How racism and sexism fuelled a new toxic masculinity — and galvanized a whole generation of women
In 2014, the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business announced Jennifer Berdahl as its first-ever Montalbano Professor in Leadership Studies: Women and Diversity, heaping expected praise on her academic research. While the title was a mouthful, her goal was more straightforward, although not exactly simple. In the words of UBC, Berdahl’s hiring would make the school “a centre of excellence for the study of equity in the upper echelons of the corporate world” with a mandate to explore how “business leadership can be made stronger through greater gender equity and increased diversity.”73 In other words, whoever held the professorship was to make a business case for diversity. Or, put even more bluntly: undo all the white-dude domination.
UBC had picked the right person for the job. Before joining the school, Berdahl had spent more than twenty years researching workplace equity, working at both the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research, UBC gushed, had helped form the spine of Sheryl Sandberg’s arguments in Lean In. She had been an adviser to the Canadian Parliament and a courtroom expert witness. For Berdahl, the hiring was a woohoo! moment. Business schools had not always supported her research, particularly when it delved deeply into sexual harassment, power dynamics, and workplace cultures, but the Sauder School wanted to be at the forefront of change. They were even open to turning the focus back on the school itself. Or so Berdahl thought.
First, she flagged some problematic comments made by a male professor within the department. Then she flagged some student behaviour. Each, she thought, was indicative of the type of work environments that undermine success for women and people of colour. Each instance was dismissed. Berdahl began to feel as if she’d been hired to do the “corporate feminist dog-and-pony show” and nothing more. Then, a year into Berdahl’s professorship at UBC, the president of the university, Arvind Gupta, abruptly resigned after less than a year in office. Berdahl heard the news as the conference she’d been at all day came to a close. That conference, incidentally, was a gathering of interdisciplinary scholars focused on studying work as a masculinity contest — that is, workplace environments which, belying what appear to be neutral practices, pressure men into proving manhood on the job to get ahead.74
It seemed to Berdahl that Gupta was yet another real-life example of her research. She decided to write a post on her blog, titled “Did President Arvind Gupta Lose the Masculinity Contest?,” analyzing his resignation through her decades-long scholarship.75 She was careful to open the post by stating that she wasn’t privy to the detailed information that might explain the “unfortunate outcome” of his resignation. UBC had failed in either selecting or supporting him, she wrote, and while she didn’t know which it was, she did know that women and people of colour, including men, rarely won the masculinity contest at white-dominated institutions like UBC. (At the time of her writing, eleven of the twelve deans at the school’s Vancouver campus were white, and ten of them were men.) It wasn’t just that Gupta was not a physically imposing white man — both considered gold-medal qualities in the masculinity contest — but that he also advocated for more diversity in leadership. From Berdahl’s experience with Gupta, she knew him to be a leader who listened, encouraged the less powerful to speak first in group settings, felt confident in expressing his own uncertainty, and never encouraged others to fall in line.
“He exhibited all the traits of a humble leader: one who listens to arguments and weighs their logic and information, instead of displaying and rewarding bravado as a proxy for competence,” Berdahl wrote. Unfortunately, she added, none of those things are valued when work is a masculinity contest — in fact, they’re likely to cost a leader. “Instead, those who rise to positions of leadership have won the contest of who can seem most certain and overrule or ignore divergent opinions. Risk-taking, harassment, and bullying are common. Against men this usually takes the form of ‘not man enough’ harassment, with accusations of being a wimp, lacking a spine, and other attacks on their fortitude as ‘real men.’” She continued, presciently describing a leadership style that has permeated world politics, “‘Frat-boy’ behavior sets the tone, like encouraging heavy drinking, bragging about financial, athletic, or other forms of prowess, and telling sexual jokes.”
University leadership reacted swiftly, and brashly, to Berdahl’s post.76 Or, as Berdahl put it to me, “All hell broke loose.” Though she had named no one in her short blog post, evidently some men thought it was about them. She received a call from John Montalbano, who, at the time, had an extensive list of titles to his name: chair of the UBC board of governors; member of the faculty advisory board for the Sauder School; and, as CEO of RBC Global Asset Management, the man behind the $2-million gift that had created the Montalbano Professorship in Leadership Studies: Women and Diversity. Montalbano was not happy. He felt the blog post was directed at him (and, indeed, while Berdahl told me she did not have him in mind when she wrote the post, documents later leaked showed Montalbano had a rocky relationship with Gupta, to say the least).77
Montalbano told Berdahl that her blog was hurtful, inaccurate, unfair, and grossly embarrassing to the board. According to Berdahl, he worried it made him look like a hypocrite. He mentioned talking to the dean of the Sauder School about it, and repeatedly brought up RBC, which funded Berdahl’s research. Her academic credibility, Berdahl recalls him telling her, was now shit. Shortly after that call, the dean’s office reached Berdahl, relaying concerns about future fundraising prospects and the school’s reputation. That evening, at a Sauder reception, said Berdahl, two more administrators pulled her aside at the party and chastised her again. To Berdahl, the message was clear: you should have kept silent. She had never felt more institutional pressure in her life. She had never felt more as though her academic freedom had been curtailed. And she had also perhaps never been more trapped inside a losing masculinity contest of her own.
