Part 2: Ego, Power & Subjugation of the Masses:
On the weaponization of gender binaries, the pillars of capitalism, and building businesses versus building communities.
Legal complaints and appellate filings are easy to write, once you’ve done it — the who, the what and the why is all laid out nice and clean. You establish what it is, where it happened and proper jurisdiction, who you’re suing and a statement of facts.
I’ve written a few at this point — they’re pretty clear cut.
Tragedy, however, is much less clean, although the two are often inextricably intertwined when truths relevant to all parties are woven together; they often stop just short of shared perspectives about those truths, however.
That’s because what’s true for us can also be factually true for another person, yet each person’s takeaway will be as different as night and day. This is what I’m currently (and forever) grappling with: equal truths.
Numerous things all being true at the same time.
Welcome to the limbic system, dear readers — our own personal emotional hoarder and court clerk that records every glance, head tilt and wayward sigh… all in an effort to protect us from some unseen and unknowable future harm.
For me, the limbic system is a veritable minefield as a former fat kid growing up in a rural Utah farming community as one of seven kids, but the only one without a thyroid and carrying undiagnosed ADHD and Autism. The first one would be discovered when I was 19, deep in an ADHD paralysis depression. The second would wait until I was 34 and on the brink of a nervous breakdown. That child was also surviving sexual abuse at the hands of an elder cousin on the matriarchal side, and incest perpetuated by my older brother, in addition to severe neglect and violent abuse from both parents, which led to sibling bullying and familial ostracism.
Like I said: a lovely little limbic minefield.
I’ve mentioned these facts here and there before, but perhaps not all in the same paragraph. Writing a handful of facts about the first ten or so years of my life doesn’t make them more digestible for a reader, I’m sure, but I like to think that publicly speaking those facts into being for the first time in 2021 in an Instagram video might’ve primed the pump, so to speak.
I list that basic rundown of my limbic landmines not for pity or even consideration, but rather in an effort to provide context around why it took me so damn long to sort it all out, as well as why I’m writing this particular piece in the first place — I had a bit of a lot on my plate from the first whistle, even without the added experiences of betrayal and other familial traumas, juvenile detention, foster care, rape, childbirth, the adult criminal system, and the not-unique combination of everything massively scarring in my life happening before the age of 20.
I wasn’t quite ripe.
I think it’s safe to joke about the possibility that my neural network of survival mode coping mechanisms probably pre-dated the tissue it should’ve been imprinted upon.
But a rather significant part of my personal process has been learning how to forgive myself for all of the ways that I tried to be loved, and all manners of sins through which I sought safety.
Without that forgiveness, there could be no truth, and without these truths, there would be no healing.
I can heal only to the same extent that I’m willing to meet myself — without embracing and accepting every single act I’ve ever taken, for better or worse, I can’t have met myself at all.
And this is where the truths mentioned above collide:
I can have been neglected and abused and molested and raped and hurt and harmed by people who themselves had been subjected to the same (or similar) pain, and none of us deserved it, yet all of us have to choose whether or not we prioritize our own temporary needs over the humanity and future of another human being in each moment where we inflict harm upon someone else.
You might have to read that again, because it’s important.
A choice is made by every perpetrator (or enabler) in every harmful act performed — physical or emotional.
There is an instant of decision where our survival mechanisms and homeostatic brain drugs drive take over, and we all choose to act — to either prevent harm or to cause it.
To protect someone or damage them.
To curtail injury or promote it.
I point this out partly because that specifically decisive moment has been a very thematic element in my life, both recently and consistently, and for myself as well as other people, but also because it’s a very human trait that I’m still learning to recognize it as it occurs.
It’s also a crucial element of what I’m going to cover in this mini-series of essays as a foundational neurobiological fact that applies to every human who has ever lived, so buckle up and remember what I wrote about homeostasis.
In the instant when the behavioral road forks and the ego makes the choice to prioritize its own need-driven desires above the humanity of another person (as I wrote about in my last post, Part 1, as well as other essays here), the perpetrator has resorted to a process that neuroscience has just begun to understand — but the decision to harm another person is a distinct and entirely separate neurological function from that of reactive aggression, fMRI studies have found.
The decision I outline above are two separate and distinct neurological functions that use entirely different parts of the brain.
Now, I write the above line with the expectation that you’ll click on the damn hyperlink and read this particular study1.
But even if you don’t do a deep dive into the neurobiology of provocative versus reactive aggression, the neurochemical signatures of risk assessment and what bravery looks like in an fMRI machine, it’s crucial to understand that proactive aggression and reactive aggression are two very different processes in the human brain2 3, because our neurological processes dictate how you, I and everyone else on this planet behaves.
These specific directives are based in codified human behaviors that are intrinsically tied to individual neurology — as such, have a direct and lasting impact on each of us both as individuals and humanity as a collective, as well as our evolution as a species.
It’s also a key factor of ‘toxic masculinity’ and the ‘male loneliness epidemic’.
… Both of which I view as misnomers, in fact.
Did I mention to buckle the fuck up?!
Good.
As I said in my BlueSky thread about this topic four months ago:
“Just as scientists have stopped using the term ‘global warming’ in favor of ‘climate change’, we really need to stop using ‘toxic masculinity’ and start calling it what it is: faux masculinity.”
