The New York Times recently reported that “over the past four years, at least 10 people in South Texas have been victims of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping or rape” at the hands of United States Border Patrol agents. The agents — including one man who went on a 12-day killing spree targeting sex workers — are described to have “suddenly and violently snapped.”

This stands in stark contrast to President Trump’s repeated racist attempts to paint immigrants from Mexico as “killers and rapists.” Indeed the subtext of the Times‘ writing is that it’s not those who cross the border who should be feared, but those tasked with enforcing inhumane immigration policies against them.

The Times also suggests the possibility that “the very nature of Border Patrol agents’ work—dealing with vulnerable, powerless people, often alone on the nation’s little-traveled frontiers,” contributes to their ability to get away with their crimes, as well their inclination to commit them in the first place. After all, many of these attacks occurred prior to Trump’s reign of terror — including under President Obama — which suggests that the way the United States approaches border control has long been deeply racist and dehumanizing.

We also know that law enforcement officers across the United States are trained to treat people inhumanely, especially Black and brown people, and this reality has also led to a well-documented epidemic of mass incarceration and violence, including sexual violence. In fact, the New York Times also reported this month that women working in the Federal Bureau of Prisons face a near constant threat of assault and harassment, often from their own co-workers.

This portrait of Border Agents could also be applied to the ever-expansive pool of mass shooters, who are also often described as having mysteriously “snapped,” although it’s well-documented that they are largely straight men — typically white — and almost always have a history of violence against women. Not so mysterious.

Every day, men throughout society are encouraged to dominate “vulnerable, powerless people,” including those traversing well-traveled areas, and they know that they are very likely to get away with their aggression — or even be rewarded for it. This is not coincidence. It’s due in part to patriarchy, a social system that not only values men over women, but the behaviors which we describe as “masculine” over those which we call “feminine.” It is — as race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw emphasizes — inherently linked to white supremacy, capitalism, and other social systems rooted in ideals of dominance.

The very nature of Border Patrol agents’ work contributes to their ability to get away with their crimes, as well their inclination to commit them in the first place.
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And yet, none of the news reports above mentioned include the word patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, or any other reference to historically entrenched gendered oppression. Despite the array of blockbuster reports over the past two years unveiling sexual violence in various American institutions, we — especially men in power —  still seem far more comfortable discussing how the specific “nature” of certain environments lend themselves to rape than we are acknowledging that the very structuring of our society is the reason that these types of environments exist in the first place.

In Vivek Shraya’s new memoir, I’m Afraid of Men, the writer and artist never shies away from that bigger picture, beginning with a painstaking account of a day in her life as a trans South Asian woman living in Canada. We follow her as she faces a near constant barrage of sexism, misogyny, transphobia, and literal threats of violence as she walks out of her apartment, logs onto the Internet, does her job, and simply survives the day. Shreya underlines the ways in which the fear of men has been reinforced and affirmed throughout her life, from childhood onward.

In the Times article “Hazing, Humiliation, Terror: Working While Female in Federal Prison,” a prison employee named Jessica recounts something similar in relation to her working conditions:

Every single day something happened, whether it was an inmate jerking off to you, whether it was an inmate pushing you, whether it was a staff member harassing you through email, on a phone, following you to your car.

Both of these accounts echo the report on Border Patrol as well, in which one of the survivors, M.G., describes the moment when she, her daughter, and another woman from the same town in Honduras were first detained by the agent who would go on to attack them all:

“When I saw him, I said, ‘Thank God,’” M.G. said.

But they slowly began to worry as they sat on metal benches in the back of the truck. M.G. thought there was something strange about the way the man was breathing. At first, she tried not to show her fear to the girls.

“I pretended,” she said. “I tried to be strong.”

The acceptance of hypermasculine brooding, anger, and intimidation in our society means people become accustomed to, adept at, suppressing their legitimate fears in order to appease those in power. Not just in prison or while risking their lives to cross into a new country, but as Shraya writes, the fear of men “governs” the choices she must make “from the beginning of my day to the end,” from the way an email is written to deciding what to wear out the door. (Particularly as a trans woman of color).

None of the news reports mentioned include the word patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, or any other reference to historically entrenched gendered oppression.
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Ultimately, M.G. dragged herself out of the brush where she was left for dead and was able to alert another Border Patrol agent passing through. It seems to take such death-defying acts of heroism, or painfully-researched exposes in mainstream media, to even get us to face this violence. Yet, even then, there’s an avoidance of the deeper pattern.

The naming of patriarchy is largely discouraged by those in power because of patriarchy. As bell hooks has written:

Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word ‘patriarchy’ in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained.

