From TEDxIsfeld in April 2011, Bill Pozzobon is an actor, director, and inspirational speaker - and he is also Director of the SafeTeen Boys Program. In this TEDx talk he explicates the "man code," the largely unspoken rules about what a man is and how to be a man in this culture. As the image above makes clear, these "rules" are also known as the "man box."

TEDxIsfeld - Bill Pozzobon: Breaking the Boys Code of Masculinity

Bill has worked on gender and violence issues with youth and educators for over a decade. In his role as Director of the SafeTeen Boy's Program, he trains the new SafeTeen Agents for Change and co-leads Educator Trainings locally, nationally and internationally. With humor and skill Bill invites the boys and men he works with to step into their full humanity with dignity and courage.

"I am a strong believer in the power of personal choice and heart centered action. My own personal journey and the undeniable impact on the thousands of young men I have worked with, give me an enduring passion for this work."

Bill is also an actor, director, acting teacher and inspirational public speaker who brings powerful personal narrative and a vision for a better world to his work. Find out more about his work at http://safeteen.ca

Jaclyn Friedman - Toxic Masculinity

This article from The American Prospect appeared last month shortly before the conclusion of the Steubenville rape trial, in which the two teen males were essentially found guilty of rape. Although the article is a month old now, the points Friedman makes are relevant today, and next month, and next year - until we do something to change the culture of masculinity within which young men are raised

Toxic Masculinity

JACLYN FRIEDMAN
MARCH 13, 2013

If we want to end the pandemic of rape, it’s going to require an entire global movement of men willing to do the hard work of interrogating the ideas they were raised with.

Judge Thomas Lipps listens to arguments in Jefferson County Juvenile Court in a case involving two Ohio high school football players charged with raping a 16-year-old girl.

Last summer, two young football players in the Ohio town of Steubenville carried the unconscious body of a local girl from party to party, violating her in ways you’d probably prefer not to think about. (I’m not pretending this incident is merely “alleged,” because there’s video and this column isn’t a court of law.) Today, she’ll face her attackers in court for the first time. It’s a brave act, as she surely knows she’ll not only be facing down the boys who did this to her, but also the adults whose jobs it is to blame her and call her a liar. Only she can know what will make this sacrifice worthwhile: Is it enough for her to be heard in court? Will it only be healing if the boys are convicted? Whatever it is she needs, I hope she gets it.

But rape prosecutions are argued on behalf of the state, not just the victim, and there’s a good reason: Rape doesn’t just harm one person. It tears at the fabric of our communities. And if we treat this trial as simply the story of what a couple of kids did to another, we’re missing the point. This isn’t an isolated incident, and the incident itself didn’t happen in isolation.

This rape is like most in that it was enabled by a deeply entrenched, toxic masculinity. It’s a masculinity that defines itself not only in opposition to female-ness, but as inherently superior, drawing its strength from dominance over women’s “weakness,” and creating men who are happy to deliberately undermine women’s power; it is only in opposition to female vulnerability that it can be strong. Or, as former NFL quarterback and newly-minted feminist Don McPherson recently put it, "We don't raise boys to be men. We raise them not to be women, or gay men." This starts in childhood for many boys, who are taught young that they’ll be punished for doing anything “girly,” from playing with dolls to crying, or even preferring to read over “rough housing” outside.

Toxic masculinity has its fingerprints all over the Steubenville case. The violence done to the victim was born out of the boys’ belief that a) sexually dominating a helpless girl’s body made them powerful and cool, and b) there would be no consequences for them because of their status as star athletes (If you want to see stomach-churning first-hand evidence of this, check out this video of one of their friends gleefully talking about how “raped” and “dead” the victim was). The defense is basing their entire case on it, arguing that this near- (and sometimes totally) unconscious girl’s body was the boys’ to use because “she didn't affirmatively say no." The football community’s response—by which I mean not just the coaches, school, and players, but the entire community of fans—is steeped in the assumptions of toxic masculinity, treating the athletes and the game as more important than some silly girl’s right to both bodily autonomy and justice. Steubenville residents have been quick to rally around the team, suggesting that the victim “put herself in a position to be violated” and refusing to talk to police investigating the assault. The two players who cooperated with police were suspended from the football team, while the players accused of the rape have been allowed to play. The coach even went so far as to threaten a New York Timesreporter asking questions about the case. (No surprise there: When it comes to male-dominated sports, toxic masculinity is the rule, not the exception.)