Why? Because masculinity isn’t ALWAYS toxic, and a lot of masculinity can exist without being toxic, but the term ‘toxic masculinity’ has currently overtaken the cultural narrative and positioned as the 'default' when it isn’t and doesn’t have to be (more about that later).
The toxicity level of someone’s masculinity is an individual choice in each moment of expression, as I explained above — and I believe that faux masculinity can be healed.
I view faux masculinity as a spectrum of fraudulent, misinformed or maladaptive beliefs and values that can only exist in the absence of proper information, healthy behaviors and adaptive tools and capability.
Faux masculinity is a skill issue, as the kids say.
The term ‘toxic masculinity’, on the other hand, comes off as a straightforward damnation of the individual: it acts as both judgment and sentencing of an individual human that’s using faux masculinity to ameliorate internal pain or discomfort they experience in their daily lives — acting out in an attempt to solve inner conflict is something that I’m personally and intimately familiar with, y’all.
I’ve written about this before, too: the ways we all cope with the demands of life can only be as healthy and useful as the tools we’ve got, and everyone starts in a different spot with different levels of tools, access, emotional intelligence, etc.
As someone who happened to be given absolutely no tools from the initial get go for my emotional expression and regulation outside of screaming or throwing items at other humans (yes, literally), I’ve been pretty much forced into learning a few things4 about the basic emotional, psychological and neurophysiological needs of every human.
I’ve also had to collect everything inside of my own ‘toolbox’ piece by piece, as I needed them, just to deal with the challenges presented by my unique neurobiological tangle — which is why early formal diagnostics of autism and ADHD can make such a difference for people like myself.
But those tools didn’t come without a whole lot of heartbreak, failure and challenge that I’m still working through on a daily basis (as is fairly obvious from the content on my threads account).
As noted in earlier accounts, finally granting myself compassion around the facts of my brain being different was also the gateway to accepting that I’d also need additional methods to address and disassemble the limbic field of landmines inside my brain.
But the integration of those facts didn’t happen overnight, and my compassion for myself certainly wasn’t ever aided through someone else’s critical damnation of my behaviors — in fact, the changes I needed to make didn’t actually happen until I was on the verge of a full blown breakdown during a global pandemic and amid a series of traumas that pried my skull open and hammered a nail into my stubbornness.
It took me 34 years to get an autism diagnosis, y’all… And I’m ‘a smart human’ who felt like a cow in a field — so may I politely ask just what the fuck everyone thinks shaming entire generations of men is actually going to achieve?!
What I’m saying is that through these conversations AND ACTIVE CHANGES, we can alter the entire process, as a society, and offer people a kinder existence where we’re all allowed to be human —
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.
I feel like I’ve said that before.
Maybe.
*wink*
I hate the term ‘toxic masculinity’ because it’s unapproachable from a practical standpoint.
'Toxic Masculinity' leaves no room for compassion for or repair of that person’s inner wounds, nor even any future harm reduction for them or other people, because we’ve already branded their behavior as ‘toxic’ — which, to a defensive dude with the emotional maturity of a turnip, is the equivalence of a damnation of them as a person. TRUST ME ON THIS, I LEARNED IT THE HARD WAY.
That combative approach doesn’t help, solve or heal anyone or anything, nor does it bridge the rifts built between the boys and men struggling with it, and everyday society. I also believe that the ‘toxic’ term has led to confusion — people (mostly men) assume that we’re labeling all masculinity as toxic.
I think ‘faux masculinity’ is simply more appropriate as it describes the full scope of the issue far more clearly, like calling a rubber snake ‘fake’: calling a rubber snake ‘fake’ almost immediately nullifies our brain’s perception of a harmful threat — it delegitimizes it. Labeling something as ‘toxic’ when it’s ‘fake’ leaves too much space for misinterpretation, and not nearly enough for nuance or redemption.
Toxic masculinity will only ever be ‘toxic’.
But fake masculinity can indeed be toxic and dangerous, but also benign and just plain humorous.
… Like a particular president lying to the world about his weight, perhaps.
That bullshit isn’t dangerous, it’s just stupid and egotistical — but it’s definitely part of the faux masculinity he embodies.
That’s why, after carefully watching the antics of said dipshit president and those of Musk, Zuck, Kanye & even my ex boyfriend, I no longer believe that toxic masculinity exists — I think that entire encyclopedia of behavioral nonsense is all just a *TOXIC EXPRESSION* of FAUX MASCULINITY.
Quick Reminder: this is just a blog written by a giant nobody full of spicy meatloaf and trauma. I’m a trainwreck, not a professional, and while I’m quite qualified in the dark arts of dysfunction, I am NOT quasi-diagnosing anyone, suggesting we round anyone up or even medicate a bunch of men to see what happens — I’m making a case for compassion and a change in colloquial usage.
I write and publish my opinions and observations to both aid and fuel public discourse.
This one is about neurological processes, survival strategies
and how we vilify men / masculinity.
More hilariously, I think that both the invisible and the public expressions of faux masculinity might also be an intersection and result of those men (NOT HIM) all being at least slightly neurodivergent, too5 — it’s fairly obvious to me because I too am ADHD and autistic.
Why does that matter??
Well, because *I* am autistic, and I kiiiiiiiiiiiinda know what it looks like at this point: I also have mirrored, imitated and adopted some genuinely crazy behaviors that looked ‘normal’ or ‘fun’ based solely on my own ‘sentient alien cow in a field’ experience; I didn’t know how to human, so I just copied behaviors I saw in movies and on TV.