To name patriarchy is to name the existence of historic gendered oppression, which is to name the existence of systemic bias against what we call femininity. And that is, in turn, an attack on the legitimacy of masculinity, the gender and sex binary, and how we are fundamentally taught to conceptualize power. In other words, naming patriarchy risks dismantling it.

In an essay for The Atlantic last year, Vann R. Newkirk II addressed the backlash against the increased use of “white supremacy” in the Trump era, responding to critics who argue that its usage has become overly broad. Newkirk clarified that this systemic “definition of white supremacy has long animated black activism,” including the work of Martin Luther King Jr., and efforts to reduce its scope have always been directly linked to the ever-expansive project of sweeping racism under the rug:   

The repackaging of Jim Crow into a “race neutral” set of policies didn’t just arise as a wink-and-a-nod deal in southern political backrooms a few years near the end of the civil-rights movement, but was a half-century-long project forged by thousands of lawyers and mainstream political leaders that costs millions of dollars, and was played out in every arena across the country from the Supreme Court to town hall meetings.

When we do tend to hear patriarchy these days it’s often in the form of the limiting phrase “the patriarchy” and it is similarly marginalized to “backrooms” where a certain group of powerful men apparently decide the fates of women. Indeed, some of the rebuttals to the existence of “the patriarchy” come down to the argument: but women are in those rooms too!

This diminishment and dismissal of the dominator culture in which we are swimming, happens in tandem with the avoidance of white supremacy and the fact that this society was in fact built upon white patriarchal violence. Despite the popularity of “intersectionality” as a buzzword—and the subsequent backlash to its use—we don’t often describe in detail the various systems of dominance, including capitalism and imperialism, which overlap to compound oppression.

Keeping these systems in obscurity serves a status quo in which indigenous women living in poverty, while carrying the generational trauma of genocide—on land targeted for environmental destruction—are still the most likely to be raped and assaulted (and usually by white men).

Extreme situations, like the dehumanization happening at our southern border or within our prison system, must be challenged, but isolating hypermasculine violence to particular conditions, independent of history, has also long been a tactic for avoiding cultural change. Or for dismissing unsavory problems as situational.

We’ve seen that in the way many have attempted to reduce Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement to a white Hollywood issue. Or in the way people like Trump blame terrorism on Muslims, or dismiss the epidemic of rape in the military by suggesting that it’s unavoidable in those conditions, asking incredulously, “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?.”  

The irony is that these attempts at narrowing the conversation always end up doing the opposite: If the situation is to blame, why are there so many different situations producing similar results? Why is it a given that men will attack women when in isolation? Why do we simply accept the terror of masculinity as a fact of life?

Connecting this all to patriarchy means a commitment to describing how aggression, violence, and dominance are normalized all around us. It requires our constant effort to link the idealization of masculinity to that of things like whiteness, thinness, ability, wealth, Christianity, cisnormativity, and the destruction of our environment. It demands a more complicated story.

Despite the popularity of “intersectionality” as a buzzword, we don’t often describe the various systems of dominance, including capitalism and imperialism, which overlap to compound oppression.
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At the end of I’m Afraid of Men, Shraya laments that “any ambiguity or nonconformity, especially in relation to gender, conjures terror. This is precisely why men are afraid of me. Why women are afraid of me too.”

What she yearns for is a world free of gendered expectations altogether, one in which we follow trans and gender-nonconforming people of color toward our “sublime” possibilities. Words alone do not ensure that safer, physical reality — a society without borders or prisons or hierarchies — but naming systems does force certain realities into the light. And perhaps dares us to look for a path.

A few days before his final confirmation hearings, during a nationally televised interview with FOX News, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was asked about Julie Swetnick’s allegation that he attended parties in high school where he touched girls “without their consent” and played a role in facilitating gang rape. Kavanaugh dismissed Swetnick’s memory by describing it as “ridiculous and like something from The Twilight Zone,” Rod Sterling’s classic science fiction series which, according to its opening sequence, took place in a “fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man.”

Kavanaugh’s comparison was unfortunately apt for how he and other men in power reacted to the recollections of Swetnick, Deborah Ramirez, and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford over the past few weeks. This was especially the case during those final hearings, when Senators on all sides of the political spectrum joined the then-nominee in suggesting that Dr. Ford’s sexual assault did not take place in the realm of normal American life—the wholesome world they all apparently live in—but rather an alternate dimension of the United States in which men violently dominate women with regularity.

This sort of illogical thinking was common on The Twilight Zone, which despite its surreal set-up was very much about the human condition. It depicted extreme scenarios like alien invasions and dystopian futures to illuminate the terror lurking in our cookie-cutter American neighborhoods; the propensity of people to bury their insecurities beneath the desire for power—with little regard for its impact on others. Or what Serling himself once described as “man’s seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.”

