When I reflect upon the root causes of

• Some of my most momentous choices
• The events we call “chance” or “coincidence”
• My greatest regrets

I discern again and again some socio-cultural force that I’ve never been able to identify. It has loomed there, just out of sight, just beyond description for as long as I’ve had the ability to do serious, adult-grade self-examination and feel serious, adult-grade remorse.

The words that I had to describe the mysterious force seemed to miss the mark. It wasn’t just “violence” or “homophobia” or “misogyny” or “jealousy” or “competition” or “bullying.” It was tinged with “rage” and “depression” and “isolation,” too. The force also made known to me that it wasn’t going to be a transient moment or series of moments like “heartbreak” or “grief.” It let me know that it was a system that would outlast any one man’s emotional state and would rule us until we stepped into our graves.

When I’ve talked to close friends about pivotal moments where it was there, whispering cues offstage, I’d often find them dismissing it as a regional quirk, hangover of patriarchal Abrahamaic religious indoctrination, or post-Boomer narcissistic greed-culture tenet. But to classify it didn’t provide me relief or insight. Still unresolved, recently I’ve found myself triggered when hearing of friends’ kids encountering it. But I still could not name it until Lauren found its secret name and told it to me.

This force that made so much of how and where I grew up hard to survive and intolerable to me as an adult is called: domination-based masculinity. And here’s the rub, it’s been ruining all of our lives for a very long time.

Named by Mark Greene, this short video shows how it works.

pic.twitter.com/o2RmmBPzp5

— Mark Greene (@RemakingManhood) July 31, 2021

The upshot is that boys are policed from a very early age to “be tough” and “not like women” thus femininity and emotional availability are disparaged. In an effort to scourge the hated woman-ness out of themselves, boys are taught that scourging woman-kind (physically, emotionally, sexually) is a behavior that can be used to augment their masculine esteem.