In the end, after Berdahl spoke about the fallout on her blog78 and in the media, UBC and the Faculty Association of the University of British Columbia launched an investigation into whether her academic freedom had, in fact, been violated. Perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone following the facts, former B.C. Supreme Court justice Lynn Smith concluded that UBC had failed in its duty to protect and support that freedom.79 “Dr. Berdahl reasonably felt reprimanded, silenced and isolated,” wrote Smith in her October 2015 decision. Yet she added that the interference was unintentional — a result of a series of “several relatively small mistakes” as well as “some unlucky circumstances.” Not exactly a sound victory. That apparent win becomes even murkier considering the details of Berdahl’s subsequent mediation with the school. Montalbano eventually resigned from the board. But Berdahl herself lost her position, was put on a two-year academic leave, and was also moved from the business school to the department of sociology, effective upon her return to the school. It was as if she, and the once-lauded equity goals of her original professorship, had never existed at all.
Revealingly, in the weeks following the whole debacle, much of Canada’s powerful mainstream media sided with the status quo. Some argued that Berdahl’s blog post wasn’t grounded in academic research at all, it was pure feminist conjecture — erasing her and others’ entire field of deeply considered study. The Globe and Mail dedicated not one, but two opinion pieces to undermining the concept of her academic freedom, and, in turn, Berdahl’s voice. First, it published a piece by James Tansey, the executive director for the Centre for Social Innovation and Impact Investing at the Sauder School, that seemed to almost wilfully misinterpret Berdahl’s blog. Tansey wrote that, “Just because an academic is speaking, it doesn’t mean that what they are saying is scholarly or academic.”80 And then, in a later editorial, The Globe described Montalbano’s actions as those of someone who “may or may not have let off some needless steam,” adding that “[Berdahl’s] post was one remark about one unexplained kerfuffle in a university’s administration, not a piece of data in a social research program.”81
In contrast, two years later, when the director of McGill University’s Institute for the Study of Canada, Andrew Potter, came under fire for writing an article about what he described as Quebec’s “essential malaise” — a topic not even remotely grounded in decades of academic research, but rather an anecdote about being stranded in a snowstorm — The Globe, and other media, bemoaned the supposed violation of his academic freedom. “Did Mr. Potter, a professor of philosophy and former newspaper editor, truly resign voluntarily from his ‘dream job,’ as he described it? Or did someone inside or outside the school apply undue pressure? Why didn’t the university defend his academic freedom?” the Globe editorial board wrote. “We need to know. The right of university professors to speak their minds without fear of sanction is critical in a free society. It matters not a whit that the online Maclean’s column that got Mr. Potter in trouble was poorly thought out . . .”82
Because of course it doesn’t. Why would it? It only matters whose power was, supposedly, being violated. When I spoke to Berdahl, she was in the final months of her leave. She didn’t regret speaking up, but she still seemed ambivalent about the whole thing. On the one hand, she felt as though it set a bad precedent to take away a named professorship from a professor because they wrote something that upset the donors. That they made the work environment so poisonous that she couldn’t return to her department was also wrong. Clearly. And yet, “On the other hand, I don’t want to work there at all anymore,” she told me. “I can still do my scholarship, still do my speaking and still be who I am — maybe even more who I am — in sociology.” She would no longer be under any pressure to win the masculinity contest, she added. She’d been released from the game.
Berdahl’s case has an element of the absurd. She was punished for doing her job, and the very research that she was once celebrated for was suddenly minimized as feminist mudslinging. Lady gossip. The case itself, as well as the reaction to it, exposed how reluctant old institutions are to change, no matter the cloying lip service paid to fostering diversity and equal treatment. But while Berdahl’s case might win for the most ironic, it is not singular, and it is far from the most jarring example of a woman, trans or cis, clashing against, or being felled by, toxic male leadership. Things have only become worse in the past five years. We still witness the type of bumbling interference seen at UBC, of course, but we’ve also seen an escalation to full-out harassment and, often, violence that has become almost surreal in its ordinariness. It’s like we’re stuck in a global masculinity contest — one that more and more men keep joining. Eagerly.
If the push for equality is experiencing a renaissance, and arguably it is, this galvanizing moment cannot be divorced from a new sort of leadership, one that is grounded in inequality. While the emergence of that leadership is often pinned on Donald Trump, he is — likely much to his dismay — only one part of the depressing equation. Democracy has been in an alarming decline for thirteen consecutive years, according to Freedom House’s 2019 Freedom in the World report, which examined 195 countries and 14 territories over the 2018 calendar year. The organization has conducted its annual survey of global political rights and civil liberties since 1973, and in that time it has seen a dramatic reversal in democratic values.83 After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later, democracy rose around the world. That surge of progress, however, warned the Freedom in the World report, has now begun to roll back. In 2018 alone, 68 countries saw a weakening in democracy.
“So far it has been anti-liberal populist movements of the far right — those that emphasize national sovereignty, are hostile to immigration, and reject constitutional checks on the will of the majority — that have been most effective at seizing the open political space,” wrote researchers in the 2019 report. The ascent of such far-right groups into the political sphere has led to a successful, emboldened backlash against democratic liberal ideas, in both expected and unexpected places. “In countries from Italy to Sweden,” added the researchers, “anti-liberal politicians have shifted the terms of debate and won elections by promoting an exclusionary national identity as a means for frustrated majorities to gird themselves against a changing global and domestic order.” In those countries, groups have attacked institutions designed to protect minorities against abuse, dismissed core civil and political rights, and polarized the press — enabling a globally used blanket cry of “fake news” any time a leader wants to silence and discredit criticism. And while Trump does not bear sole responsibility for the slipping democracy in the United States, the report stressed, he has certainly been greasing the path there, and for countries far beyond his own.