Everyone seemed to like party girls, so I became a fun party girl (that chapter didn’t last very long because I was exhausted as hell).
People appeared to be fond of various colors of hair depending on the sub-structures of social groups, so I dyed and cut my hair in a whole slew of different styles and ways.
I masked by adopting behaviors that appeared as though they might keep me safe…As it turns out, masking and mirroring is a uniquely autistic coping mechanism. Some of us never even realize that our cognitive processes have been shaped so thoroughly as tiny children that we altered who we were, just to survive.
It’s a hell of a wakeup call when a person finally learns such a crucial truth — again, you can trust me on that.
But masking and mirroring is what all of these men appear to be doing, too.
For these men, their masculinity looks and feels performative because it is: the central tenet of their strange behaviors is just the fraudulent execution of a behavioral facade.
Their performance of ‘maleness’ is a maladaptive neurodivergent imitation of what their brains think masculinity is — it’s an observation-based perception of accepted (and even endorsed) social behaviors.
But due to the social stunting that so often accompanies neurodivergence, those same men lack healthy male role models to verify and validate the behavioral coding as it happens, so it plays out in the public and personal realms without any refinement or filtration.
That part is important.
These neurodivergent men are *also* surrounded by similarly inept neurotypical men who also carry fraudulent perceptions and ideas of masculinity looks like, which means that the neurodivergent maskers can’t verify the accuracy of their social puppetry… Because all of them have one thing in common: a total absence of genuine, healthy male influence in their lives on anything close to a consistent basis.
Their current social structure is a Petri dish of faux, laughably-bad expressions of American cowboy masculinity ripped straight from the villain role in an old-school John Wayne movie.
Just look at the entirety of the GOP’s ‘leadership’ structure: it’s a Temu-branded vaudevillian caricature of your most basic, late-night AMC shoot-em-up theatrics.
And because the entire circus lacks models of healthy masculinity, the aforementioned men don’t know, understand or even comprehend what REAL and HEALTHY masculinity actually look like.
It’s also why jackasses like Andrew Tate have risen to such widespread, cult-like infamy: in a vacuum left by poor or nonexistent leadership, anyone who claims to be a credible authority can take over — no one is left to refute their bullshit.
John McCain’s death had a lot to do with the sudden and sharp decline of the male populace in this country, for example, and he wasn’t even a picture of healthy masculinity — he was just a (very flawed) human man. McCain was respected in politics and general society, on all sides of the aisle, simply by virtue of being very much a man6. And while I won’t attempt to define manhood here because I’m not one, I will outline the issues I can speak authoritatively on as a woman who has suffered greatly at the hands of men who don’t understand their own manhood, as well as a woman who loves men, has loved a lot of genuinely good men, and was also raised around a great number of them — after all, I was an ugly, androgenous little girl with a grandfather who doted on me, so I tended to disappear.
And that grandfather of mine was, in my eyes, a god amongst the goddamned men.
I know real masculinity looks like because I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by healthy forms of it, but also because I’ve been watching hostile masculinity unfold my entire life… The fragile, the feeble and yes, the false.
I also know what real masculinity is because I’ve been constantly accused of ‘being masculine’ by people who are terrified of and threatened by traits I possess that they do not have and cannot understand, but which society has inexplicably assigned to a specific gender.
Luckily, I’ve also had enough exposure to healthy masculinity and have both benefited from and suffered the contrary’s effects to an extent that, for the most part, I’m able to identify fraudulent masculinity from 100 yards away — but I was incredibly lucky, and have often taken my experiences with good men for granted.
I frequently forget that the great majority of my social peers weren’t raised on a horse farm in rural Utah, and that most of the American populace has never ridden a horse or even baled hay — not everyone grew up watching Paul Newman movies and reading Louis L’Amour, then having the opportunity to comparatively analyze the stark differences between storytelling and real life.
Not everyone has a slew of grandfathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and neighbors that run the entire gamut from really good men to absolute pieces of shit, either.
What many men and boys have never seen and *cannot recognize* is the inherent self-possession of a man who has done the doing, and who also likes them and wants them around.
THAT PART IS REALLY IMPORTANT.
It’s also a topic I’ve wanted to write a book about for a very long time — 'Shoot ‘Em Up: The Warp & Perversion of American Cowboy Culture’s Masculinity and How It Has Shaped The World’.
I’ve studied this topic thoroughly, and it matters.
It matters because we have numerous generations of American men who perform manhood, but who almost zero experience with healthy or safe masculinity because the Greatest Generation was focused on surviving all they had lived through, and had little time for the emotional needs of the Baby Boomer generation — a generation which now only has the warped perspectives they’ve seen in movies and TV to rely on, which they used to parent their Gen X and Millennial children, and also run the entire world.
… You wanna know why the world has gone to absolute fucking shit?!
That’s why.
They’re not doin’ so hot, y’all.7
John McCain, for instance, (as poor an example as he may be) represented and modeled something that the majority of men and boys haven’t ever had access to: the genuine masculinity of someone who has done the thing and has the quiet and confident strength to prove it (regardless of how their trauma has played out after the fact).
And without the daily reminders, references and resources to guide them, a leadership vacuum has been created for men inside of our very patriarchal, sexist society that demands male leadership, but has none.
It’s impossible to uphold a sexist patriarchy when it’s run by men who can’t get sex without paying for it, y’all.