On the Republican side, this self-righteous perspective was maintained by bolstering Kavanaugh’s claim to being an all-American Christian kid at 16; a boy living universes away from the kind of parties where drunken teens force themselves onto classmates. In his testimony Kavanaugh painted his drinking and partying as completely normal for a young man, and Republican Senators were eager to accept and celebrate this (very) limited picture of normative white masculinity in 1982.

Meanwhile, the Democrats created their own image of Kavanaugh as an abnormally aggressive man. Men like Richard Blumenthal asked him about excessive partying, lewd yearbook quotes, and how often he drank to the point of forgetting parts of the night before, but each time Kavanaugh simply denied he did anything excessively at all. He angrily maintained that he did not live in that other dimension, but only the one where top-of-their-class young men occasionally have some beers with their bros. Kavanaugh went to great lengths to emphasize this American manliness, making sure to mention details like “Roger Clemens was pitching for the Red Sox” when asked about a booze-filled baseball trip he organized in law school.

The Senators failed to name then—even as they commended Dr. Ford’s bravery and spoke at length about what her message might mean for other survivors nationwide—the reality that “normal” American men not only like beer and baseball, but also regularly hurt women.

Senators suggested Dr. Ford’s sexual assault did not take place in the realm of normal American life, but rather an alternate dimension of the United States in which men violently dominate women with regularity.
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In fact, only 10% of American men list baseball as their favorite sport today, but a 2017 study found that 32% of college-aged men would have “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse” if they could get away with it. And though beer is the drink of choice for 41% of Americans, a staggering 81% of women in this country report being sexually harassed. 1 in 6 American women have survived an attempted or completed rape, the perpetrators of which are overwhelmingly men (and mostly white). All of which is to say, misogyny is at the very least as American as beer and baseball.

Yet, as Kavanaugh performed his exasperation at being linked to sexual violence, the men in the room never admitted that the scene Ford described was very familiar to them as well.

When Kavanaugh posed a threatening question back to Amy Klobuchar about her drinking habits, none of the other men chimed in to affirm that yes, they too have silently listened to, witnessed, or participated in the dehumanization of women. Men like Sen. Dick Durbin never countered the narrative that the multiple accusations against someone like Kavanaugh were “absurd,” but rather set out to prove that this straight white man, who attended elite schools and has remained in positions of power his entire life, would be unique in his behavior if he once used that power to hurt a person of another gender.

Misogyny is at the very least as American as beer and baseball.
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That is the lie—the binary of “good” and “bad” masculinity— that men so often hide behind. The same illusion, compounded and mirrored by the lie of white innocence, which carried a racist misogynist to the presidency two years ago even after he admitted to sexual assault. It’s no surprise then that President Trump himself has openly attacked the credibility of the Democratic men since the hearing, saying “I watch those senators on the Democrat side and I thought it was a disgrace. Partially because I know them…They are not angels.”

The fear men have to speak the truth about power in this country, who has it and how they got it, ultimately bolstered Kavanaugh’s “twilight zone” case for the Supreme Court. He knew it and Trump knew it. Kavanaugh’s faux-shock at being among the accused worked in the same way as Trump’s claim to “locker room talk” before it, because the other men in the room insisted on maintaining their own facade of innocence—afraid that if they spoke about patriarchy, they too might get kicked out of the club.

That is the lie—the binary of good and bad masculinity— that men so often hide behind.
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In one of the more famous episodes of The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” a seemingly perfect community is whipped into frenzied paranoia by a series of strange occurrences—beginning with a power outage and a little boy’s story about shape-shifting creatures—which ultimately leads them to turn on each other in search of the monster amongst them. The episode ends with a bloody brawl on Maple Street that exposes who these people really are.

Though many powerful men have reacted to the #MeToo movement by expressing fears of a “witch hunt,” the reality is that they themselves maintain the perception that some men are monsters worth stoning, while the rest are innocent bystanders. For instance, Matt Damon—who played Kavanaugh in a Saturday Night Live skit recently—once publicly worried about the “culture of outrage” targeting his friends in power, saying “there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation.” Which, just like Trump’s worrying for “young men in America,” expresses a desire for a hierarchy of masculinity rather than a willingness to look in the mirror.

Like those on Maple Street, the men in power in Hollywood and D.C. choose to ignore the systemic issue at hand, and instead focus on preserving their own position—regardless of how it might harm their neighbors. The Democratic men of the Senate, glad to use their five minutes during the hearing to perform their “decent” masculinity, were playing the same game as Kavanaugh: a game of avoidance and imagination. It’s not that many didn’t declare that they believed Dr. Ford, but that nearly all of them were unwilling to state that they have contributed to the culture which allows such violent acts to persist.