The report’s assessment of Trump at the midpoint of his presidency reads like a how-to primer in the newly popular, ultra-toxic, ultra-masculine power: “[He] has assailed essential institutions and traditions including the separation of powers, a free press, an independent judiciary, the impartial delivery of justice, safeguards against corruption, and most disturbingly, the legitimacy of elections.” Trump’s unwavering commitment to “America First,” his reluctance to talk democracy abroad, and his belligerent praise for some of the world’s most repugnant dictators and, dare I say, fellow strongmen has only cemented his place as one of the world’s new power icons — like a sort of Lady Gaga for bigots. This type of power, which extends far past politics, is not only spreading, not only being emulated, it’s being celebrated. At its core, it disregards individual rights, embraces extreme hierarchies, promotes an almost radical self-interest, ignores limits, and seems chiefly concerned with expanding its own reach. Oh, and it’s naturally misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, anti-immigrant, and racist. Just for starters.
Canada has not escaped its oily reach. Much ink has been spilled debating whether or not Ontario premier Doug Ford, in particular, is a sort of Trump Lite.84 That, unfortunately, distracts from the larger reality, which is that Trump’s brand of power and leadership does not begin and end with him; it’s worldwide. Whether Ford is Trump Lite is almost beside the point. He employs the same type of power, to the benefit of himself and others like him.
Ford, Trump, and their ilk are fond of reminding everybody that they were democratically elected. People — many people — chose them. And it is important to remember this; it is a reminder that this type of power does not exist without support. Their power is sustained, even in its chaos, even in dissent, because it’s seen as restoring a particular world order. It’s a power that constituents hope will also trickle power down to them, elevating them to whatever place — in society, in the workplace, and in their own homes — they believe they have a natural right to occupy. It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that expressions of this power are seen in movements, and public figures, beyond politics.
Online, misogyny flourishes in the so-called manosphere, a loose network of anti-feminists, traditionalists, and men-first men that includes members of the men’s rights movement, the Red Pill movement, Trump supporters, Gamergaters, the Incel movement, and, also, just general jerks. In the past, there’s been a tendency to dismiss such digital hate as “not real,” as if the digital space confines rampant misogyny to a series of magical bubbles spread across the dark, lonely basements of losers everywhere. But nearly a quarter of women experience online abuse or harassment, according to a 2017 Amnesty International poll that surveyed women in eight countries. Most of it comes from complete strangers. A lot of it is unsettling, terrifying, demeaning — meant to undermine, diminish, and exert power, just the same as offline abuse. “Online abuse began for me when I started the Everyday Sexism Project — before it had become particularly high-profile or I received many entries,” UK women’s rights activist Laura Bates told Amnesty International. Her project, as the name suggests, catalogues everyday sexism through submissions to her site. “You could be sitting at home in your living room, outside of working hours, and suddenly someone is able to send you a graphic rape threat right into the palm of your hand.”85
Not all digital violence is directed at specific women. On the extreme and murkiest end of the manosphere is the Incel movement, which is not unlike a mass temper tantrum of men kicking and screaming for the power they believe they’re owed. The term “incel” is a slang identifier for those who describe themselves as “involuntarily celibate.” For a movement that, on the surface, seems primarily focused on getting laid, it would almost be laughable, if it weren’t also so dangerous. As I’ve written elsewhere, in The Walrus, it would be a mistake to underestimate the Incels.86 When Reddit banned its Incel subreddit in November 2017, the online community had 40,000 members.87 Though the sub claimed to be a “support group” for those navigating a “normie” world, Reddit said the Incel community violated its then-new policy prohibiting any group that “encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people” — in this case, women.
Though many Incel members have said they were merely commiserating, not preaching violence, on the Reddit channel, the misogyny threaded through the group’s rhetoric is undeniable. Incels often refer to women as both “femoids” (a portmanteau of “female” and “humanoid”) and “roasties” (a term that’s meant to liken a woman’s genitals to a roast beef sandwich). Women are “sluts” by nature, “nothing but trash that use men,” and “genetically hardwired to exchange sex for money, status, power, shelter and material — things that they presumably cannot earn or make for themselves.”88 The deeper one goes into the archives of the community’s messages, the more disturbing it gets.
Unsurprisingly, scrubbing the Incel subreddit did not succeed in silencing them — on Reddit, or elsewhere. A new community, called Braincels, was more than 17,000 Reddit members strong in April 2018; it remains accessible, but because of its dedication to “shocking or highly offensive content” it is now “quarantined,” which means those who want to access it have to actively opt in to see it. Incels have a presence on 4Chan, as well. Beyond that, the dedicated website Incels.me has over 5,000 members. Conversation threads there happen under stomach-churning subject lines such as: “[Serious]Can you talk to a girl knowing that her mouth has been filled with semen?” (answer, from one user, whose profile photo is of Bill Cosby: “They weren’t made to talk. I have no reason to listen to them talk”); “The END GAME is women losing their rights” (initiated by a user who was later banned); and, in reference to then-recent events, “Honestly, reading all the comments that people on news articles and Facebook [write] about us only JUSTIFIES what the van killer did.”