That’s not how sexism and patriarchy can most effectively operate and prey upon people, obviously, which requires that they manufacture and use other means of upholding a sexist patriarchy…
Men can’t claim to be superior to women when those allegedly-inferior women want nothing to do with them — it’s not rejection if you’re not even allowed into the building, honey.
(broad gestures to… everything.)
It smacks of falsity, and that falsity is evident in the final pudding (or lack thereof, bah duhn dun tssssssh).
AS I WAS SAYING: real masculinity can’t be adopted or embodied when it’s not modeled — I saw this play out most clearly in my ex partner, whose constant and all-consuming search for a male mentor to guide him was a genuine issue in both his self-image and in our relationship because he was unable to self-validate and had no external affirmation of his worth or value as a human.
People like that will eventually fold, because they have no core structure.
His story is his to tell, but I will say this: he lacked close relationships with safe, healthy and trustworthy adult male role models he could respect.
(insert funny brain index recall here:)
I’m not saying that real masculinity or manhood is stealing cars and punching people (I’m actually saying the opposite) — that scene is just a funny reference to me of the guiding undertones of male strength and leadership in the face of very clear and present danger, and the upset shown by this character at the lack of ethics shown by the carjacker. Yes, they’re both car thieves, technically speaking, but one of them is a master of his craft while the other shows behavioral patterns of being a lazy and entitled shitbag who has chosen to get what he needs through violence rather than skill.
And therein lies one lesson of that clip: real masculinity is a decisive choice about doing and being, and the ability to self-validate as part of an identity that centers around who a man believes himself to be.
Real masculinity carries authority with it because real masculinity is, at its core, an authentic ownership of self — someone who has weighed and measured themselves, and does their best to be the best person they can with the tools they have. It also is and can be embodied by any gender.
Real masculinity is gentle strength — strong and protective, yes, but in a compassionate, respectful, equitable way that recognizes the equal value of ALL humans, regardless of gender, race, age, appearance, etc. It’s a respect, a reverence, that applies to oneself, one’s life and one’s environment as a conscious decision to raise the standard. My grandfather taught me that how I do anything is how I do everything, and anything worth doing was something worth doing right the first time — he taught me that anything I took the time and care to do should be done and finished in a manner worthy of my attention.
Someone I also see exemplifying and living this on a regular basis is Selema Masekela, who exudes authentic masculinity through his actions and existence... A commitment to being a safe man, to creating opportunities for others, for living an honorable life that is centered around care and respect. I’ve also been lucky enough to see real masculinity modeled by past partners, role models, close friends and chosen family. Yes, all of these people were flawed humans with frailties and failings — the difference is that they try.
But a lot of men out there are not living it, nor even trying to live it — they’re completely ignorant of the fact that ✨real masculinity✨ prioritizes the genuine, core safety of everyone around them on emotional, psychological, mental and physical levels; healthy masculinity puts both a man’s individual power AND sexual appetites/fulfillment LAST, in favor of the safety and security of other people.
Real masculinity is the prioritization of honor, care and respect.
As I said above: I’m deeply fortunate to have had and to continue to have relationships with men who have chosen to live lives that reflect their sturdiness, confidence, strength, kindness, generosity, optimism and strength, and who teach me about real masculinity even as I redefine my own relationship with the concept.
I’m so very, very lucky that I get to know incredible men who will recognize a person in need at a random national MTB race and assist that person beyond any realm of professional obligation, then wrench for and pack the hotel room of that same person when she breaks herself off at another national MTB race, and then travel across multiple states to help me close my shop five years after that.
These are the men who have taught me about care and respect.
These are the men who have taught me that I’m worthy of it.
And these are the men who continue to honor their unspoken commitments to caring for the people they care about — because they’ve chosen to do so, and choose to on a daily basis.
These are the men who need to be teaching boys and men about masculinity, dammit. But I know that those living truly masculine lives rarely possess the desire for mass dissemination of their theories —it’s almost always the shitbags and charlatans who seek fame and fortune.
I have a significant amount of experience with that subset of men, too — the ones living and preaching faux masculinity and the gospels of Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and their equally-odious ilk.
It’s the only part of the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ that’s truly an epidemic, in my opinion.
Because these men and boys genuinely believe that to have any power at all, they have to take it from someone else:
Yet women and girls are repeatedly telling those men and boys that no, this doesn’t work and no, it doesn’t make us respect them — because the ‘hustler game’ and ‘pickup artist’ schtick only works on the men and boys paying for it.
It’s just a really bad con put on by the jerks collecting the cash.
Whenever any ‘thought leader’ says “you should believe me instead of the person living it”, it’s a pretty solid sign of that particular ‘anyone’ being absolutely full of shit… yet there are boys and men actually listening to ‘get the girl’ tips from morons like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, even in the face of direct information straight from the source: women.
But why would men and boys ever listen to or trust women when those same men and boys are being instructed to not even trust themselves?!
This epidemic of false information directed at boys and men serves two purposes:
1) it stems from and maintains the constant dehumanization of women + the intentional discrediting of our lived experiences and
2) it keeps men and boys isolated, alone and scared of women.
Why?!
Because, as I told my ex-boyfriend in 2023, capitalism can only be successful if it can alienate us, isolate us and exploit us as individuals.
Let me put it this way:
if a man is fully himself and authentically owning and living his realest and strongest masculinity, do you honestly think that man would ever allow his partner or wife, sisters, mother, daughters or ANY woman to be harmed?