But sports is hardly the only breeding ground for toxic masculinity. Witness the recent, vicious bullying of Zerlina Maxwell by fans of Fox News. Last week, Maxwell was on Hannity and dared to opine that the best rape prevention isn’t about what women can do to protect themselves, but instead focuses on raising men who don’t rape. She also personally identified herself as a survivor of rape. What followed was a nearly inconceivable onslaught of misogynist and racist attacks, including repeated threats of rape and death. All because a black woman insisted that the work of stopping rape—“women’s work” if there ever was such a thing—requires men’s labor. Under the influence of toxic masculinity, the logical response to a man being forced or even encouraged to do something coded “female” is always violence.

The U.N. is in the midst of its 57th Commission on the Status of Women, this year focusing on gendered violence, a global pandemic made all the more urgent by growing evidence that social change leads to increased violence against women. Why? Because destabilizing established social order—even in the interest of what we might agree is progress—can leave people feeling vulnerable. And when men feel vulnerable, toxic masculinity teaches them the way to reassert their power is by dominating women. There’s a pall hanging over the proceedings, a real risk that this year’s commission may wind up like last year’s, failing to come to any policy agreements thanks to the obstructionism of a handful of patriarchal countries who claim that their traditional and religious customs would be infringed upon if they had to take action to end gendered violence in their countries. You can bet that any customs that require impunity for violence against women are built on toxic masculinity.

It’s time for a serious intervention in masculinity. It’s not enough to not be a rapist. You don’t get a cookie or a Nobel Peace Prize for that. If we want to end the pandemic of rape, it’s going to require an entire global movement of men who are willing to do the hard work required to unpack and interrogate the ideas of masculinity they were raised with, and to create and model new masculinities that don’t enable misogyny. Masculinities built not on power over women, but on power with women.

This is going to take real work, which is why so many men resist it. It requires destabilizing your own identity, and giving up attitudes and behaviors from which you’re used to deriving power, likely before you learn how to derive power from other, more just and productive places. There are real risks for men who challenge toxic masculinity, from social shaming to actual “don’t be a fag” violence—punishments that won’t ease until many, many men take the plunge. But there are great rewards to be had, too, beyond stopping rape. Toxic masculinity is damaging to men, too, positing them as stoic sex-and-violence machines with allergies to tenderness, playfulness, and vulnerability. A reinvented masculinity will surely give men more room to express and explore themselves without shame or fear. (It will also, not incidentally, reduce rape against men as well, because many rapes of men are committed by other men with the intention of “feminizing”—that is, humiliating through dominance—their victim.)

These interventions start with a “feminine” activity: introspection. What did you learn about “being a man,” from whom? How are those lessons working out for you, and for the people you love and your communities? Taking action can be as simple as men publicly owning their preference for “female” coded things, whether that’s child-rearing, nonviolence, feminism, or anything else—and being willing to suffer the social consequences. It can be more formal, working with established organizations like Men Stopping Violence. As more men take responsibility for the work, it will surely also take on forms no one has yet envisioned.

Obviously, the mouth-breathing troglodytes who hailed hate down on Maxwell aren’t going to be interested in this project. And there’s strong evidence that most rapes are committed by repeat offenders who may not call what they’re doing by the r-word, but know full-well they don’t have their partner’s consent. Remaking masculinity isn’t about sweetly beseeching those guys until they don “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” t-shirts. It’s about two much more practical things: 1) raising new generations of boys much less likely to grow into rapists and/or Fox trolls, and, meanwhile, 2) undermining the social license to operate which allows the current generation of assholes to keep trolling and raping with impunity.

