Greene - The Little #MeToo Book for Men

THE LITTLE #METOO BOOK FOR MEN

The Little #MeToo Book for Men is a profoundly empathetic guide for men who are navigating a culture that pressures them to bury their humanity. This book is nothing short of a blueprint for mens liberation.

Caroline Heldman, Ph.D.

Executive Director,

The Representation Project

The Little #MeToo Book for Men is an excellent resource. It offers insight into our collective socialization and how we can break out of the Man Box to promote healthy manhood and help prevent all forms of violence and discrimination against all women and girls.

Tony Porter, founder, A CALL TO MEN

Outstanding read and great contribution to understanding the current cultural impact on boys and healthy masculine development.

Joe Ehrmann, Author, InSideOut Coaching

Mark Greene is unique among my activist friends and colleagues in speaking truth to power, but not seeing men and women in opposition.

Jed Diamond, Men Alive Now

This isnt just a book, its a thunderbolt! A powerful call to end mens silence on sexual assault.

Lisa Hickey, CEO, The Good Men Project

With deep compassion for men, Greene calls out to our better selves.

Michael Kasdan, Editor, The Good Men Project

Greene has compiled his thoughts, perspectives, and masculinity research in a manner that would be helpful for anyone that truly wishes to equip boys and men for a better life. Specifically, its highly recommended for school and college administrators, coaches, counselors, and therapists.

Byron A. Hughes, Ph.D.

Dean of Students, Virginia Tech

Mark Greene, in seventy five pages, has written perhaps the most important book on masculinity ever.

Joseph Losi, Mature Masculinity

This is the book that men should be reading to get a thoughtful and concise look at modern masculinity and the man box in which we find ourselves stuck.

Matt Schneider, Co-founder, City Dads Group

This book is 70+ pages of truth, wisdom, explanation, and understanding. It doesnt make excuses, but it does give explanations of how we got here and what we can do to change. I was so impressed with the book, I immediately gave a copy to my twenty-something son and asked him to read it as well.

EM Bosso, Author

Mark Greene has written a timely, compelling book that connects two seemingly disparate issues, the widespread silence about and cultural acceptance of sexual assault against women, and the emotional assault against men that begins when they are boys.

Lisa Duggan, Author

Mark Greene manages to write in a way that makes a very difficult topic easily accessible. His non-judgmental writing allows men to have a little distance, so they can think through these issues without shutting down. He places society and our culture squarely in the cross hairs and then offers men a path forward and out of the pain we inflict on others and ourselves when we blindly follow the cultural scripts we were born into. I will be recommending this book to my clients as well as friends and family.

Jay Sefton, Therapist

This book is dedicated to Saliha Bava,

who continues to grow and share with me such joyful,

powerful ways of living.

And to Arthur Wellington Greene, Jr.

And one more for the pot.

Copyright 2018 Mark Greene

Published by ThinkPlay Partners

All rights reserved.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.

- Elie Wiesel

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Little #MeToo Book for Men is a critique of our dominant culture of manhood in America, framed through the lens of a single challenging question. Why is #MeToo such a source of alarm for so many men? This book is the result of ten years of my writing and speaking about manhood as a senior editor for the Good Men Project. It is written from the perspective of a white man raised in the United States, but I am told these issues resonate globally, that men and women are dealing with versions of these issues everywhere.

For millions of men, manhood can seem like a foregone conclusion, mapped out for us by universally understood rules for being a real man. These rules determine how we walk, how we talk, what we think and do, what we view as our responsibilities and most importantly, how we pursue or fail to pursue our deepest needs, wants and desires.

These rules of manhood become so central to what we believe as to render the distinction between ourselves and our culture of manhood invisible to us. When millions of men live our lives subject to the rules of a culture we are not fully conscious of, it can be damaging for our families, our communities, our collective quality of life, and even our longevity. As such, this book seeks to encourage a conversation about how boys and men arrive at what we believe.

If this conversation can reveal even the slightest glimmer of daylight between our dominant culture of masculinity and our own daily choices as men, my hope is we will find, in that space, a more vibrant and authentic connection to our agency, our power and our humanity.

Mark Greene

November 2018

New York City

1 /COLLISION

We cannot understand why #MeToo is so alarming for men without also understanding manhood in America. The two are inescapably intertwined. We must look at how our dominant culture of manhood is constructed, what it creates in the world and how it impacts peoples lives.

No culture is immutable. Cultures are fluid and ever changing. Our dominant culture of manhood coexists and overlaps with a multitude of others, each rising and waning across generations. Cultures can be religious, corporate, political or social, and based sometimes on rigid delineations of, and at other times the intermingling of, class, race, gender, creed and other categories of social identity.

What then, is culture? Culture is a collective agreement on how we should behave, integrated into how we construct our identities, and reconfirmed daily in our actions. Those with more power and resources often have more say in how we define culture. Those with less power often resist those definitions.

Our collective agreement about how men should behave has been shaped and reshaped over time. Whenever we are ready to do so, we shift towards a new collective agreement, changing manhood, sometimes by great leaps and bounds, sometimes by only the slightest of degrees. This process is ongoing, caught up in the push and pull of generations, gender, race, sexuality, religion, politics and the larger culture.

The more dominant a culture, the more those who have internalized it will fight in defense of it. The more archaic and inflexible a culture, the more it will be challenged as it increasingly fails to meet the needs of those it impacts. What has always been and what is coming next eventually come into direct conflict. Hence the term, culture war. The resulting collision can be chaotic, alarming and filled with challenges, creating great uncertainty daily or even hourly, disrupting our sense of who we are and how our world operates.

As women take up the banner of #MeToo by the millions, many men are feeling conflicted, alarmed, angry, and even disheartened. How is it that men are challenged by a movement which says, Dont rape, sexually harass or abuse other human beings? These are ideas we can all get behind, right? But its not playing out that way.

The uncertainty and alarm this movement creates for men can be profound, lurching up from within our socially constructed identities, from within the process by which we experience and express who we are, and from within the structures by which we are assigned our status.

Men have our own #MeToo stories, when we ourselves were sexually harassed, assaulted, or raped. These stories, which men have been shamed into hiding or denying, are just one more example of why this earthquake called #MeToo shakes the ground beneath all our feet. #MeToo challenges from multiple angles mens sense of control over, and confidence in, who we are. Life used to be simple. Now it is complicated. Men and women used to know our place. Now we do not. I do not want to think about this .