No… but really.
In your heart of hearts, do you really believe that any sort of ‘a real man’ would ever tolerate an employer, government or even a society as a whole harming women?
Of course not.
Which, naturally, begs the question:
Then why do we?!
Why are any of us tolerating harmful behaviors and looking the other way?
Why do so many men in our present day and age not only allow the abuse and exploitation of women and minorities, but also often seem to eagerly perpetuate and drive it?
I’ll tell you why:
1) because it’s easier to stay silent, and silence/inaction seems as though it costs them nothing; there is no ‘reward’ for being a good man/embodying healthy masculinity in the modern age.
Remember: ease = survival.2) because the propaganda served to men about women portrays women as a threat to male success and happiness — every facet of media portrays women as the cause of every male problem (just like immigrants and Black people have consistently been portrayed as a threat to white people and ‘white jobs’);
3) because it benefits capitalism to rob men of their power, to present cowardice as ‘the smart choice’ and make them small — to steal their self-worth, to tell men that they are what they do for a living, that their only worth lies in productivity — to make men afraid: afraid of losing their jobs, homes, safety and survival.
It requires nothing of a man to be small.
nothing.
It requires no character, no effort, no integrity, no follow-through nor any conscience for a man to choose weakness — he can simply choose not to act.
And in the face of an active threat to his job or his home or his overall homeostasis that might come from standing up for or beside a woman or marginalized person, why would any man choose to risk any of that just to feel like a good person?
Why would anyone ever make that sort of a choice?
The long and short of it is that they aren’t.
We aren’t.
Humans are currently so rewarded by other fabricated systems of priming our neurochemical pump that a significant portion of our species now gets our ‘reward’ brain drugs (dopamine, et al.) from likes, follows and a variety of synthetic shortcuts rather than making things with our hands, creating art, making music, and engaging in hobbies and interests that require a lot more effort.
For example: swiping on an app and then using porn = a similar neurochemical cascade as the one our ancestors would get during sex after months of wooing a potential mate.
Another example: Oreos (or cocaine, it’s all the same)
A third: Cheese (which releases an entire profile of soft-core opiates into the human blood stream)
A few more: Rock and roll.
…Downhill MTB racing. *wink wink*
I’ve spoken about all of this before — but I’d like to point out that every moment of modern life has been boiled down to an addictive, synthetically ‘efficient’ and thoroughly monetized function… And the human brain loves efficiency. We prioritize that, remember? Rule number one.
But being a good man embodying real masculinity (or just being a good person) doesn’t make logical, efficient sense for the human brain in the face of so many other dopaminergic options, especially when the modern risk-to-reward ratio is skewed the way it currently is.
Our brains evolved to prioritize low risk, lower effort and high reward as the pinnacle of human performance — yet we’re more mediocre than ever.
And the human brain and body will always preemptively assess threats to prioritize its own survival and fulfillment8 over anyone and anything else — that’s what keeps the host alive, after all.
Factoring in the above-mentioned neurobiological implications of the powerful reward system in the human brain, neurochemically, for our brains and bodies, more effort must more reward.
it’s much more difficult to be a good man.
Effort must be expended to be a good person — it requires more.
And sex isn’t nearly motivation enough when survival is on the line,
Even as good as really good sex can be, sex, love and safety with women is not and will never be enough motivation for men to decide that they want to be good men.
And if the reward hormones that come from sex are no longer substantially different because science has synthesized every reward system’s output evolutionary driver for men and boys in modern life, but they have to grow up and do their own laundry and there’s no free labor at home, why the hell would they ever bother to choose true masculinity??
… Especially when they could just perform it and have two million views (and rake in a whole bunch of money in ad revenue) on a vitriolic YouTube video about how women are awful??
Choosing real masculinity is difficult: it requires an internal strength, personal discipline, honesty, self-control, genuinely honorable intentions and a ferocious commitment to the sort of integrity that’s not only goes unrewarded, but that is perpetually punished under capitalism.
Hyper-individualism is a pillar of capitalism for a reason, folks:
if they can keep us isolated, they can sell us convincing lies that we can’t refute through experience, self-worth, comparative analysis or community input because we’re afraid and alone.
I believe that modern men are choosing to limit their personal risk and prioritize their own survival and satisfaction (often at the expense of women and girls) simply due to the fact that modern men and boys have been and are being repeatedly and constantly conditioned to believe that their decisions don’t matter and that they aren’t ‘enough’ — they’ve been convinced that they are alone, unimportant and worthless. We all are.
And let’s be quite honest with each other here:
Capitalism has provided scant opportunity for modern men and boys to refute that destructive narrative and, it could be argued, has actually promoted, enabled and ensured the dehumanization and destruction of men.
How?
By robbing them of almost every avenue for important early-age and adolescent self-worth development that can only happen through trial-and-error.
I’ll explain: for many previous American generations, male self-worth was often attained through ‘doing’ that began for them in early life; these men and boys came of age under much different economic and social conditions which often required them to accomplish tasks and complete ‘chores’. This lifestyle-required accomplishment and completion not only established their personal core values around work ethic, self-discipline and cost versus reward, but also shaped male neurobiological and physiological development around certain core values that impacted self-worth through personal capacity.