That “van killer” is a former Seneca College student from Richmond Hill, Ontario, whose name is Alek Minassian. On April 23, 2018, the twenty-five-year-old allegedly rammed his white rental van into Toronto pedestrians on a northern stretch of Yonge Street, killing ten and injuring fourteen. Before doing so, Minassian reportedly posted a single message on a since-deleted Facebook page, widely circulated in the aftermath of the attack.89 “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” it read, in part. “All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger.”
In 2014, Elliot Rodger committed a mass shooting that killed six and injured fourteen students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, including two sorority girls. Before the shooting, Rodger uploaded his 140-page “manifesto,” in which he freely called himself an “incel.”90 After the mass shooting, the “Supreme Gentleman” achieved a cult-like status within the Incel movement, with certain members later calling him, and others they believe to be like him, a hERo — with intentional emphasis on his initials. Other “ER” homages include “winnER,” “altERnative,” and “bettER.”91
The movement also adopted Nikolas Cruz, the nineteen-year-old who in 2018 killed seventeen students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, as a hERo after discovering a YouTube comment the school shooter had apparently made, promising “Elliot rodger will not be forgotten.”92 That Cruz chose Valentine’s Day for the massacre only added to his mythos. And in November 2018, Scott Paul Beierle became a winnER in the community when he walked into a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, and shot six people, killing two. The forty-year-old was a self-described misogynist who likened his adolescent self to Rodger, had twice been arrested for groping young women, and often posted women-hating screeds
on YouTube and SoundCloud, including a song called “Handful of Bare Ass.”93 The list of men who have committed mass violence and claim allegiance to the Incel movement doesn’t stop there, either.
Men like Trump and Ford may not condone this type of violence, but they have helped establish the culture in which it now flourishes. They benefit from it. It’s the same type of culture that allowed Trump to mock Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi, to roars of delighted laughter.94 The same culture that helped elect Ford on a promise to scrap the sex-ed curriculum — a curriculum that focused on things like consent and gender identity. And it’s the same type of culture that helped Canada’s own Jordan Peterson become world-famous. The University of Toronto psychology professor rose to fame by, essentially, refusing to refer to students by their preferred pronouns and then creating YouTube videos to explain why (among other things). Once the second-highest-funded creator on Patreon (he claimed), Peterson left the platform, a crowdfunded subscription content service, in January 2019, citing growing discomfort with censorship after another user was banned for using the N-word and for other hate speech.95 Still, Peterson’s internationally bestselling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is marketed not as some alt-right screed, as it’s often portrayed, but as a self-help book. Marketing material promises the “renowned” psychologist’s answer to an almost laughably huge question: What does everyone in the modern world need to know?96
Well, apparently, it’s that boys will be boys.
Examples of Peterson’s twelve rules include both the friendly “Do not bother children while they are skateboarding,” and the fair “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” That this advice is coming from a man who once mused to a Vice reporter that he didn’t know whether men and women could ever coexist in the workplace without sexual harassment — but that one way to help would be to ban makeup in the workplace because it’s “sexually provocative” — is exactly the point.97 Peterson does not advocate for violence against women or for the Incel movement, but, as with Ford and Trump and many others, that hasn’t stopped those with violent views from mimicking and even co-opting his rhetoric, or from seeing him as a champion.
For those who want to use his views to justify their own, Peterson and the men presumed to be like him personify reason and natural order; feminists, and their allies, are illogical, hysterical fascists, grasping at power they don’t need or can’t use. In 12 Rules For Life, Peterson allows that girls can win by winning their own hierarchy, “by being good at what girls value, as girls” (I’m going out on a very twig-like limb here to guess he means being attractive, likeable, nurturing, wearing pink, and also able to find a “good man”), and they can “add to this victory” by winning in the boys’ hierarchy (we will soon learn how untrue that is, but let’s let him have it for now).98 Boys, on the other hand, he contends, can only win by winning the male hierarchy — the masculinity contest, if you will, painted in a positive light. Men must be men, so that they can look after their women and children, and women must only look after their children. Forget equal partnerships! And definitely forget same-sex partnerships!
Predictably, Peterson’s self-help book has some things to say about power, too, as it pertains to oppression. Namely, that one doesn’t at all influence the other, at least not in any way that people couldn’t overcome if they were talented or dedicated enough. “Any hierarchy,” he writes, “creates winners and losers. The winners are, of course, more likely to justify the hierarchy and the losers to criticize it.” Sure, fine. But Peterson also believes that the collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy, and it is the pursuit of those goals that gives life meaning. To him, “Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself — and then there would be nothing worth living for.”99 Peterson posits that competence, not power, is the prime determiner of status in any hierarchy. This, he stated, is obvious. (And obviously not true for women; see chapter 1, and also your own life.) In fact, Peterson’s belief that hierarchies are not socially or culturally constructed, but are instead instinctual, has become something of a trademark. In early 2019, he started selling lobster merchandise in a reference to his oft-repeated claim that lobsters naturally develop hierarchies so . . . science? Anyway, the leggings are $60.100
By pretending neither power nor privilege has anything to do with social status, and that neither can be passed down through systems of elitism, Peterson and his disciples exalt a sort of modern, gender-infused social Darwinism. Those who have less just can’t hack it, and those who have more are simply better. Life is viewed as a simple binary. Men and women are miserable, unsuccessful creatures when they break the conventions of their genders; they are happy in their hierarchy when they do not. At the same time, because the manosphere is nothing if not contradictory, for all the talk of individual responsibility and improvement, many of those who follow the sphere’s various creeds often blame others for their inability to achieve personal fulfillment, usually pointing toward Peterson’s so-called chaos, the corruption of traditional roles, and, of course, women themselves. In other words, if you’re great and exemplify the traits of a straight, white man, congrats, that’s on you. If you can’t get ahead, and you’re a woman, that’s on you, too — you’re where you’re meant to be. But if you can’t get ahead and you’re a man? That’s on feminism and greedy, whiny, not-nice women who want too much. That’s on the world that is struggling to diminish the power structures under which you’re meant to thrive.
