Johnny was the cool kid on the block at just 16 years old because he was older than everyone else and, more importantly, he was having sex.
One day he gathered all the men together and, like patients waiting for the dentist, lined them up to have sex with a woman who, unbeknownst to the boys, was mentally ill.
Johnny asked, “Do you want some?” The men don’t refuse because a man wants sex, a man is always on the prowl and a man is dominant.
A horrifying story to most people, but this was the reality for 12-year-old Tony Porter, who was one of the kids Johnny lined up. Porter said he avoided the situation by faking it and regrets not standing up to Johnny, he now advocates for boys and men to stand up to kids like Johnny.
Porter is now an educator and activist who co-founded the non-profit A Call To Men: The National Association of Men and Women Committed to Ending Violence Against Women.
From a very early age young men are taught and molded into society’s vision of ideal masculinity, and it greatly affects students’ lives in college.
These phrases and many more might seem harmless to some, but they teach young men to stay inside the “Man Box,” a concept championed by Porter.
The Man Box keeps men adhering to typical societal norms of “what it means to be a man,” which includes employing a zero-tolerance policy toward crying or showing emotion; being powerful and protective; and — maybe most importantly — not being a woman.
“If I’m sad and I cry that makes me weak or less of a man, or at least that’s the idea,” said Bill Arnold, graduate assistant for bystander intervention and prevention education for The Women’s Center. “When I put myself outside the Man Box by say, being sad and crying, what often happens is I either tell myself I’m doing something wrong and I call myself a ‘pussy’ or someone else does.”
Arnold said this concept of the Man Box prevents men, like himself, from being their “authentic self and experiencing the full range of emotions that all people feel.”
In this way, Porter argues that the study and progressive action of male gender roles is directly linked to the ongoing struggle for female equality.
“My liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman,” said Porter in a lecture hosted by TED Talks. “(Men) are very much a part of the solution as well as the problem.”
The problem is male violence against women. A study from the Justice Department estimated that one in five women will be raped or experience an attempted rape within their college years — a problem men, and the expectations of the Man Box, are very much associated with.
“Many men are still socialized into roles that teach them to see themselves above women, teach them to see women as their servants, assert unhealthy ways of being a man through exercising violence against each other,” said Susanne Dietzel, director of The Women’s Center. “We know that most violence that is committed is actually male-on-male violence, and that is definitely not healthy and we know that many men are socialized into exercising violence against women and that is not healthy.”
Violence is certainly a key part of male culture, from athletics to traditionally male roles in the military and even playful wrestling matches as kids on the playground.
Arnold said male violence stems from a classification of manhood as being defined against women.
“Being a man does not only mean being certain things; it also means not being like a woman,” Arnold said. “And a woman is not just a woman, a woman is either a pussy or a bitch, so either a body part or a negative stereotype. So if masculinity involves defining itself over and against femininity … that creates the conditions of possibility for a culture wherein men do not hold other men accountable for the violence they perpetrate against women.”
He added that the construction of masculinity makes it that men are unable or unwilling in many cases to stand up to violence against women — a problem he said he is hoping to change through discussions on campus.
However, there is another side to men’s activism, which Porter and Arnold have distanced themselves from, that many have titled men’s rights, a movement Dietzel described as “anti-feminist to its core.”
The movement is very decentralized with no clear objective, but it generally expresses the idea that men have greater power and privilege over women and aims to focus on issues in which men are disadvantaged and discriminated in society.
Peter Nolan, co-founder of the website Crimes Against Fathers, said in an email he doesn’t consider himself a men’s rights activist and feels he has been unfairly labeled as that by others. Nolan runs the website working to help men who have been victimized by what he calls unjust laws such as battery, kidnapping, unlawful incarceration, perjury, extortion and kidnapping of their children.
Nolan inserted himself into the alleged Court Street rape after it went viral. He published the public information — including photos, addresses, birth date, videos and social media accounts — of Rachel Cassidy, the Ohio University student who was falsely accused of being the woman receiving oral sex in the video, on his website, leading to a flood of hate mail and threats to Cassidy.
Jenny-Hall Jones, dean of students, who also had her personal information published by the site, and Athens Police Chief Tom Pyle, as well as Cassidy herself, have said in previous Post articles that Cassidy was not the woman in the video.
Nolan, however, said he still believes her to be that woman and accuses her “of the crime of a false rape allegation.”
“The man suffered the crime of slander or perjury,” Nolan said in an email. “His face was clearly visible and he will have suffered backlash. Indeed, he is alleged to have been bashed based on this slander or perjury.”
Although Nolan said he is for equality between men and women, he also claims the women’s rights movement is perpetrated by the Illuminati, which aims “to incite women to claim privileges as ‘rights’ and then incite women to attack men.”
But not everyone takes as radical of an approach as Nolan. Dietzel chose not to comment on these sorts of men’s rights organizations because she said “it’s not worth her time,” adding that she is much more interested in working with men who are interested in “interrogating masculinity” and critiquing the ways in which men are socialized into society.
One of the ways Dietzel said men are socialized on campus is through traditionally male institutions such as fraternities, male athletic teams and institutions, and the military, which can reinforce negative stereotypes and gender roles in men.
“The Greek system is very much about reinforcing certain gender roles,” Dietzel said. “It’s not as if we are doing that saying, ‘Oh, today we are reinforcing male hegemony.’ It’s just part of the ways in which things have been done.”
Nick Ferrara, a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and a junior studying management information systems, management and business pre-law, agreed that it’s a matter of getting a lot of guys together in one place.
“If you packed a house with 30 dudes, all this age, no matter where you go, it would turn into a TV show,” Ferrera said. “What are you going to talk about? Well, you’re obviously going to talk about things that you don’t talk about when women are around.”
Arnold said he thinks men care about this issue more than they let on and might feel they can’t be an active member in women’s equality, which is why he hosts frequent Brown Bag Lunches on masculinity.
“I think a lot of men care about these things but feel insecure or at least unsure about being involved in them,” Arnold said. “Sometimes they feel like they will be attacked, sometimes they feel like they care, but they don’t know what their role is, and so I think it’s useful to have spaces for men. … Ultimately all that work needs to come back around to be in cooperation with female identified people.”
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