In other words: What if misogynist trolling got you shunned by their friends and family? What if raping someone was actually likely to result in your expulsion from your team, and your conviction in court? If the rest of us shift our relationship to masculinity, ideas like “she was asking for it” or “don’t be a pussy” won’t make sense anymore, and the guys who try to cling to them will find themselves isolated, facing serious social and legal consequences.

There’s already some sign that this can work, and that the work is underway. Vancouver’s new initiative placing the focus on preventing offenders, not victims, is showing early promise. The Feminist Wire just launched a “Masculinities Forum” to create a more explicit dialogue on just these issues. And the organization Breakthrough has launched a global "Ring The Bell" campaign that is poised to take the lead on this very issue, calling for one million men to take concrete action to end violence against women.

It’s not a moment too soon. Just as putting the onus on women to prevent their own rapes on an individual basis is both wrong and ineffective, so to is putting the onus on women to stop rape as a social phenomenon. It’s time to “sack up” and step up, men. I promise it will hurt you a lot less than it’s hurting me.

Editor's Note: On May 17, the two young football players were adjudicated delinquent of rape, comparable to a guilty verdict in adult criminal court.

Masculinity and "Suicide by Mass Murder"

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine), Cho Seung-Hui (Virginia Tech), Steven Kazmierczak (Northern Illinois University), Jared Loughner (Tucson), James Holmes (Aurora, CO), and Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook Elementary School).

Do all of these "rampage" killers share common traits? Which of these is not like the others?

Second answer first - Loughner and Holmes did not kill themselves after killing many other people. All of the other shooters seemingly planned to kill themselves before they could taken alive.

First answer -  Rachel Kalis and Michael Kimmel, with the Department of Sociology and SUNY Stony Brook, studied the first three murders in their paper, Suicide by mass murder: Masculinity, aggrieved entitlement, and rampage school shootings [Health Sociology Review (2010) 19(4): 451–464], and identified some common elements.

All the perpetrators were males, all were students in the rural or suburban schools they terrorised, and all evinced a self-justifying sense of righteousness to their actions. These characteristics conform to the pattern established by the other cases.

Interestingly, these three killings were perpetrated by young men significantly older than the average school shooters:

Harris was 18 and Klebold was 17, both high school seniors; Cho was 23 and Kazmierczak was 27. The average age of the perpetrators in the other cases was 14.7, and the modal age was 15. (Of the more recent American cases, for example, consider 16-year old Evan Ramsay, from Bethel, Alaska; 16-year old Luke Woodham, from Pearl, Mississippi; 14-year old Michael Carneal, from Paducah, Kentucky; 11-year old Andrew Golden and 13-year old Mitchell Johnson, from Jonesboro, Arkansas; and 15-year old Kip Kinkel, from Springfield, Oregon).

There are two other differences between these mass killers and the younger boys who have killed their peers. (1) These killers took more people with them, killing and injuring dozens of people. (2) These three killers took their own lives as or before police arrived.

[T]he school shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Northern Illinois all seem to be cases of what we can call suicide by mass murder.

Adam Lanza fits the model of these three other cases.

* * * * *

Granting that all of these young men were in some way mentally ill, can we say something intelligent about the situation that acknowledges this fact and also expands the conversation into more fruitful territory? Mental illness is a given when someone commits violent acts on a massive scale and then kills themselves, and the majority of people who are labeled "mentally ill" are not violent and will never hurt anyone (other than possibly themselves).

Again, one of the common traits shared by these young men is that they were male. There are qualities in the unhealthy male archetypes in this country that contributes to rage or rampage killings.