As it turns out, that’s what ‘doing’ does, science shows — regardless of gender: sports-development programs for women and girls have been proven to produce a greater number of competent female leaders who carry the skills and lessons they developed in sports into their future endeavors. The case is so strong for women and girls in sports, in fact, that a 2015 survey by espnW found 94% of women in C-Suite positions had an athletic background9.
That science and my own experience is the precise reason why I developed and promoted the ‘Proving Possible’ program in 2014 to foster female participation in downhill MTB racing; I’ve personally witnessed the impact of ‘doing’ on my own life, and also its impact on one of the greatest men I’ve ever known: my younger brother, Tyler, who is now an NFL player for the Minnesota Vikings.
Accessible, hands-on activities that have been proven to build self-worth in people of all ages and genders (eg, building something tangible, engaging in a sport, fostering relationships with other people and wider communities) — but thanks to the mass defunding of educational programs like shop classes in high schools from 1990-2010s, there’s now multiple generations of men and boys who are primed to buy into the bullshit narratives about masculinity and themselves.
I’m 38 years old, and shop classes had almost entirely gone the way of the dinosaur by the time I entered high school in the early 00s, despite growing up in said farming community that relied heavily on manual labor and agriculture.
Even by that early time, intramural and club sports ruled the day and computers had taken over as a preferred form of after-school and summertime activity.
These shop programs and opportunities were both lifeline and anchors for a future for boys and men, and when they died off as a result of the No Child Left Behind Legislation,
For me personally, I didn’t know what I liked or wanted, and didn’t have many options of exploring what I wanted or enjoyed because I was busy fending off a whole bunch of early life trauma… I wouldn’t even find snowboarding until I was in my teens, and sacrificed a significant number of things to pursue my hobby-related ambitions in the sport, including anything even remotely resembling economic stability.
However, one of the single most life- and sanity-saving things I did get to experience happened when I was 14, and enrolled in a 4-hour science program in 9th grade as part of a specialty curriculum program that got us out of the classroom and into nature.
In that school year, I had the rare and life-altering opportunity to learn a great many skills, including film photography and photo development, how to read, interpret and even create a topographical map/3D structure, and the finer points of XC skiing and cold-weather survival — and in the two decades that have passed since then, I continue referring to the information, skills and memories I gleaned from that single year of school…
Because of that program (and other life experience that I only gained from repeated failure and loss), I know that I am capable, adaptable and smart. I know that I matter. And while my sense of self-worth has absolutely fluctuated and has been influenced by external forces, I can and have always come back to myself and the hard evidence of my personal capacity, as I wrote in my last essay.
But those programs don’t exist anymore — not the one I was in, and not the shop classes or continuing trade education programs that were historically integrated into American education curricula.
Do you think that’s a coincidence?!
It’s not, just for the record.
Men and boys are now choosing performative, faux masculinity because they too have been told that they aren’t safe, that nobody cares about them, that nothing they ever do will ever matter and that they’re inherently shitty and unlovable because they don’t have the perfect body or a full bank account or or or __________ — just like girls and women have all been.
And the worst part is that we’re all believing it because capitalism has undercut and stolen every single pipeline fueling anyone’s sense of self-worth in modern society —instead, capitalism hands us an employee badge and a voter card, telling all of us that our only value as humans lies in the profit that we’re able to produce and that our freedom is limited to the greedy politicians we elect.
But we’re all still convinced that it’s men who are the problem, aren’t we?
*wink wink*
Because harm is still a decision between two outcomes, right?
And ‘men just don’t know how to be men’, amirite? /s
It’s all so very black and white, correct?
And men and boys are out there choosing to harm women and girls and just… getting away with it, right? Because the system rewards male privilege?
Baby, what if I told you that the system created the male privilege so it can reward it in a direct effort to unequally constrain the economic value of women’s labor in an exploitative market so that women blame men and men blame and fear women and we all just go round and round and round and round and round again, forever and ever?!
Yep.
You should probably also consider this:
“In the human brain, aversive and appetitive processing have been studied with controlled stimuli in rather static settings. Here, we sought to investigate the dynamics of aversive/appetitive processing while participants engaged in trials involving threat avoidance or reward seeking. A central goal was to characterize the temporal evolution of responses during periods of threat or reward imminence. We uncovered imminence-related temporally increasing (“ramping”) responses in multiple brain regions, including the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, periaqueductal gray, and ventral striatum, subcortically, and dorsal anterior insula and anterior midcingulate, cortically. Overall, we uncovered extensive temporally evolving, imminence-related processing in both the aversive and appetitive domain, suggesting that distributed brain circuits are dynamically engaged during the processing of biologically relevant information regardless of valence.”
- Dinavahi V.P.S. Murty, Songtao Song, Srinivas Govinda Surampudi and Luiz Pessoa
Journal of Neuroscience 19 April 2023, 43 (16) 2973-2987;
Furthermore, as MEG studies of the somatosensory cortex show, electromagnetic signatures of brain activity during risk-assessment can accurately predict subsequent choices made by a subject, and:
“… within anterior insula we observed early and late effects of subject-specific risk preferences, suggestive of a role in both risk assessment and risk anticipation during choice. The observation that cortical activity tracks specific and independent components of risk from early time-points in a decision-making task supports the hypothesis that specialized brain circuitry underpins risk perception.”
- Symmonds M, Moran RJ, Wright ND, Bossaerts P, Barnes G, Dolan RJ. The chronometry of risk processing in the human cortex. Front Neurosci. 2013 Aug 20;7:146. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2013.00146. PMID: 23970849; PMCID: PMC3747673.