What patriarchy promises these men in exchange for this deflection, especially the white men, is the chance to play the hero on TV again (just like “good” Will Hunting). Meanwhile, Trump and his friends can confidently call survivors liars, knowing that the men around them will never expose the actual lie of masculinity.

But what might change if we weren’t afraid to connect sexual assault to that celebrated culture of drinking “brewskis” and playing football? What if we admitted on the largest stages that Brett Kavanaugh’s allegiance to American manhood is precisely why we should be terrified of giving him more power?

Among the most harrowing moments of Dr. Ford’s testimony was when she described Mark Judge’s actions—and inaction—while Kavanaugh was assaulting her in 1982. According to her account, Judge alternatively stood by laughing, encouraging his friend, and half-heartedly asking him to stop while Kavanaugh attempted to rip off her clothes. Dr. Ford even spoke of making eye contact with Judge at one point, hoping he might intervene. Yet he did nothing.

What if we admitted on the largest stages that Brett Kavanaugh’s allegiance to American manhood is precisely why we should be terrified of giving him more power?
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As long as men are unwilling to risk being as vulnerable in front of men as Ford and Anita Hill have been, the Kavanaughs and Trumps of the world cannot truly be challenged. They can yell and demand respect, because they know that we will adhere to the rules of the game.

To look on as someone is sexually assaulted, or to remain quiet as people are dismissed for sharing their stories of assault, is a dehumanizing way of being. Yet the illusion of normalcy, and the burying of empathy, is precisely how men have long cemented their power in this country. As the narrator says at the end of that episode on Maple Street, “the tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions.” Men are well-practiced and well-rewarded in maintaining our illusions.

When Donald Trump recently retweeted a meme depicting himself hitting Hillary Clinton in the back with a golf ball, the outrage from men on the left was swift and direct. Writer Stephen King said it was evidence of a “a severely fucked-up mind.” Former Vice President Joe Biden warned of its impact on children. And many across Twitter asserted that our collective lack of response to the president’s attacks on Clinton was contributing to the normalization of his misogyny.

This is, of course, a familiar cycle, sparked by a man who has repeatedly shown a particularly potent disregard for women.

Clearly, the intended idea behind the short video clip he shared is that he defeated Clinton in the November election, and effectively embarrassed her. But the original tweeter also included the hashtag #CrookedHillary with the meme; the not so subtle subtext of his post was that Clinton is somehow a deceptive person, perhaps even evil, and that Trump is a hero for knocking her down. What a sophomoric GIF becomes then really is a celebration of aggression — metaphysical and otherwise — towards women who have the gall to challenge men. (Which is, in-turn, part of the ideology at the core of Trump’s popularity, which is also why he was more than happy to share it.)

That being said, the response from men on the left who fear the “normalization” of Trump’s attitude towards women, as a result of his tweets, has an odd tone to it — mostly because hostility towards women online isn’t anything new, as anyone paying attention to the world wide web already knows.

A Pew study way back in 2005 found that women’s participation in online chat rooms had already fallen dramatically as a result of harassment and “worrisome behavior.” In 2014 things were still really terrible for women online, and Pew found that 26% of young women had “been stalked online” while “25% were the target of online sexual harassment.”

It’s not just that Trump often participated in this culture before he was a politician, but that memes showing violence against women have in many ways been synonymous with social media since its inception. Directing hate towards women is one of the primary ways in which a lot of men use social networks everyday. This anti-women culture online is by no means the result of Trump’s tweets; rather, his election directly reflects the fact that misogyny was and is the status quo in this country — online and off.

So while there should be outrage about the president encouraging the dehumanization of women online, something he has done consistently throughout his short political career, it’s worth wondering why many men insist on viewing Trump’s need for dominance as an outlier, as something special, rather than asking why these memes are so prominent on Twitter in the first place. Years after #GamerGate made national headlines, after countless women have told their stories of social media abuse, why do so many men still struggle to admit this is a ubiquitous problem?

The truth is Trump is not normalizing misogyny online —we already did that for him.

When Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network was accused of promoting misogyny in 2010, the famous screenwriter responded that he was simply reflecting the reality of the culture being built in Silicon Valley:

“I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80’s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)”

Sorkin’s dismissive last line is indicative of the kind of benevolent sexism which is basically his calling card, but his first point — seven years later and nine months into Donald Trump’s presidency — does feel somewhat prescient. Though he’s mistaken in thinking that the movie “nerds” of the ’80s weren’t also “deeply misogynistic,” or that his Hollywood boys club is any different, he was onto something about the ambitions of the men at the forefront of tech.