I saw some of this thinking on display in person near the end of April 2019 when I joined more than 3,000 other people in Toronto to see Peterson debate Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on “happiness,” capitalism, and Marxism. The square-off between the two pop-intellectuals was billed as the “debate of the century,” and, to be fair, the audience did seem incredibly pumped to be there; the tickets, which topped out at over $500, sold out quickly, and Peterson later boasted that people were reportedly scalping them outside the venue, charging more than they do for Toronto Maple Leafs games. At first glance, when I arrived outside, the crowd seemed exactly as I had expected it to be: a sea of young men — not all white, but mostly. Inside, it was more diverse: a Black man and a woman wearing hijab and clutching an autographed copy of 12 Rules were seated in front of me; well-coiffed older couples wandered the venue with wine glasses in hand; and somewhere in the crowd, judging by the jeers made during the actual debate, there were haters. The venue warned that everyone who attended, even children, must have a ticket — a fact I found eye-rollingly funny until I saw some people show up with babies strapped to their chests.
As media who covered the event noted, the two men, who were supposed to be mortal enemies (at least, according to their Twitter spats), had more in common than most expected.101 For starters, both men were largely boring. Onstage, neither presented as blatantly sexist, racist, or xenophobic. In fact, they both bemoaned the perceived injustice of being described as too Eurocentric, too colonial, too high on Judeo-Christian values, too anti-transgender, too anti-feminist, too anti — well, you get the idea. Each seemed supposedly tortured by the misunderstanding, as well as the apparent weight of his own intellectual burden. Only they could see the truth! Peterson expressed his anguish by hunching over and splaying his hands, as if he were playing an invisible, miserable piano; Žižek plucked and brushed at his shirt. Each agreed upon a shared enemy: the so-called “academic left,” a cadre of progressives whose apparent political over-correctness will send the world into chaos. And each man received voracious applause with every jab at the thusly defined other side.
By the end of the night, perhaps the most shocking part of the whole exchange was that anyone could have thought they were that different in the first place. Both men are the traditional benefactors of an academic system that grants them automatic power, rewarding their way of thinking, their way of research, their approach to how the world is studied and seen — and establishing who deserves to study and see it. Neither Žižek nor Peterson is the absolute monster their enemies have made them out to be. But that hardly matters. They’re willingly mouldable symbols, seemingly loath to condemn the legions of fans who have adopted them, made them, given them power. It isn’t the men who should scare us so much as the culture that groomed them for the pedestal. The same culture that’s given us academics and philosophers who preach a natural order has also given us volatile internet communities, violent shooters, politicians and world leaders who bulldoze over democracy, and bosses who insist the best person has won — all of them engaged in a renascent battle for hyper-masculinity. To win that battle is to become the best said-with-a-grunt man, rewarded with all the status-quo checkmarks such a man supposedly deserves: women, stature, money, physical prowess, and the admiration of other people.
Welcome, in other words, to the angst-ridden identity politics of mediocre men.
Most men in this New (Old) World Order will protest that they don’t hate women. They will hold their sexism and their misogyny clenched tightly in their fists as they tell you that they love women. Worship them! Lay chocolate and flowers at their feet like a fleet of Aphrodites! Researchers dub this popular shield against criticism the “women are wonderful” defence. In examining the disadvantages and inequities women and others continue to face in society, feminists often tend to look at what researchers Peter Glick and Susan Fiske called “hostile sexism” in their much-cited American Psychologist article, “An Ambivalent Alliance.”102 That’s the kind of obvious sexism that causes men to lash out and, for example, refer to somebody as a “nasty woman” when they perceive them to be usurping their power. Then there’s what the researchers termed “benevolent sexism.” Such sexism rewards women for conforming to conventional roles, gifting them with both protection and affection.
Glick and Fiske surveyed more than 15,000 participants across nineteen countries using what they called The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory to measure the connection between the two types of sexism. They discovered a troublingly tandem relationship. Taken together, hostile and benevolent sexism become even more potent, with the latter working to pacify women’s resistance to gender inequality. It’s the type of sexism that creates, and then elevates, Pampered Princesses and Daddy’s Little Girls, but is less celebratory of women’s leadership and independence.
