This Sunday’s essay was supposed to be about men and how they manage their sexuality. I was going to talk about how society, and particularly the media, portray an image that sets many men up for failure in sexual relationships.
And then the images started flowing into my newsfeeds about women and old men being thrown to the grown by heavily armored and armed figures, who, on the surface, bore something of a resemblance to men.
I saw videos posted about children being woken up from their sleep, as their families’ apartment building was flash banged by rappelling storm troopers. (Yeah. Storm Troopers.)
The common thread through all of these stories is that grown adults agreed to be the perpetrators of this violence against other humans.
Crying women thrown to the ground. Children traumatized. American businessmen sent to the hospital with injuries because heavily armed soldiers were rampaging through his car wash.
If you’re reading this and you have some kind of counterpoint, get the fuck out of here. I have no time for you.
I grew up with an angry Italian father who had a hard time holding back his rage when I was young. In our family business, I hauled lumber and construction materials on my back and shoulders for eight years. When I was 20, I lost the tip of one finger in a table saw splitting a 2x6 for a customer. I played ice hockey and was an enforcer for my coach.
I have no problem cursing. I have no problem telling someone to “go fuck off” when that’s what they finally need to hear. I have no problem using my fists when I absolutely have to.
But hurting women? Making children cry and filling them with fear when you have other options?
If you approve of any of this shit being forced on other humans, if you think there are no alternatives to solving America’s problems, you need to reassess what it means to be a man.
There is no reason for this disgraceful exhibition of mindless aggression. And it’s part of the reason why I started this Substack — to get some people to look at themselves and the world we are co-creating, and ask ourselves to be better humans.
Becoming a man means understanding what one is
When a boy grows into a real man, he realizes that on average, we are bigger, stronger and faster than the average woman and child. (I’ve met some pretty big teenage boys.)
That’s when a switch should go off in his head that he needs to be mindful of how his emotions can accelerate outside his control and cause him to use his advantage to the detriment of others.
What I see in all of these people in camouflage, with sidearms and automatic weapons, night vision goggles, armored vests and zip-ties, are boys who never grew up. They are stuck in their teens with an immature understanding of masculinity and biology.
You see it in the Clearer Thinking Gender Continuum Test results. The largest male-leaning traits, used in the wrong context, can lower the brakes on aggression and cause the scenes that are flooding our newsfeeds today:
Thick-Skinned: lower sensitivity to others’ distress; helps in high-stress jobs, but can interfere with empathy.
Risk-Taking: greater willingness to accept physical/legal/social risk; increases likelihood of the use of force when situations are ambiguous.
Self-Defending: heightened vigilance for threat/insult; can tilt toward hostility in charged situations.
At Ease / Self-Valuing / Improvisational: confidence and fast, on-the-spot decisioning; good under pressure but can shorten deliberation windows.
Men also are lower than women in traits like being Unselfish, Compassionate, Peaceful, Emotionally Aware, Forgiving and Warm/Amicable; behaviors that would otherwise support perspective-taking, and encourage de-escalation and restraint in the face of provocation.
These personality qualities can help some men dash into burning buildings, or run toward danger to protect us. Those same traits, without the right culture and training, can also tilt a hazy, difficult moment toward human harm.
It’s like kindling on a fire in situations that are intense, fast-moving, ambiguous, or dehumanizing. Whether that fire flares up or not depends heavily on other factors, like leadership, the norms a man has been raised in, accountability.
Self-control is manly self-worth
Living near West Point for nearly three decades, I had the great pleasure and privilege of meeting dozens of graduates, and very often veterans of real wars.
One man I became good friends with became an Apache helicopter pilot after he graduated. He served in the first Iraq war. He did not like to speak about his service, because, as he told me once, “every time I pressed the ‘fire’ button on that stick, I knew I was probably taking a life.”
As a Christian, he regretted taking lives and was not proud of the result of his actions, though he was proud to have served and defended his fellow soldiers on the ground.
What my friend described and how he described it is NOT what I see in these cosplaying, penis-bearing individuals (I refuse to call them “men”) in America today.
We have seen this show before, and if you haven’t studied history, let me help you.
Raids and dawn arrests are high-arousal settings. Providing participants with poor leadership, anonymity (a.k.a face masks), and out-group cues (a.k.a military uniforms vs civilians, “us” versus “illegals/threats”), sets them up for a rapid decline into ugliness.