There’s one scene in The Social Network which actually conveys this particularly well, and it centers on Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake). The Napster founder is doing lines of cocaine at a Facebook party, high out of his mind and basking in a hypermasculine dreamscape, when he starts talking about the potential of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation to change the world.

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Trump’s election directly reflects the fact that misogyny was and is the status quo in this country — online and off.
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He excitedly proclaims: “first we lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the internet!” The framing, music, and lighting add a sinister undercurrent to Parker’s gleeful obliviousness (there are cops breaking up the party at that very moment). He’s certainly correct in predicting an increasingly virtual world, but the fact that this straight white man thinks it’s a given that such a development is a universally great thing is what’s so off-putting.

At each of the “revolutionary” crossroads in American history that Parker mentions — as the way people spent their days was fundamentally changed by technology — what the white men in power apparently didn’t question was how the previous systems, which they sought to improve upon, were built precisely to keep people like them in power.

Trump And The Dangerous Myth Of Good And Bad Men

And thus, when “reinventing” life, they mostly just replicated those old systems. In Sorkin’s script, Facebook is just Mark Zuckerberg’s slightly updated version of the “finals clubs” which once excluded him. All along the way, what men have largely failed to consider is that a central societal problem is that men don’t listen to women.

Thus it’s no surprise that a decade later we are indeed living on the internet, but are still mired in the same white supremacist patriarchal abyss which has defined life in the United States since day one. So-called “disruptive” companies like Uber have cultures which perpetuate abuse, and dating “innovations” like Tinder are used by men to further harass women. If our most popular social networks were designed by white men who desperately wanted the power which they thought they inherently deserved, it’s no coincidence that these very networks were utilized to spread the racism and misogyny that helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016.

Women — especially those women of color most vulnerable to the hate online — have been pointing out this truth since Facebook first launched. They’ve launched campaigns and organizations dedicated to combatting Internet harassment and threats of violence. They’ve made films, gone on speaking tours, and written about it constantly. And yet, so many men have remained silent, or ignored their warnings, only seeming to care when Donald Trump participated, there was a profitable movie to be made about it, or their stocks started to plummet.

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It’s no coincidence that social networks were utilized to spread the racism and misogyny that helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016.
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Misogyny online is often only a problem for men when it’s coming from the other ideological side. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem to exist — and certainly not in their own backyards. But at the root of this dismissive attitude is that same-old belief that once our side takes power — the “good” men — things will be somehow different. Society will be “reinvented” once more. And we will be able to justify ignoring women once again.

Most of the outrage at Trump’s misogyny has been directed at the man himself, and often these critiques from white men — much like those of his support for white supremacy — morph into broader criticisms of Trump’s un-presidential qualities. For instance, Rex Huppke, writing at the Chicago Tribune in response to the anti-Clinton meme, reflects on why Trump’s position is what’s most significant about his action:

“If someone on the internet wants to express opinions that I view as anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, sexist, racist and transphobic, that’s that person’s right. If that person wants to share a video that shows Trump whacking Clinton with a golf ball, I would think it’s unfunny and makes light of violence against women, but it would still be that individual’s right.”

Huppke’s point is that Trump’s retweet isn’t abnormal for a man online, but it is abnormal for a president — and thus should be treated differently. This is of course true, but it’s also true that Trump is well within his “rights” when disparaging women online. Misogyny is far from illegal. But the idea that other men are just expressing their “rights” when being hateful, while Trump’s tweets are worthy of a real response, leads to some disturbing questions. Namely, would men still be writing these op-eds about online misogyny if the president wasn’t involved?

How My Abusive Father Helped Me Understand Trump Supporters

Jared Yates Sexton, whose tweet about Trump’s meme has over 35,000 retweets, describes the president’s action as part of his “abnormal and dangerous behavior that is quickly eroding the American system of government.” Sexton is afraid that Trump laughing along with misogynistic tweets contributes to a loss of “democratic customs,” and he joins the chorus of those who warn that we’re edging closer and closer to fascism as a result.

But is the Clinton meme just dangerous because of how it dishonors the office of the president? Is misogyny only scary if it leads to dictatorial rule? Aren’t rape culture and patriarchy already terrifying enough? Sexton also writes that “an alarm needs sounding and outrage is prudent in the face of outrageousness” — but it’s significant that so many didn’t think that threats of violence directed at women on Twitter were outrageous before Trump started cosigning them on a national stage.