“Ideologies of benevolent paternalism allow members of dominant groups to characterize their privileges as well-deserved, even as a heavy responsibility they must bear,” wrote Glick and Fiske. “On its own, this ideology may seem unobjectionable, even laudable, but what if . . . it is a crucial complement to hostile sexism, helping to justify men’s greater privilege and power? If men’s power is popularly viewed as a burden gallantly assumed, as legitimated by their greater responsibility and self-sacrifice, then their privileged role seems justified.”
Women who seek their own power are then seen as ungrateful, deserving of whatever harsh treatment they get. (Ahem, Peterson. Ahem, Trump.) But the thing about benevolent sexism, noted the researchers, is that it’s also seductive. Women are wooed into waiting for a Prince Charming, a mythical man who promises to use his power for her benefit — be it at home, at work, or in the political system.
Women are granted power, then, but only so long as it upholds restrictions on rigid gender roles. It’s the same bind as it ever was: those who are the nicest, the prettiest, the most communal, the most motherly, the most likeable, and the most feminine are also the most rewarded. These same women are sometimes allowed to succeed in other ventures, too, but they must succeed most in being a good woman. Trump once ran a PSA, for instance, in which his daughter Ivanka, who is an arguably savvy businessperson, whatever one may think of her, said, “The most important job any woman can have is being a mother.”103
And while much has been made of Trump’s “pussy-grabbing” comment, it’s perhaps the comments both he and his wife Melania have made about their relationship that are the most revealing of how today’s power imbalances have cemented themselves on the wider stage. “Now, I know Melania, I’m not going to be doing the diapers, I’m not going to be making the food, I may never even see the kids,” Trump told Larry King in an interview after he and Melania were married in 2005. “She’ll be an unbelievable mother. I’ll be a good father.”104 Melania, on a press junket to promote a new jewellery line she’d ostensibly designed, offered an echo of that sentiment to Parenting.com in 2016, after that once-dreamed-of child was born. “It’s very important to know the person you’re with. And we know our roles,” she told the reporter. “I didn’t want [Trump] to change the diapers or put Barron to bed.”105
When it comes to power, often it’s not just about who has access to it, it’s about how the world values (and undervalues) different types of power — and about all the trappings that go with it, including knowledge and leadership. Sociologists, and the rest of the world, may not be able to agree on a precise definition of power, but that is, in large part, because there are so many different kinds. Traditional power structures and systems, mostly dominated by men, have sought to maintain those gendered views of power, in good part by limiting the socio-cultural capital of traditionally feminine pursuits. Mainstream society has doled out a certain kind of power to motherhood, for instance, but it isn’t on par with the perceived power that comes with C-suite status. All genders are encouraged, and even expected, to succeed in their socially defined roles. That is, in many ways, the trade-off of benevolent sexism: women and other equity-seeking groups (because, of course, there’s also benevolent racism and benevolent colonialism) get protection from the imbalanced world, usually in the form of financial stability, and in return are granted a smidge of power, always within the confines of their prescribed roles. (See: Being a mother is the most important job! ) Those in power — or those who believe they ought to be in power — are less enthused, however, when women break from that benevolence. They especially don’t like it when that break shakes the very power hierarchy they’ve come to rely on.
Consider what happened after Radio-Canada announced Manon Bergeron as its 2018 Scientist of the Year. Bergeron is a professor within the sexology department at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), as well as lead researcher in an influential study, l’Enquête Sexualité, Sécurité et Interactions en Milieu Universitaire — or, in English, the Sexuality, Security, and Academic Interaction Survey. She is also the first person from the social sciences and humanities to win in the prize’s thirty-year history. Which is point one against her. Point two: her research area. For her seminal study, Bergeron led a team in surveying more than 9,200 people who worked or studied at six of Quebec’s French-speaking universities.106 They found that roughly 37 percent of those surveyed reported experiencing a form of sexual violence in which the perpetrator was somehow linked to their university, whether it was a professor, a TA, or another student.107 Point three: she and her team went on to host the first-ever bilingual and multidisciplinary Canadian symposium on sexual violence in higher education.108 And point four: her research also played an integral part in developing Bill 151, which passed in late 2017 and requires all CEGEPs and universities in the province to create a stand-alone policy on sexual violence, harassment, and misconduct, as well as to report on its implementation. And, really, point five, the most egregious of them all: her motivations were grounded in feminism.
In announcing her win, Radio-Canada’s senior vice-president, Michel Bissonnette, noted that, in the time of #MeToo, Bergeron’s research provided important context for action — something that people could no longer close their eyes against.109 But many men sure wanted to. The backlash against her win was swift and brashly dismissive of her work. La Presse journalist Yves Boisvert led the charge with a January 24, 2019 column headlined “Pauvre Science.”110 Writing in French, Boisvert called Bergeron’s survey sample “worthless,” snidely concluding that, logically, the results of her study must therefore be worthless as well.
