Lonely? Maybe You Should Join the Fight for Equality [Live Recording]

Welcome to our Weekly Call with the Publisher. I am Lisa Hickey, Publisher of The Good Men Project, and we hold these calls every Friday and have been for over a decade.

goodmenproject · Lonely? Maybe You Should Join The Fight For Equality

On today’s call, I want to tie together some themes from other calls. Mark Greene has written a lot about loneliness and man box culture. He cites statistics such as one in three adults aged 45 or older reported being chronically lonely. Just a decade before, only one out of five of us said that. And that chronic loneliness can cause mortality rates equal to smoking a pack of cigarettes. And men are also often taught the misguided idea that romantic love is the only solution to loneliness. It is not.

Men are bullied into Man Box culture beginning at birth via the denigration of the feminine (What are you, a sissy? What are you, a girl?) which brainwashes them over the course of decades into seeing women and girls as less.

Then, after men are bullied into seeing women as less than — they are offered a culture of male dominance. So they are taught to degenerate and police other men. They are taught to stay silent and ‘man up’ when other men are abusive. They are taught to compete with others — even if it harms their ability to form friendships.

And so first they lose women as friends, and then they lose other men. And we wonder why men end up lonely.

Yesterday on Facebook, I saw a story that brought this to life so clearly, it took my breath away.

First some context — I used to work in an ad agency as a creative person (ie, copywriter/art director). It was such a male-dominated field that when I became a creative director, I was the only female creative director in all of New England. And I was on Facebook yesterday and saw a post by someone I used to work with. Another creative director. A man. Someone I considered a colleague and possibly a friend. And this guy was lamenting the “good old days” in advertising. The days when advertising was “fun”. And he gave an example of said fun. He told the story — and I’ll tell it in his own words, so you know I’m not dramatizing — he talked about “that time we mummified an account guy and sent him down the elevator. Where else could a bunch of creatives wrap a dude up in duct tape head to toe, stuff him on an elevator, and send him down to the lobby. Good times!”

I don’t know about you — but in my mind, that is assault. And here this guy is bragging about how it is FUN. And then he asked other advertising people for more stories about good times. I will note that of over 75 responses, only guys added in these types of things were fun.

Here is what people admitted to on Facebook. In 2021:

Some guys hired a stripper to impersonate a female copywriter candidate
Logged onto a colleague’s computer a woman, and sent a message to this woman’s husband, pretending a colleague who wanted to have an affair with the woman.
The boss wanted to reward the guys who worked for them, so he hired a stripper and some ‘quote unquote’ interesting girls (you can use your imagination to define the word interesting) and they smoked interesting botanical herbs on a cruise on Lake Michigan. And what he remembers most about that day was the laughter.
At a big company party with an open bar, they brought in an actual full-size boxing ring, so people could get drunk and duke it out with each other.
At another party, two colleagues were having an affair, and the guy was married. So at a holiday party, someone invited the wife, knowing that the guy was going to be there with the woman he was cheating on his wife with.

I couldn’t even read the rest of the thread, but there were about 40 more. And some women did get on the Facebook thread who tried to call the guys out on these “pranks” and got shamed, silenced, minimized, told ‘boys will be boys’ and every other abuse tactic in the book. And one of the women who tried to call the guys on the thread out had a good point — she said she got called out for leaving to pick up her infant, and yet the guys were spending their time wrapping someone up in duct tape and laughing about it.

And this was the culture, where I, as a woman, wanted to be a creative director. Which meant I would have to manage those guys. And it sort of explains everything about why they wouldn’t want a woman managing them and why there wasn’t a single woman creative director in all of New England.

And the guys telling these stories still working in ad agencies, still managing people — and have often become rich, famous, and powerful in the world of advertising. THEY are still examples of how to succeed in business. One of the guys even wrote a book about those stories.

Reading that thread was literally traumatizing for me.

Gender norms are taking a toll on boys’ and girls’ mental health around the world, a new study has found. Youth are conforming to gender stereotypes to fit in and gain social status according to the Journal of Adolescence Health. Gender stereotypes enforced by the segregation of boys and girls when they reach puberty contributes to significant health consequences including violence, victimization, and depression,

One of the “Boys socialized to conform to traditional masculine ideology may demonstrate it through violence.”

Now — I believe that wrapping a work colleague in duct tape and sending him down an elevator IS violence. I don’t know how you can not think of it as violence.

But in case you are wondering about other forms of violence — almost one in 10 teenage boys have admitted to carrying a concealed weapon. This was from the Center for Longitudinal Studies in London. And despite stereotypes that say otherwise, the majority of those are white boys.

Also, 20% of kids in school report being bullied. This article defined bullying as unwanted aggressive behavior. Usually, there is an unbalance of power. So it makes sense that when boys bully it is often physically aggressive, and when girls bully it is often “being mean” and excluding them from social groups.

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If you want to combat loneliness, if you want to help boys and men, if you want to help the “boys who aren’t doing so well” as Mark Sherman has said on these calls before — if you want to do all that — fight for equality. We talked about this on a call on Wed, the GMP playlist. (which is at 8 pm Eastern time / 5 pm Pacific) btw. And there was a new person who came on the call. And he admitted to having an ache in his heart from being lonely. And he wrote me after and said how the ache in his heart disappeared by the end of the call.

But it doesn’t have to be gender equality. Fight for racism. Oh, we have a call about that too — that’s on Tuesdays! Or learn about how to create deeper, broader, better relationships! That’s on our Monday night calls.

And finally, we also talked about self-care and happiness. And one of my mantras is “all you really need for happiness is something to look forward to.” And helping to co-create a more open, more inclusive, more equal world is something I look forward to every day.

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This post is republished on Medium.

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