Just ask the veterans from Charlie Company who entered the village of My Lai in 1968. Or ask historians about the Waffen SS, who in December 1944 massacred 84 U.S. Army prisoners in Malmedy, Belgium.
Just ask any adult Jewish American. They very likely have met a Holocaust survivor and/or have family members who were killed by individuals who were “just doing their job.”
Below is a picture taken in Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. Take a long look at the faces of these women and children. The likelihood that any of them survived being “rounded up” is slim to none.
This is what happens when heavily armed men, indoctrinated to fear and hate “others” aren’t properly trained and led.
The scene above comes from file footage from the 1941 pogrom in Iasi, Romania. 15,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered by Romanian supporters of the Nazi Third Reich.
I am very fond of someone who is alive today, who has two children alive today, only by the stroke of good fortune that her Romanian parents weren’t among those 15,000.
Yet, despite these facts, every day I walk among, work with, and smile at Americans who seem to believe “that will never happen here. This is totally different.”
Bullshit.
The dehumanization of Jews in Romania started long before 1941. In 1866, Ion Brătianu, Romania’s Minister of Finance, labeled the Jews a “social plague” for Romania, that…
“…pure and simply because of their large number threaten, as everyone acknowledges, our nationality....Only [strong] administrative measures can save us from this calamity and prevent this foreign underclass from invading our country.”
Words and concepts like these were repeated over and over again for decades, until men with guns took fear and brutality into their own hands on June 28, 1941 — while most of their Romanian Christian neighbors no doubt stood by and watched.
Is that what you want to be today here in America?
Is that what it means to be an “American man?”
It IS happening here
Recently, I had a mostly civil discussion with a group of adult male friends about what is going on in America today. I know these men very well. We get together regularly for coffee and conversation.
I noticed something cold and distant during a recent exchange we had about America’s immigration policies and how some popular influencers and commentators talk about immigrants — and even about African Americans.
They seemed indifferent to the denigration of “others.”
These commentators, they explained to me, have the right to “free speech,” to label non-white Americans as more stupid, lazy, more criminal, than “us.” At no point did they express horror at the comments I showed them from one particular popular commentator. In fact, they wondered how much of what he said “was taken out of context,” when there was not nearly enough context to gloss over his racism.
The ultimate revealing irony is that one of these adult males recently married his South American girlfriend, who apparently has been living and working in America for years on an expired visa. But it was okay for her to stay, and for him to try to do everything he could to keep her in this country.
All those other “illegals?” They need to be deported.
Across hundreds of studies, prejudice reliably rides on two human characteristics adjacent to what we see in the 18 Clearer Thinking traits:
Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) — preference for group hierarchies and inequality between groups. Men score higher on SDO quite robustly. It predicts harsher attitudes towards low-status or stigmatized groups and stronger endorsement of force to maintain hierarchy.
Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) — submission to established authorities, aggression in the name of authority, and conventionalism. This predicts prejudice against groups seen as norm-violating or threatening social order. (Gender gaps are smaller and less consistent here than for SDO.)
When we talk about “them” as less than fully human, we’re not just being rude — we are flipping neurological and cultural switches. Decades of research show that seeing an outgroup as less evolved (“they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs”) or less capable of “human” emotions lowers our moral brakes and raises our appetite for harsh policies and actions.
Men, who more often endorse group hierarchies and feel pressure to prove their manhood publicly, are especially vulnerable to these cues. Change the cues — restore people’s names, roles, emotions — and support a culture where restraint is status-worthy, and the spiral toward othering loses its grip.
We are standing somewhere on that proverbial “slippery slope” to the ugliest side of ourselves, losing our grip on the solid multi-ethnic ground America used to strive to represent. We are already targeting and arresting innocent people without due process, and carting them off to other countries with no justice system to protect them.
What’s next? Building camps in Florida swamps from which they permanently “disappear?”
“IT” IS happening here, right now. And men, real men, good men, need to grow a pair and put a stop to “IT.”
We must never forget the depravity that humans are capable of performing as they descend into madness. The words “Never Again” must never be trampled under the feet of hate-filled people.
Dear men,
Grow the fuck up. NOW.
Before you’re the one throwing a wailing wife to the floor, or cracking open the head of a photographer, or pointing the barrel of a gun at innocent children.