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Is misogyny only scary if it leads to dictatorial rule?
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This isn’t to suggest that Trump, as president, doesn’t wield enormously more power and influence. He is certainly further enabling the actions of violent, racist white men by approving of their beliefs from the White House. But it doesn’t take much to paint Trump as a monster — he does that work for you. What’s harder is for men to actually admit how utterly normal and recognizable his attitudes are; that Trump isn’t the first misogynist-in-chief, and that his behaviors are institutionally supported by the very democracy we’re worried he might torpedo. What’s difficult is teaching boys to reject the everyday culture of masculinity which all straight cisgender men grew up in and continue to participate in.

Hating Trump alone doesn’t teach boys to respect people of other genders, embrace femininity, or reject white supremacy. Most of the women killed each year in the United States are murdered by men who are their intimate partners, and a majority of these killings involve prior domestic violence. This happens without the president’s input, and was the case before he took power. Misogyny is deeply embedded in American society and supported by actual policies which demean, dismiss, and degrade women — especially Black and brown women.

Social media reflects this reality, but so does the entire landscape of visual entertainment. The meme which Trump retweeted wouldn’t stand out on TV, at our local movie theater, or in mainstream porn. And media which calls out this view of women, which shows men being non-violent role models or even just discussing the truth about the epidemic of violence against women in this country, is basically nonexistent. Shows like Westworld — which exploit images of women being abused and raped — are critical and commercial hits, while stories about a DV-related mass murder in Texas barely make a blip on our news timelines.

Biden worries that “our kids are watching,” but the kids have always been watching. Most teenage boys in this country have already seen far worse done to a woman onscreen than they’ll ever see on Trump’s Twitter feed — but they may never hear their parents, coaches, and teachers who are men say a word about patriarchy. And even though many young boys growing up in the households of Democrats might very well understand that Trump is decidedly gross and not a role model, our end goal can’t just be convincing boys to reject Trump. Because Trump is not a “lone wolf”— he’s a product of the same pervasive system those boys are growing up in right now.

In other words, it shouldn’t take Trump or Clinton to get us to respond to the institutional hatred of women. Or about the way social media has been weaponized to attack all those who aren’t straight white cisgender men. It should be widely acknowledged that misogynoir is a “normal” part of life in this country, or that bragging about hurting women has always been a foundational element of American masculinity.

These are not questions we need answering, but truths we should have already faced. The real question now is how committed men are, as the president moves on to other targets, to actually dismantling patriarchy. Are we really willing to change how we use social media? To call out misogyny in all its forms? Long after Trump is out of office, will we support those challenging these corporations to change their harassment policies? Are we willing to give up our own power? And will we finally begin to listen to, believe in, and be led by women?

A 27-year-old man with a history of abusing his girlfriend killed five people in Alabama last week, apparently because they tried to help her leave him. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have now been at least 248 mass shootings in the first eight months of the year, which continues an alarming upward trend in this kind of violence in the U.S.

In a 2015 essay for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explored whether or not the frequency of reported shootings in America has created a self-propagating “phenomenon” — with each new act increasing the likelihood that another person, somewhere in the country, will soon lash out.

Referencing the work of sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell posits that school shooters, as a group, function much like a riot, in that each new participant’s “threshold,” at which they are compelled to join, is lowered by those before them. Riot instigators may be those on the brink of desperation, or people willing to destroy property for little reason at all, but at some point even otherwise “law-abiding” citizens tend to also suddenly take part in chaos. Gladwell uses this model to explain why it’s become so hard to create a single profile for shooters, or predict who might be next:

“The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

This echoes a 2015 New York Times analysis of mass shootings in general, which concluded that “what seems telling about the killers . . . is not how much they have in common but how much they look and seem like so many others who do not inflict harm.”

Yet both the Times and Gladwell come to their conclusions while only glancing at a certain commonality: that these shooters are nearly all men (and mostlywhite men at that). Furthermore, these writers seem to presuppose that there is a “normal” or healthy ideal of how young men should behave in America. Which suggests that if it just weren’t for all these high-profile massacres, perhaps the threshold for violence amongst men would have remained higher, and so many of them would not be choosing to “inflict harm” on society.

But, in the year of Donald Trump, as we process the loss of more than 270 lives at the hands of mass shooters — whether in Alabama, at a gay club in Orlando, or on the streets of Dallas (not to mention attacks in Munich, Fort Myers, Baton Rouge, Istanbul, Dhaka, Baghdad, Nice, Kalamazoo, and too many other places to list) — it’s important to ask the question again: What exactly is “healthy” behavior for men? When exactly do boys learn how to be men in ways that do not inflict harm on society?

Gladwell himself makes a strong case for broadening our lens on this topic, in further explaining Granovetter’s research:

“[Granovetter] was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. ‘Most did not think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,’ he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. ‘But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.’ You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.”