These perpetrators were not just misguided ‘kids’, or ‘youth’ or ‘troubled teens’ – they’re boys. They are a group of boys, deeply aggrieved by a system that they may feel is cruel or demeaning. Feeling aggrieved, wronged by the world – these are typical adolescent feelings, common to many boys and girls. What transforms the aggrieved into mass murders is also a sense of entitlement, a sense of using violence against others, making others hurt as you, yourself, might hurt. 

And there's more:

• Aggrieved entitlement inspires revenge against those who have wronged you; it is the compensation for humiliation.
• Humiliation is emasculation: humiliate someone and you take away his manhood. For many men, humiliation must be avenged, or you cease to be a man. 
• Aggrieved entitlement is a gendered emotion, a fusion of that humiliating loss of manhood and the moral obligation and entitlement to get it back. And its gender is masculine.

In order to take a wider perspective on these killers, Kalis and Kimmel looked at three major weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report) and three of the largest daily newspapers (USA Today, Ne York Times, Los Angeles Times) to identify any related patterns to their explanation.

In conducting our analysis, we found a striking pattern from the stories about the boys who committed the violence: Nearly all had stories of being constantly bullied, beaten up, and, most significantly for this analysis, ‘gay baited’. Nearly all had stories of being mercilessly and constantly teased, picked on, and threatened. And, most strikingly, it was not because they were gay (at least there is no evidence to suggest that any of them were gay), but because they were different from the other boys – shy, bookish, honour students, artistic, musical, theatrical, non-athletic, ‘geekish’ or weird. Theirs are stories of ‘cultural marginalisation’ based on criteria for adequate gender performance – specifically the enactment of codes of masculinity. We can learn from queer studies that gay youth have higher rates of suicide then their straight counterparts (Remafedi et al. 1998). The shooters here display evidence of such marginalisation, but they choose a decidedly heteronormative way to combat it: violence.

Again, as is true with mental illness, millions of kids have been teased, bullied, picked on, threatened, and "gay baited," including me. But only a minuscule number of them take their own lives or the lives of others. This makes it challenging to pinpoint alienation and marginalization as explicit "causes."

However, it is males who tend to be most successful in suicide attempts, even though girls make more attempts (they choose less lethal means than boys).


There is another commonality among these killers that, to me, may be one of the best explanations for why these boys choose this route to their own death.

School shootings take place in front of others, a public display of violence. In fact, the public nature of school shootings are an example of their instrumental nature; they are done to get a point across, to send a message that the shooter wants to convey to the localised culture that has marginalised him, as well as the larger society. The detailed plans laid out by school shooters, as well as their methodical reasoning for their actions that impose blame on their peers demonstrate how they view their actions as public, as well as the entitlement the feel in their actions. The note left behind by Columbine shooter Eric Harris explicitly places the blame for his actions on his surrounding community (Klein and Chancer 2000).

Rampage murder/suicides are public performances, they are enacted to make a point, to assert power over those who have hurt them, and to do so as publicly as possible, and they have no doubt that their actions will be the talk of the nation for days or weeks after they have killed themselves - they have grown up in this culture and they know that mass killings will be covered 24/7 for weeks.

Still, this is not sufficient.

Kalis and Kimmel make a point on which they do not have space to follow-up, namely that we must also consider the schools where these killings happen, as well as the communities - and possibly (as in Adam Lanza) the families.

[It does not] diminish the specificity of that tragedy to also note that all the schools in which random school shooters also exhibited certain similarities. The schools themselves share characteristics that make random school shootings more likely in some places than in others. We believe that profiling the school shooters must be accompanied by a profile of the shooters’ schools.

We are never looking simply at the acts of a single person (or pair of persons) - these acts occur within a system, so if we hope to understand them, we need to look at the whole system, from the individual biology and psychology of the killer(s), to their families, their schools, their communities, and their society - all of these are systems interacting as a metasystem - we need that wide of a perspective.

This is an interesting and provocative paper - definitely worth your time to go read the whole thing.