Scroll back up to what you read earlier about the watershed moment when a human being makes a decision about whether to cause harm or interrupt it, and the distinction between an ego-fueled proactive decision to harm someone or a response to a threat that arose from risk-assessment.
Now, considering everything you’ve read here and experienced in your own lives, I’m going to ask all of my female, lady-identifying readers the following question:
if you knew that doing so would cost you your job, your house, your safety and your reputation to stand up for some random dude who was being threatened by a system that could and would take all of that away from both of you, would you step in and take up his case?
Be honest, babe.
… because a lot of y’all won’t even do that for other women, right now.
A lot of white women won’t even do that for other white women because they fear some sort of bullshit, nonexistent competition based in capitalist scarcity — god forbid I ask whether or not you’d sacrifice your own safety and security for Black women or Hispanic women or Indigenous women or Iranian or Palestinian or or or or or…
Can you see where I’m going with this?
Tell yourself the truth, in this moment, about how resentful you’d feel if all the ‘ain’t shit’ men in your life were shouting and yelling at you about how you didn’t have the skills or desire to stand up for them; imagine every man in your life declaring that they deserved better and you’re just a lazy piece of shit riding along on your privilege…
Sound familiar?
I’m sure it does — or at least it should, because that’s what we’re all yelling at each other on a daily basis all across the internet, using a script that isn’t actually coming from either side of the so-called ‘gender war’…
instead, it’s a call that’s coming from inside the fucking house.
the house is called CAPITALISM.
And sexism is just one of the pillars propping up that loose facade of cards.
Over time, the inaccurate and wholly dehumanizing propaganda served to men about women and vice versa is just that: propaganda.
The propaganda on both and every side is just an intentional ‘othering’ of half of the human population, by capitalism, so that none of us will talk to, trust or rely on each other. IT IS A DISTRACTION.
Distracted people become desperate people.
And desperate people are easy to exploit.
Capitalism isn’t careful, and it wasn’t built overnight. It also hasn’t evolved overnight.
Remember that — it’s going to be an important theme in the next piece.
But I need you all to understand that distraction, worthlessness and synthetic need fulfillment have taken the place of real masculinity, self-accountability and honor because our entire human neurobiological process has been hijacked and commodified — and that we’ve been trained to choose the easy way out.
Especially men.
Men have been trained to ignore and abandon the basic principle of effort, even when the benefits are clearly drawn out for them, just because their fragile ego and delicate sense of self demands that they try to own and dominate someone else to ‘prove’ their value.
Instead of creating their own value for themselves and building a sense of self-worth and confidence, a lot of men and boys are really out here just manipulating, coercing and abusing their way through life as they try to extract value and labor from women instead of just creating their own… All while demanding that women are inferior beings, just because a lot of women have discovered our own pathways to self-worth and are no longer willing to pour into men who have no idea of who they are or what they want.
And rather than recognizing women as equally-amazing peers and equals with unique skills and talents we can bring to partnerships that would create unbreakable connections and level everyone up, men are choosing to trade in a probable partnership with mutual respect, trust and healing for a fragile, faux masculinity and ultimately, total loneliness.
Men and boys think they can’t have anything good or healthy because they believe they’re inherently worthless and unlovable, so no — they can’t have it all…
why should women get to, either?!
THAT is precisely why there’s a ‘male loneliness epidemic.’
That’s exactly why we can’t have anything nice.
Capitalism has slot-machined every single human instinct and mammalian drive that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and we’re going extinct because we’re stupid fucking idiots who can’t pull our heads out of our asses long enough to take a look around (or even at each other) and say “wait a second — what if we didn’t?” or own our mistakes and apologize for being human.
And the saddest, funniest part of knowing all of this is that in 2023, I explained and drew out ✨this exact concept✨ to my ex — and in the end, we both still decided to choose false power and fragile ego instead of alchemy and joy… instead of bravery and authenticity, we each chose our own versions of cowardice and avarice.
it’s all such a perfect example of the issues at hand.
ROUND AND ROUND WE ALL FUCKING GO:
I can say all of this because I have nothing to hide: I hope I’ve made it clear that I spent time, effort, energy and cold hard cash to prove I was a person with value, too.
That’s what happens when we blame ‘aint shit’ humans for hurting us instead of just leaving.
That’s what happens when we exchange our power for some fairytale notion of ‘love’ or ‘success’ that exists anywhere outside of ourselves.
And that’s especially what happens when we rely on the exact same systems exploiting, oppressing and subjugating us to be the same systems to save us instead of relying on each other.
Just like faux masculinity isolates and hurts men and women, so do racism, bigotry, ableism, ageism, politics and economics — it’s not just divide and conquer, it’s harm and dominate.… Because the real winner here is capitalism and the forces driving it.
Just like racism and bigotry, sexism is an equal pillar supporting and continuing the elevation of capitalism — and capitalism uses it well.
A person only focused on fighting sexism, for instance, will be far too distracted and angry and dysregulated to also fight racism and bigotry — I know this because I was this, for a very long time.
The ruling class has weaponized our own physiological system and individual survival drive to maintain capitalism’s subjugation of humanity.
Pretty simple, really.