Similarly, mass shooters in this country can’t be entirely separated from Granovetter’s group of boys who act recklessly out of a fear of being called “sissies.” It seems likely that the killer in Orlando, who targeted a gay nightclub that he himself visited (and who also had a history of domestic violence), shared an overt fear of femininity. The shooter at UC Santa Barbara in 2014, who made a confessional video listing his frustrations with women, was also clearly disturbed by the idea of appearing less than manly. As were countless other killers before and after them.

And though a majority of young men do not become murderers — or even “delinquent boys” — it’s no stretch to say they are mostly being socialized to carry in their hearts that same fear. So perhaps we should consider that so-called “healthy” visions of masculinity exist at the edges of society (if at all), and that the dislike of women and all things “feminine” is much closer to the center.

If mass shootings are akin to a new kind of cultural “riot,” then, it is a riot born in the traditional culture of masculinity — thriving in a country built on the macho mass violence of genocide and slavery. And it is occurring within a global society still dominated by hypermasculine straight white men, and where men of all backgrounds are cheered more for their loyalty to other men, than for their resistance to oppression.

But why exactly has this particular threshold been lowered in the last few decades? Gladwell points to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High, and the way news of that spree, and many subsequent ones, spread online and openly taught young men the rituals of mass killing. He emphasizes the role of visual storytelling in this process:

“[T]he sociologist Nathalie E. Paton has analyzed the online videos created by post-Columbine shooters and found a recurring set of stylized images: a moment where the killer points his gun at the camera, then at his own temple, and then spreads his arms wide with a gun in each hand; the closeup; the wave goodbye at the end. ‘School shooters explicitly name or represent each other,’ she writes.”

Illustrating this point, last month in Munich, a man who killed nine people at a shopping mall was found to be using the photo of another shooter (who killed 77 in Norway exactly five years before attack) as his own WhatsApp profile picture.

These killers don’t consume or create their stylized images of masculinity in a vacuum, though. We have long seen them elsewhere. If those who planned Columbine “laid down the ‘cultural script’ for the next generation of shooters,” as Gladwell writes, they did so within the context of other scripts and images which have also encouraged young men to, as Gladwell put it, “contemplate horrific acts.”

If knowing the stories of past shooters helps to lower the barrier of entry for these killers — or if this is a riot “in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before,” as Gladwell claims — perhaps it’s worth thinking more about how these stories intersect with those we most often tell about men.

Like all American institutions of power, popular cinema — one of our most celebrated forms of storytelling — is filled with white men, and is often centered on a conception of masculinity which encourages a fear of being called a “sissy.”

The stars of the year’s top live-action film, Captain America: Civil War (Captain America and Iron Man, played by Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr.), or in last year’s blockbuster Jurassic World (Owen Brady, played by Chris Pratt), were not hellbent killers, but seemingly noble heroes intent on saving humanity from evil. These guys recall beloved movie characters like Han Solo, the kind of hard-shelled, wise-cracking white men who aren’t afraid to bend a few rules in pursuit of justice.

That seems different than how we might initially describe someone like Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver’s “lone wolf” protagonist who plots the execution of a presidential candidate and takes out his frustrations by murdering a pimp. Yet films like Taxi Driver or Reservoir Dogs aren’t cult hits because they necessarily differ from the status quo of popular cinema, but because they zero in on specific, familiar representations of masculinity, and then take them to extremes.

Why The ‘New Masculine’ Movement Is Just As Toxic As The Old One
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Similarly, SUNY professor Tristan Bridges says that instead of seeing mass shooters as “outliers or oddballs . . . we should actually think of them as conformists . . . They’re over-conforming to masculinity.” The truth we tend to avoid is that the norm is for men to be valued for harmful anti-social behaviors, and that most stories about men, intentionally or not, reinforce this norm.

Physical toughness, lack of emotion, and power over women are just as linked and celebrated in blockbusters like Captain America, or this year’s Deadpool, as they are in films like Taxi Driver, only slightly more obscured by romantic subplots, CGI-ed villains, or a framework of fantasy. But at his core, the immensely popular Iron Man is also a “lone wolf” type who rarely cries, makes rape jokes, and uses aggression to gain the respect of other straight men.

How many of our favorite movies — from American Sniper to Dirty Grandpa to The Revenant — give men ways of overcoming challenges that don’t appeal to aggression, power over women, and other limiting ideas of “manliness”?

Films like Batman vs. Superman tend to reiterate that (white) men are entitled to control, and that acceptance into the “group” of masculinity requires dominance. But they also risk providing a script for how men should go about obtaining that power — or at least reaffirm the vision of what it looks like to “become a man.” This echoes the underlying messages about masculinity we see in the videos of mass shooters, or even ISIS propaganda.