Jackson Katz - Masculinity, Guns, and Mass Murder

In a recent article at Huffington Post, cultural theorist Jackson Katz suggests we need to talk about masculinity codes and how they are related to gun violence and rampage murders. He offers seven ideas that he believes would move the conversation along and bring unhealthy masculinity codes into the open.

I'm not sure I fully agree with all of his thoughts here, but I do think it's important to examine these issues. Based on what I have read, I would be hard pressed to see this current killing as a part of this conversation, but I believe that it was certainly relevant in many of the other rampage killings committed by young men.

Memo to Media: Manhood, Not Guns or Mental Illness, Should Be Central in Newtown Shooting

Jackson Katz. Educator, author, filmmaker, and cultural theorist

Posted: 12/18/2012

Many of us whose work touches on the subject of masculinity and violence have long been frustrated by the failure of mainstream media -- and much of progressive media and the blogosphere as well -- to confront the gender issues at the heart of so many violent rampages like the one on December 14 in Connecticut.

My colleagues and I who do this type of work experience an unsettling dichotomy. In one part of our lives, we routinely have intense, in-depth discussions about men's emotional and relational struggles, and how the bravado about "rugged individualism" in American culture masks the deep yearning for connection that so many men feel, and how the absence or loss of that can quickly turn to pain, despair, and anger. In these discussions, we talk about violence as a gendered phenomenon: how, for example, men who batter their wives or girlfriends typically do so not because they have trigger tempers, but rather as a means to gain or maintain power and control over her, in a (misguided) attempt to get their needs met. 

We talk among ourselves about how so many boys and men in our society are conditioned to see violence as a solution to their problems, a resolution of their anxieties, or a means of exacting revenge against those they perceive as taking something from them. We share with each other news stories, websites and YouTube videos that demonstrate the connection between deeply ingrained cultural ideas about manhood and individual acts of violence that operationalize those ideas.

And then in the wake of repeated tragedies like Newtown, we turn on the TV and watch the same predictable conversations about guns and mental illness, with only an occasional mention that the overwhelming majority of these types of crimes are committed by men -- usually white men. Even when some brave soul dares to mention this crucial fact, it rarely prompts further discussion, as if no one wants to be called a "male-basher" for uttering the simple truth that men commit the vast majority of violence, and thus efforts to "prevent violence" -- if they're going to be more than minimally effective -- need to explore why.

Maybe the Newtown massacre will mark a turning point. Maybe the mass murder of young children will force the ideological gatekeepers in mainstream media to actually pry open the cupboards of conventional thinking for just long enough to have a thoughtful conversation about manhood in the context of our ongoing national tragedy of gun violence.

But initial signs are not particularly promising. In the days since the shooting, some op-eds and blog posts have spoken to the gendered dynamics at the heart of this and other rampage killings. But most mainstream analysis has steered clear of this critical piece of the puzzle.

What follows is a brief list of suggestions for how journalists, cable hosts, bloggers and others who will be writing and talking about this unbelievable tragedy can frame the discussion in the coming days and weeks.

1) Make gender -- specifically the idea that men are gendered beings -- a central part of the national conversation about rampage killings. Typical news accounts and commentaries about school shootings and rampage killings rarely mention gender. If a woman were the shooter, you can bet there would be all sorts of commentary about shifting cultural notions of femininity and how they might have contributed to her act, such as discussions in recent years about girl gang violence. That same conversation about gender should take place when a man is the perpetrator. Men are every bit as gendered as women.

The key difference is that because men represent the dominant gender, their gender is rendered invisible in the discourse about violence. So much of the commentary about school shootings, including the one at Sandy Hook Elementary, focuses on "people" who have problems, "individuals" who suffer from depression, and "shooters" whose motives remain obtuse. When opinion leaders start talking about the men who commit these rampages, and ask questions like: "why is it almost always men who do these horrible things?" and then follow that up, we will have a much better chance of finding workable solutions to the outrageous level of violence in our society.