When Radio-Canada later streamed an interview on Facebook with Bergeron about her work, the page was flooded with comments before the video even started. Most of those comments criticized her win, reducing it to pure activism, and therefore bad science — an apparent affront to real scientists everywhere. Let’s look at some of the translated comments. “In 2018, Dr. Daniel Borsuk was the first surgeon to succeed in a face transplant in Canada,” wrote one Facebook user who did not watch Bergeron’s interview. “But she’s a feminist activist who deserves the scientific prize of the year for putting a biased poll online. Does that make sense?” Another wrote, “Nothing against Mrs. Bergeron whose cause and action is noble” — women are wonderful! — “But it is an insult to all scientists who have contributed to the advancement of knowledge this year.” The more Radio-Canada tried to explain its choice, the more people retaliated: “Stop justifying yourself and recognize your mistake, it’s a matter of respect for real rigorous scientists.”111
It wasn’t lost on other social scientists that the poisonous reaction was connected to a bigger backlash, one that did not like the changing parameters of the game. Shortly after the public outburst, University Affairs published an opinion piece signed by more than a hundred members of the Quebec Network of Feminist Studies — professors, course instructors, graduate students, and researchers.112 “We are not surprised that this recognition provokes controversy: feminist researchers, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are used to seeing their knowledge production work questioned, if not disqualified by the yardstick of a positivist and one-dimensional vision of science,” wrote the article’s two lead authors, Francine Descarries and Sandrine Ricci. “Like the current controversy over what constitutes or does not constitute ‘science’ this vision appears obsolete and untrue.” Untrue, they added, because it was also at odds with the United Nations’ new definition of science, outlined in its 2017 “Recommendation concerning science and scientific researchers.” In it, the UN clearly states that the term “science” “signifies a complex of knowledge, fact and hypothesis, in which the theoretical element is capable of being validated in the short or long term, and to that extent includes the sciences concerned with social facts and phenomena.”113
In fact, if we shifted the definition of science — and, by extension, the power — away from its masculine-skewed roots (that is, a definition limited to the STEM fields) and instead used the more inclusive vision the UN outlines (that is, one grounded not in stereotypes but in worldwide expertise), we’d see how far women have come, how much they already lead and influence. Women are gaining in the medical field and they are gaining when it comes to life sciences.114 Women often lead in the non-profit sector.115 Not enough women head colleges and universities in Canada, but there are certainly more of them represented there than as CEOs.116 For that matter, women also fare better when it comes to entrepreneurship and small-business ownership.117
I’m not advocating that it’s time to stop shaking up these heavily male-dominated spaces. It’s essential that feminists do not stop. Even in the arenas where we’re doing better, we’re still suffering from pay gaps and a general lack of representation in leadership, particularly in larger and higher-earning organizations. I am saying we need to end the narrative that women’s pursuits and expertise don’t measure up to an arbitrary standard we had no say in creating. I’m saying, yes, maybe men should be scared, just a little, because here we come.
Then again, maybe it would be nice if, instead of being scared, men helped change the game. Much debate has been stirred over whether men can truly be allied to feminism — and, if so, how they can help. For all that feminists insist feminism will rewrite gender roles and power structures so that the world is better for everyone, the movement is hesitant to bring men on board, and is even more reluctant to give them a vested reason — beyond support — for joining Team Feminist Killjoy. This is understandable. Feminists don’t need another bro telling them what’s best. Studies have even shown that when men take action to support women’s rights, people often react in surprise, but also anger. Like, what’s the catch here? (There’s so often a catch.) But also, returning to the masculinity contest: helping the losing team makes you a loser, too. This, in turn, makes men reluctant to act.118
Yet as tempting as it may be to put the responsibility for finding solutions in the hands of women and other equity-seeking minorities, I wondered how much faster change would happen if men were included in the process. And more than that, I worried that any solutions that excluded them would only further entrench the idea of us-versus-them — a binary division that seemed ultimately unhelpful and also utterly beside the point. What if men also had a stake in reimagining power?
In search of an answer, I found myself seated among nearly a dozen men gathered in a top-floor studio of a downtown Toronto Lululemon in late August 2018. Hunched into Japanese meditation chairs, their long legs arranged before them in various geometric shapes, the men faced each other in a circle. Two of the facilitators had decided to sit on plywood boxes, which were usually used for the workout classes hosted in the space; rows of medicine balls and yoga mats were stacked against the exposed brick walls. Age aside — most of the men looked to be in their twenties or thirties — the group was diverse, and most of them were strangers to each other. They were all here, quite simply, to talk: about themselves, about their insecurities, their challenges, and how these things were all entangled in their perception, and expression, of what it means to be a man.
Organized by Next Gen Men, a national non-profit that focuses on “building better men,” the gathering was part of a monthly meet-up held under the moniker Wolf Pack — a cheeky gesture to the idea of men as lone wolves. That night, the group was there to tackle the subject of competition. But, as one participant put it, “The subject is not as important as looking at the basic problematic parts of masculine stereotypes.” He had never attended Wolf Pack before, he added, and characterized the night as his “first step into the community,” which I soon learned could basically be described as something like a club of IRL Peter Kavinskys — your favourite internet boyfriend, but better.
The evening opened with a land acknowledgement, then an invitation from one of the facilitators, a psychotherapist, to share names and preferred pronouns. One of the first questions the group tackled was: What comes to mind when you hear the word “competition”? In response, one of the men next to me wondered whether competition was gendered, and, if so, how. Another man mused that, for men, competition — winning — was tied to social capital, how men present, and the pressure to show a perfectly curated version of themselves, without weakness. Others talked about zero-sum mentalities, self-confidence, and setting achievable goals. There was a lot of discussion about failure, and how men are never, ever supposed to feel its heartbreak, how it can make them angry and bring out unhealthy competition.