And, at the end of the day, there is no mainstream counter narrative for how masculinity should be performed. Instead we see Hollywood’s ideas about the man “club” replicated in mainstream politics, in the culture of law enforcement, popular music, comic books, video games, and in our everyday lives. Adding extreme violence to that mix — or guns, or racist, homophobic, or otherwise oppressive rhetoric — only fans the already rising flames.

In The Atlantic, James Hamblin recently expounded on the problem of “toxic masculinity,” but again emphasized its specificity: “The idea of toxic masculinity is — critically — not a sweeping indictment of bros or gender. It’s an admission that masculinity can be toxic at times.”

Yet, just as in Hollywood, “toxic masculinity” remains the most pervasive mode of masculinity in this country. Our patriarchal constitution, embedded in white supremacy, was written with these very behaviors in mind. As R.W. Connell has described, there are indeed many different “masculinities” in existence, and race, ethnicity, class, and a myriad of other factors can alter one’s experience. But the version we most often see, hear, and value — everywhere from cable news to talk radio to within our police departments — is primarily toxic.

This same fear of being excluded from the club is exactly what’s fueling Donald Trump. And though it’s certainly terrifying, we can no longer pretend that his is a fringe vision of manhood.

Toxic masculinity remains the most pervasive mode of masculinity in this country.
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It’s no coincidence that one of the common ways men criticize Trump is by resorting to the same type of hypermasculine shaming which accelerated his rise — ridiculing his penis size or calling him a “wuss.”

Can we expect to put out the fire in the hearts of “violent” men if we don’t recognize that we — all of us who have been socialized to be men — are also standing in flames? That we are a part of that same riot?

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t critique the inciting words of men in power, or completely denounce the thinking of mass shooters, but that we might spend more time considering broader context — and looking inward. Because improving mental health care or eliminating access to guns alone (just like removing extreme violence from cinema) will not change the harmful context of masculinity. Neither will defeating Trump.

In fact, we might ask ourselves: In our pursuit of a “healthier manhood,” are we more interested in creating a safer and more equitable world for others, or just putting ourselves above the ugliness of these men — creating new hierarchies? Why is it that straight cis men are more comfortable talking about “reimagining masculinity” than simply embracing “femininity”? Are we still holding onto that same fear of being called a “sissy,” of being associated with women?

Gladwell frames that New Yorker essay around the life of John LaDue, a young man who was caught planning a school shooting in Minnesota. The writer suggests that perhaps LaDue, who “never expressed a desire to hurt anyone,” was more attracted to the ritual of being a mass shooter — like a rioter who stumbles into the crowd — than he was to the end result:

“LaDue was fascinated — as many teen-age boys are — by guns and explosions. But he didn’t know the acceptable way to express those obsessions.”

Isn’t it strange that there is an “acceptable” way to express a desire to destroy others? As bell hooks writes, “many boys are angry, but no one really cares about this anger unless it leads to violent behavior. If boys take their rage and sit in front of a computer all day, never speaking, never relating, no one cares.”

On the 4chan message board where a 2015 shooter in Oregon allegedly left evidence of his plan, there are a number of casual replies from men who offer ideas on how to best enact mass murder. Most of them may not have imagined they were talking to someone who was seriously planning one, and yet they feign seriousness as a way to impress others — to prove their masculinity. And as subsequent reports revealed, the deceased killer himself may have once been one of those men, with those “obsessions,” who performed on message boards in an effort to be acknowledged by others.

These men may perceive themselves to be anti-establishment, but they are in fact — like Trump, Deadpool, or the Orlando shooter — just replicating the same systems of the establishment. The same fear of isolation, and same obsession with gaining entry into the club.

LaDue eventually received a plea deal, and on the day of his last hearing, Gladwell recounts how his father, David LaDue, stood outside the courthouse answering reporter’s questions:

“He wanted to remind the world that his son was human. ‘He had love,’ LaDue said. ‘He liked affection like anybody else.” [ . . . ] He talked about how difficult it was for men — and for teen-age boys in particular — to admit to vulnerability.”

Before he learned the rituals of mass shooters, John LaDue was taught the rituals of manhood. The way you must shut yourself down to matter. How physical force always speaks louder than a cry for help. These are the ideas which have been plaguing society since long before the Columbine shootings, September 11th, or the hateful murders at Pulse nightclub.

Regardless of what else we do, without transforming our cultural understanding of gender — without being vulnerable as people who call themselves men, without embracing love and what we call feminine, and including ourselves in this work of better, less gendered storytelling — the riot will rage on, taking new forms, attracting more and more fearful people searching for a way to prove that they belong.