2) Use the "M-word." Talk about masculinity. This does not mean you need to talk about biological maleness or search for answers in new research on brain chemistry. Such inquiries have their place. But the focus needs to be sociological: individual men are products of social systems. How many more school shootings do we need before we start talking about this as a social problem, and not merely a random collection of isolated incidents? Why are nearly all of the perpetrators of these types of crimes men, and most of them white men? (A recent piece by William Hamby is a step in the right direction. )

What are the cultural narratives from which school shooters draw lessons or inspiration? This does not mean simplistic condemnations of video games or violent media -- although all cultural influences are fair game for analysis. It means looking carefully at how our culture defines manhood, how boys are socialized, and how pressure to stay in the "man box" not only constrains boys' and men's emotional and relational development, but also their range of choices when faced with life crises. Psychological factors in men's development and psyches surely need to be examined, but the best analyses see individual men's actions in a social and historical context.

3) Identify the gender subtext of the ongoing political battle over "guns rights" versus "gun control," and bring it to the surface. The current script that plays out in media after these types of horrendous killings is unproductive and full of empty clichés. Advocates of stricter gun laws call on political leaders to take action, while defenders of "gun rights" hunker down and deflect criticism, hoping to ride out yet another public relations nightmare for the firearms industry. But few commentators who opine about the gun debates seem to recognize the deeply gendered aspects of this ongoing controversy. Guns play an important emotional role in many men's lives, both as a vehicle for their relationships with their fathers and in the way they bolster some men's sense of security and power. 

It is also time to broaden the gun policy debate to a more in-depth discussion about the declining economic and cultural power of white men, and to deconstruct the gendered rhetoric of "defending liberty" and "fighting tyranny" that animates much right-wing opposition to even moderate gun control measures. If one effect of this tragedy is that journalists and others in media are able to create space for a discussion about guns that focuses on the role of guns in men's psyches and identities, and how this plays out in their political belief systems, we might have a chance to move beyond the current impasse.

4) Consult with, interview and feature in your stories the perspectives of the numerous men (and women) across the country who have worked with abusive men. Many of these people are counselors, therapists, and educators who can provide all sorts of insights about how -- and why -- men use violence. Since men who commit murder outside the home more than occasionally have a history of domestic violence, it is important to hear from the many women and men in the domestic violence field who can speak to these types of connections -- and in many cases have first-hand experience that deepen their understanding.

5) Bring experts on the air, and quote them in your stories, who can speak knowledgeably about the link between masculinity and violence. After the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide, CNN featured the work of the author Kevin Powell, who has written a lot about men's violence and the many intersections between gender and race. That was a good start. In the modern era of school shootings and rampage killings, a number of scholars have produced works that offer ways to think about the gendered subtext of these disturbing phenomena.

Examples include Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel's piece "Suicide by Mass Murder: Masculinity, Aggrieved Entitlement and Rampage School Shootings," Douglas Kellner's "Rage and Rampage: School Shootings and Crises of Masculinity," and a short piece that I co-wrote with Sut Jhally after Columbine, "The national conversation in the wake of Littleton is missing the mark."

There have also been many important books published over the past 15 years or so that provide great insight into issues of late 20th and 21st century American manhood, and thus provide valuable context for discussions about men's violence. They include Real Boys, by William Pollack;Raising Cane, by Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon; New Black Man, by Mark Anthony Neal;Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft; Dude You're a Fag, by C.J. Pascoe; Guyland, By Michael Kimmel; I Don't Want to Talk About It, by Terrence Real; Violence, by James Gilligan; Guys and Guns Amok, by Douglas Kellner; On Killing, by David Grossman; and two documentary films: Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, by Byron Hurt; and Tough Guise, which I created and Sut Jhally directed.

