Mark Greene’s Little #MeToo Book for Men and the Con of Dominance
The boardroom was filled with important people. Leaders. Decorated. Well known. All men.
The discussion moved to event scheduling. Someone mentioned the lack of female representation for visiting speakers. Someone else scoffed. All faces turned. The scoffer rolled his eyes, “Fine. Suppose we have to make a show of it. Let’s at least find something pretty to look at.”
A few uncomfortable grunts, a cough. Silence. “Joking,” he eventually said. “Guess we can’t do funny anymore either.”
No one laughed. That’s what I remember most. No one felt the need to placate a man in power who expected a laugh. It was a one-liner in a long history of one-liners that had no doubt garnered a grin or two from his hangers on in the past. You know the guffawing fools I mean, the Billy Bush-types who play along as a seemingly strong man brags about assaulting women. Cringe-worthy, sure; but never actually funny.
When the #MeToo Movement was at its peak, it baffled me to see some men fearfully pushing back; acting for all the world like a call to not harass, abuse or rape people somehow had a downside. The confusion led me to the work of Mark Greene, and through him, all of the other incredible people who have been working to answer the central question of his 2021 book, The Little #MeToo Book for Men:
“Why is #MeToo such a source of alarm for so many men?”
At 70 pages, this short overview of man box culture is essential reading for everyone. Especially for those who want to build safe work environments where we can all thrive (something near and dear to me). In those 70 pages is a profound roadmap for men to find freedom in themselves, to explore all of the emotional complexity that has been denied us, and to learn the embarrassingly simple answer to that question:
All those bad jokes, the strutting performance of dominance masking deep insecurity, the unearned greatness — no one’s playing along anymore.
The Con
I’ve been in plenty of other boardrooms, locker rooms and bars with people who have said worse and got the play-along laughs expected in those environments. Back in my teens, whenever I felt insecure and wanted to fit in with the club, I pretended to laugh too.
That stopped fast when I realized that there was no reward on the other side of that nonsense, just more pretending. More shallow conversations with no depth, meaning or anything approaching authentic connection.
By unpacking the whole affair, Greene’s book provides both language and understanding, and the kind of relief that only comes from knowledge. Men, we’ve been had. The rules we’ve always played by weren’t designed to serve us, only to hold the line of status quo for the very undeserving few. And the longer we adhere to those rules, the worse off we all are.
Let’s explore that. In Chapter 12 (called “Suppressing Fire”), Greene proposes a thought experiment:
“How many men have a female life partner who is a working woman? Yet, collectively, men accept a 20% shortfall in our partners’ income… That’s a new car. That’s a vacation. That’s a dishwasher. Why isn’t every man… out in the streets demanding that equal pay become the law of the land?… Because if all the men who have a working female spouse got behind pay equity, it would be the law of the land the day after. Instead we collectively shrug.”
More than indifference, I’ve even seen men deny the overwhelming evidence of a pay gap. Hate to break it to them but in almost every single place I’ve ever worked, I’ve seen it. On paper. On the books. In living colour. And many of these places are actually quite progressive.
So when it’s our own family’s bank balance on the line, why do we shrug? Greene’s answer is disquieting: “That millions of men are voluntarily giving up such a sizeable sum of money must mean we’re exchanging it for something we value more.”
Why do men laugh at objectively bad jokes? Why do we allow the bad behaviours in the workplace and hide behind excuses like Tenure or Seniority or phrases like “Oh that’s just the way he his?”
Our working cultures will only ever be as good as the worst behaviour we allow. All the good we do to create trusting collaborative environments means nothing. The “something pretty to look at” guy IS our culture so long as he is allowed to say it.
Are we strong enough to change our minds
Only the insecure see someone else’s agency as a diminishment of their own. The fallacy of having power over someone as a marker of status needs to be left to the dust. That’s not strength.
What we really want is connection.
As Greene writes, “We don’t heal in isolation. We heal in realtionship.” I think that goes for our working cultures, and our overarching systems of governance, too. Inviting others to speak, not just to share the floor, but to make the floor bigger, is how we uncover the faults and flaws that we can start to address.
That no one laughed that day struck me as a good thing — a step in the right direction. Now I see we can’t stop there. The step after silence is sound. Speaking up not just to limit the bad behaviours but to introduce good ones. The behaviours that benefit everyone.
That scoffer I mentioned above? He later came to a working session on removing gender bias from legacy systems and processes. No one made him. He went on his own. A few months after that, he led a discussion in which he called out his own behaviour, and encouraged others to do the same. The conversations that followed were moving, open, powerful.
That is what real strength looks like. Real leadership. It’s what freedom looks like.
If you want to get there, Mark Greene’s The Little #MeToo Book is one of the best places to begin.
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Thank you for reading and engaging with the work. You can find Mark Greene’s book at remakingmanhood.com. I also urge everyone to explore the work of people like Niobe Way and Ashanti Branch.
There are far better worlds out there to be made if we have the courage to explore.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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