objectified women they can’t have because idealized men called Chads get all the best partners for themselves. They see hypergamy as “imprinted on our DNA” and playing out in modern society when women pass them over. /7

To hold these ideas, incels must steadfastly refuse to acknowledge men’s capacities for healing, connection, growth, empathy, rich emotional expression and, yes, romantic love. They must also view “higher value men” from the narrow and restrictive frame of Man Box culture. /8

How incels and other masculinity extremists construct language is quite telling. Incels talk about higher value men and women controlling the sexual marketplace, language choices that place the miraculous diversity of sexual intimacy firmly in the realm of the transactional /9

This should come as no surprise, given that our dominance-based culture of masculinity prioritizes roles and status over relationships and values power created over others versus power created with others. /10

The cold mechanics of transactions are the Man Box model for relating to women. “I’ll give you what you want if you’ll give me sex.”

Man Box love, y’all.

/11

Man Box Culture Spawns Masculinity Extremists. So-called Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs), and incels represent the best-known incarnations. /12

I have coined this term in order to mark incels' positionality on the outer edges of our larger continuum of masculinity. /13

Incels, like all of us, grew up in our bullying Man Box culture, taught that being a man means never showing emotions (unless it’s anger), and means always being dominant, making lots of money, asserting control over women, having lots of sex, never being gay, and so on /14

The bullying rules of Man Box culture are actually secondary to it's primary purpose, which is to instill in boys and men the dominance-based model of masculinity, which is authoritarian, moving power and control ever upward on the pyramid of control it maintains. /15

Man Box culture leaves boys and men emotionally traumatized, cut off from connection, vulnerable to being recruited into masculinity extremists’ violent views of male victimhood. /16

The direct connection between Man Box culture and masculinity extremism is here: The disconnection we create in our sons is the result of two critical factors: 1) We bully boys out of authentic emotional expression and connection. 2) We do this by *denigrating the feminine.* /17

We bully boys into hiding their emotions by saying, “What are you, a girl?” or “What are you, a sissy?” In this way, we wrongly gender universal human relational capacities for emotional expression as feminine, and then hammer away at boys with the message that female is less /18

By the time boys reach adolescence, they have heard daily messages denigrating their supposedly feminine need for emotional expression and connection since infancy. /19

Eventually, they give up their close friendships in order not to be seen by other boys as “a little kid, girly or gay.” This leads to lifetimes of male disconnection and isolation. /20

And because the denigration of the feminine is central to how we police boys into isolation, many of us look right past decades of brutal bullying at the hands of other boys and men and instead blame women, especially feminist women, for our challenges. /21

It’s a blind spot of startling proportions, wherein men avoid unpacking a lifetime of brutality and bullying by other men, but become enraged when women refuse to accept this bullying as well. There is a massive cognitive dissonance in this moment. /22

Women’s rejection of dominance-based masculinity highlights men’s refusal to challenge it. We see our own histories of victimhood as perpetrated by other boys and men laid out before us, and unable to face that trauma and shame, we instead attack the messenger, feminism. /23

As long as our default culture of masculinity is dominance-based, boys will continue to struggle, expressing their manhood in dangerous and unhealthy ways, resulting in the kind of anger and rage that makes them susceptible to extremism of all kinds. /24

Incels, MRAs and MGTOWs are the canaries in the coalmine of our larger dominance-based culture of masculinity. The distorted rationalizations of incel victimhood are darkly familiar to many of us men. /25

Extremist rage towards women is a by-product of our collective unwillingness to unpack the isolating trauma inflicted on us by Man Box culture. Too easily, voices whisper in the back of all our minds, “Women have all the advantages now. The world isn’t fair to men,” and so on /26

To be an incel, you must declare over and over how ugly a person you are. By sucking up all of the oxygen in the room, the incessant “me, me, me” of incels’ self-loathing narrative seeks to obscure a single moral absolute.
No one owes anyone sex. /27

In a sane society, the right to say “no” to any request for physical or emotional intimacy is paramount. Too many men’s failure to respect this moral absolute is what is fueling the white-hot core of the #MeToo movement. /28

Women are becoming more powerful. They and the men who are their allies are creating a world where abusive men are being challenged. This is leading to a crisis in our dominance-based culture of masculinity. /29

Angry, retrogressive voices are calling for open war against women, LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants, religious minorities and others, and the outcome of this battle is by no means guaranteed to go well. /30

It's an assault on our larger democratic institutions clothed in the rage of sexual frustration and hate, fueled by ugly bigoted notions of white and male supremacy. By broken men obsessed with dominance when what we really want and need is human connection and community. /31

Incels, MRAs and other masculinity extremists are nothing new. Girls and women have been survivors of men’s sexual frustration and violence throughout the history of the world. /32

Incels are the result of Man Box culture. A culture that will not go away until hundreds of millions of men make the conscious choice to replace it with a healthy masculine culture of connection and compassion. This one isn't just on us, gentlemen...

this one is us.

/33