6) Resist the temptation to blame this shooting or others on "mental illness," as if this answers the why and requires no further explanation. Even if some of these violent men are or were "mentally ill," the specific ways in which mental illness manifests itself are often profoundly gendered. Consult with experts who understand the gendered features of mental illness. For example, conduct interviews with mental health experts who can talk about why men, many of whom are clinically depressed, comprise the vast majority of perpetrators of murder-suicides. Why is depression in women much less likely to contribute to their committing murder than it is for men? (It is important to note that only a very small percentage of men with clinical depression commit murder, although a very high percentage of people with clinical depression who commit murder are men.)

7) Don't buy the manipulative argument that it's somehow "anti-male" to focus on questions about manhood in the wake of these ongoing tragedies. Men commit the vast majority of violence and almost all rampage killings. It's long past time that we summoned the courage as a society to look this fact squarely in the eye and then do something about it. Women in media can initiate this discussion, but men bear the ultimate responsibility for addressing the masculinity crisis at the heart of these tragedies. With little children being murdered en masse at school, for God's sake, it's time for more of them to step up, even in the face of inevitable push back from the defenders of a sick and dysfunctional status quo.

David Brooks - Making Sense of Hanna Rosin?

Yesterday I posted an NPR piece about Hanna Rosin's new, expanded argument about the end of men in book-length study - The End of Men: And the Rise of Women - and now David Books of the New York Times offers a defense or an attempt to make sense of her ideas.

Unfortunately for Rosin, and for Brooks since he accepts her positions without questions, the economic recovery has occurred while and after she finished that book. According to a recent article in the Denver Post (Aug 5, 2012), men are doing much better than women in the recovery.

Men have snagged about three of every four of the 2.4 million net new jobs created since the summer of 2009, said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm based in Chicago.

The trend is so pronounced that Challenger and others have nicknamed the recovery the "he-covery" or "mancovery."

Maybe it's not so bad for men after all on the job front, but the trend in education has been bad for years, and it's only getting worse.

Why Men Fail

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 10, 2012

You’re probably aware of the basic trends. The financial rewards to education have increased over the past few decades, but men failed to get the memo. 

David Brooks

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In elementary and high school, male academic performance is lagging. Boys earn three-quarters of the D’s and F’s. By college, men are clearly behind. Only 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees go to men, along with 40 percent of master’s degrees.

Thanks to their lower skills, men are dropping out of the labor force. In 1954, 96 percent of the American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today, that number is down to 80 percent. In Friday’s jobs report, male labor force participation reached an all-time low.

Millions of men are collecting disability. Even many of those who do have a job are doing poorly. According to Michael Greenstone of the Hamilton Project, annual earnings for median prime-age males have dropped by 28 percent over the past 40 years.

Men still dominate the tippy-top of the corporate ladder because many women take time off to raise children, but women lead or are gaining nearly everywhere else. Women in their 20s outearn men in their 20s. Twelve out of the 15 fastest-growing professions are dominated by women.

Over the years, many of us have embraced a certain theory to explain men’s economic decline. It is that the information-age economy rewards traits that, for neurological and cultural reasons, women are more likely to possess.

To succeed today, you have to be able to sit still and focus attention in school at an early age. You have to be emotionally sensitive and aware of context. You have to communicate smoothly. For genetic and cultural reasons, many men stink at these tasks.

But, in her fascinating new book, “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin posits a different theory. It has to do with adaptability. Women, Rosin argues, are like immigrants who have moved to a new country. They see a new social context, and they flexibly adapt to new circumstances. Men are like immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept their minds in the old one. They speak the old language. They follow the old mores. Men are more likely to be rigid; women are more fluid.

This theory has less to do with innate traits and more to do with social position. When there’s big social change, the people who were on the top of the old order are bound to cling to the old ways. The people who were on the bottom are bound to experience a burst of energy. They’re going to explore their new surroundings more enthusiastically.

Rosin reports from working-class Alabama. The women she meets are flooding into new jobs and new opportunities — going back to college, pursuing new careers. The men are waiting around for the jobs that left and are never coming back. They are strangely immune to new options. In the Auburn-Opelika region, the median female income is 140 percent of the median male income.