Just as a white woman (hiiiiiiiii!) will always prioritize her own adjacency to power and access to false safety over ANYTHING ELSE, even if she fights against sexism, she will sell everyone and anyone else down the river at the chance to ‘get inside’ and be part of the power structure, BECAUSE HER ENTIRE SYSTEM DEMANDS THAT SHE ‘GET SAFE’ BEFORE SHE SAVES ANYONE ELSE.
Read it again.
That’s why hyper-individualism is such a crucial aspect of capitalism: it bootlegs our neurological and nervous system’s priorities.
That same white woman’s battle for her own safety undermines and corrupts the trust everyone else has in her, too, thus demolishing any progress that could possibly be made in community with other people while presenting a united front to fight for collective safety and survival.
Instead, we’re all only focusing on the issue that threaten each of us as individuals, because our egos prioritize it: sexism, racism, bigotry, age, disability, poverty, etc etc etc.
Capitalism relies on that individual self-interest, and knows that the majority of humans are going to stay complacent and happy in their little pods of misery and prejudice, because we’re all having our needs synthetically half-fulfilled and choosing to be stuck in survival mode rather than taking a chance on thriving through collective liberation.
And if white women are fighting against Black women, and men are fighting women, and LGBTQIA+ communities are constantly battling for our rights, and democrats are fighting leftists who are fighting MAGA, and everyone is fighting everyone all of the goddamned time, there will eventually be nobody left on the sidelines to blow the fucking whistle for a timeout — and none of us ever take a break long enough to look around and ask “WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING TO EACH OTHER, AND WHY?!”
And that’s how they’ll get ya:
they don’t have to appeal to our self-interests if they can simply hijack them.
//
if you’re still here, wow.
well done.
I hope reading this piece brought you as much clarity as writing it did, though I do hope it didn’t take you as long to read as it required of me to write — the labor of love is real.
Thanks for being here.
xx,
AB
Jules R. Dugré, Christian J. Hopfer, Drew E. Winters,
The dark sides of the brain: A systematic review and meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies on trait aggression,
Aggression and Violent Behavior,
Volume 81, 2025,
102035,
ISSN 1359-1789,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2025.102035.(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178925000047)
Abstract: Aggression is a worldwide issue that has significant consequences for both the victims and societies. However, aggression may vary in its underlying motivation (i.e., reactive versus proactive) and the forms in which it occurs (i.e., physical versus verbal). Yet, functional brain correlates differentiating these types remains largely unknown. A systematic search was conducted up to May 1st 2023, using PubMed, Google Scholar, and Web of Science, to identify relevant functional neuroimaging studies that included measures of General Aggression, Reactive Aggression, Proactive Aggression, Physical Aggression and Verbal Aggression. Coordinate-based meta-analysis was conducted using both spatial convergence (ALE) and effect-size (SDM-PSI) approaches. Sixty-seven functional neuroimaging studies met the inclusion criteria. Meta-analysis revealed similar yet distinct neural correlates for General Aggression (i.e., Amygdala, Precuneus, Intraparietal Sulcus, Angular and Middle Temporal Gyri), Reactive Aggression (i.e., Amygdala, Periaqueductal Grey, Posterior Insula, & Central Opercular Cortex), Proactive Aggression (i.e., Septal Area, & Amygdala), Physical Aggression (i.e., Dorsal Premotor Cortex, Dorsal Caudate, & Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex), and Verbal (i.e., Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex). Exploratory analyses revealed the importance of affective, cognitive and social cognition processes as well as serotoninergic, dopaminergic, and cholinergic systems in the neural underpinnings of aggressive behaviors. Our findings highlight the importance of examining the types of aggression (i.e., motivation and forms) within a transdiagnostic framework. Therefore, characterizing the neurobiological substrates of aggression may expand our search for targeted neuromodulation and pharmacological treatments.
Keywords: Meta-analysis; Neuroimaging; Aggression; Reactive aggression; Proactive aggression
As Jules R. Dugré, Christian J. Hopfer, Drew E. Winters note,“In humans, reactive aggression appears to rely on similar brain structures than in rage attacks in animals (Blair, 2004; Blair, 2022) but is believed to be modulated by subregions of the prefrontal cortex, including the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (Blair, 2004) extending to the ventrolateral PFC/anterior insula (Bertsch et al., 2020; Blair, 2022; Dugré & Potvin, 2023a; Lickley et al., 2018; Sorella et al., 2021) and possibly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Achterberg et al., 2020; Ibrahim et al., 2022).”
“In contrast, proactive aggression (analogous to quiet-biting attacks) is thought to be characterized by activity in the amygdala, ventral striatum, medial orbitofrontal cortex, ventromedial PFC, and posterior cingulate cortex (Belfry & Kolla, 2021; Blair, 2022; Crowe & Blair, 2008; Romero-Martínez et al., 2022), which are commonly involved during reinforcement-based decision-making and motivational fMRI tasks (Dugré & Potvin, 2023b).”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23970849/
see also: everything I know now (formally, I have a high school-level education, y’all)
(This thread was written in February, before Musk announced his autism publicly)
Nope. Not even TOUCHING that one.
Understatement of the fucking century, I’m aware.
Dinavahi V.P.S. Murty, Songtao Song, Srinivas Govinda Surampudi and Luiz Pessoa
Journal of Neuroscience 19 April 2023, 43 (16) 2973-2987; https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1778-22.2023
https://www.fastcompany.com/91194420/women-who-played-sports-are-more-likely-to-be-business-leaders