Rosin also reports from college campuses where women are pioneering new social arrangements. The usual story is that men are exploiting the new campus hookup culture in order to get plenty of sex without romantic commitments. Rosin argues that, in fact, women support the hookup culture. It allows them to have sex and fun without any time-consuming distractions from their careers. Like new immigrants, women are desperate to rise, and they embrace social and sexual rules that give them the freedom to focus on their professional lives.

Rosin is not saying that women are winners in a global gender war or that they are doing super simply because men are doing worse. She’s just saying women are adapting to today’s economy more flexibly and resiliently than men. There’s a lot of evidence to support her case.

A study by the National Federation of Independent Business found that small businesses owned by women outperformed male-owned small businesses during the last recession. In finance, women who switch firms are more likely to see their performance improve, whereas men are more likely to see theirs decline. There’s even evidence that women are better able to adjust to divorce. Today, more women than men see their incomes rise by 25 percent after a marital breakup.

Forty years ago, men and women adhered to certain ideologies, what it meant to be a man or a woman. Young women today, Rosin argues, are more like clean slates, having abandoned both feminist and prefeminist preconceptions. Men still adhere to the masculinity rules, which limits their vision and their movement. 

If she’s right, then men will have to be less like Achilles, imposing their will on the world, and more like Odysseus, the crafty, many-sided sojourner. They’ll have to acknowledge that they are strangers in a strange land.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 11, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Men Fail.

Lion Goodman - Release Your Limiting Beliefs about "Being a Man" to Become Authentically Who You Are

Lion Goodman is offering a free teleconference on how men can get out of the limiting box of culturally embedded beliefs that keep us from being uniquely who we are.

Release Your Limiting Beliefs about "Being a Man" to Become Authentically Who You Are

This teleseminar is for men who are ready to take their spiritual growth and transformation to the next level.

Most men were programmed at a young age with their parents’ "codes" – the ones they believed led to success in that era. One standard model was the super-strong, unemotional, self-sufficient, macho man.

The problem is, many of those old beliefs don’t work for who men really are, and it’s led many of us to become overly competitive and overworked, and feeling lonely and not good enough.

With these old beliefs still lingering, hovering in the subconscious mind, many men aren’t able to feel fully empowered to be their most authentic selves and live their most successful lives.

In this transformative teleseminar with Lion Goodman, you’ll learn to delete those old beliefs – and re-program yourself with a new set of positive, empowering beliefs that align with your highest values. Lion will shares his insights from 30 years of research on the nature of beliefs – and how our beliefs about “being a man” impact our work, our relationships and our lives.

Join Lion and you can take steps to:

• Identify and eliminate limiting beliefs that hold you back from happiness and success
• Understand why affirmations, positive thinking and the Law of Attraction don’t always work
• Shift any negative images of “manhood” stuck inside of you
• Become radically who you are and comfortable in your own skin
• Experience yourself as a powerful man contributing to the greater good

Lion is the creator of The BeliefCloset Process™, a potent methodology for deleting negative and limiting beliefs from the subconscious mind. He will reveal what he has learned about where beliefs come from, how they operate to shape our experience of reality, and how you can shift them to become more positive and empowered in your life as a man.

You’ll also learn more about the upcoming Ultimate Man Course, which brings together top leaders of men’s work for a transformational training.

Join us for this powerful free teleseminar!

Lion Goodman is Director of Men’s Programs for The Shift Network. He brings more than 30 years experience in entrepreneurial business management, spiritual practice, transformational coaching and men’s work. Lion is a dynamic coach, widely published author, workshop leader, public speaker and successful businessman.

He is co-founder of The Tribe of Men, an initiatory program for men in Northern California, and creator of The BeliefCloset Process, a methodology for permanently transforming beliefs at the core of the psyche. From 1984 to 2002, he was President of The Goodman Group, an executive search firm that recruited and coached senior executives for high-tech companies.

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