Throughout the discussion, the men remained respectful. They waited their turn and appreciated what each had to say — nodding, murmuring agreement, telling each other a point hit home. If they challenged a thought, it wasn’t meant as a dig, but as a means of digging deeper. Take one exchange, in which a young man returned to something another man had said earlier, in reference to competition in sports.
“You said when you lose, when you fail, you’re pissed.” He looked pointedly at the other man, whose first name was Jermal. “Why?”
Jermal considered this for a second, then answered, “I think it’s a lack of my own value.” If he loses, he added, he begins to think he’s a bad guy — and the negative self-talk will roll on from there. How can my mother possibly love me? Will I ever amount to anything? A few heads bobbed in recognition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’d been there.
Wolf Pack preached a style of open vulnerability among men that was rare — and frankly stunning to watch. It was only later, walking alone in the pitch-black to the subway station, that it hit me: I’d never felt that comfortable before in a room full of men. Not that the gathering had anything to do with me. The central idea behind Wolf Pack, after all, was to encourage men to have conversations they wouldn’t traditionally have in other spaces. The lessons learned there were universal ones of humility and humanity, of figuring out what being decent means, not because someone (your girlfriend, your wife, your sister) demands it, but because you want it. Nobody was there handing out woke-man cookies; nobody was gathering to mansplain feminism. These men were part of the wider reckoning on whose voices were loudest and what power balances needed to shift, but they also contended it wouldn’t help anybody if people kept telling men to just shut up. That’s because, they believed, toxic, restrictive masculinity harmed them, too — and the only way to break its power was for men to start talking about it.
Next Gen Men launched in late 2014 in Calgary, after co-founder Jake Stika decided boys needed a better outlet to discuss sexual health and romantic relationships. But he also recognized that before most boys could have in-depth macro-conversations about those things, they needed to talk about how to establish their sense of self, their identities as growing men, what masculinity looked like for them, and how to have healthy, respectful relationships, period. Then, as Stika entered his thirties, he started to constantly think about, and question, what it meant for him to be a man, particularly at this point in history. He thought about it again when he recently celebrated his father’s sixtieth birthday. Each generation of masculinity imprints itself on the next. What would his generation pass on? Would it be something new, or more of the same? Wolf Pack kicked off in 2016 when the co-founders realized such conversations weren’t vital just for boys but for adult men, too. For Stika and Next Gen Men, it’s all a process of learning and unlearning — debugging the complex software of patriarchy.
But to do that, men need to step up. Toronto-based Jeff Perera has spent much of his adult life exploring healthy masculinity. Perera is now in his forties, and some of his earliest memories are of his father being physically violent toward his mother, who, he recalls, was often covered in bruises. His parents immigrated from Sri Lanka, and had an arranged marriage. The abuse stopped when Perera was about seven, but it took him a lot longer to see that his father — whom he describes as a “physical monster” — was also, at his core, just a broken man, someone who faced immense discrimination as a man of colour and as an immigrant in a less-woke Canada. Perera also mentions the kids in his neighbourhood — those born in Canada as well as refugees and immigrants from all over the world — who, similarly, postured a hyper-violent model of masculinity. Growing up, that meant not admitting to watching Strawberry Shortcake; later on, that brand of masculinity translated into violence, a pressure to be hard and invulnerable.
Perera now makes it his work to create space for men to have conversations in which they can talk freely about their own experiences, their experiences with women, and all the good and the bad in between, without being completely dismissed or vilified. “It’s not about us-versus-them,” he told me. “It’s about working together toward a common goal.” When men start openly talking to each other, they hit the sweet spot that Perera calls the “learning zone.” Outside of that zone is the “comfort zone” — eating chips and watching Netflix, assuming you’re a nice guy who doesn’t need to think about masculinity — and the “panic zone” — waging war on a Twitter feed that calls you out for being sexist, denying any culpability. Most men, said Perera, are not in the learning zone. Well, yes. Men need to be called out, he added, but they also need to find a place where they can admit they’ve “done some shit,” and then process what that means accountability-wise, growth-wise. Those seeds of being better, of being good, won’t grow in the panic zone. So that’s what he and others are doing right now: creating the right environment, where the seeds of healthy masculinity can flourish.
But how exactly to reframe the “toxic masculinity” conversation so that men see how restrictive visions of manhood harm them, too? Humberto Carolo is the executive director of White Ribbon, a male-driven organization that launched in Toronto in 1991 and has since gone global, working to end violence against women and promote “a new vision of masculinity.” He describes toxic masculinity as the belief that it’s okay for men to exert control and dominance — particularly through violence. Those things are toxic to other people’s lives, he says, but those modes of behaviour are also very toxic to men, personally. If the only emotions men feel they’re able to express are anger, frustration, dominance, and control, he points out, then what about all the other human emotions? What happens to empathy, concern, sadness? “When we give that up, our lives become very limited,” Carolo says. “If men are not able to express those emotions, then how do we deal with our own challenges in our own lives?”
The answer, as we have seen, is that too many men do not. Still, it is one thing to encourage men to have a conversation; it is another to cut through a potentially appealing buffet of “let men be men” offerings on today’s menu. But Lisa Hickey, the publisher of the U.S.-based website The Good Men Project, founded in 2009 by two men, is one of many people who insisted to me that there are many men who want to have these conversations. The site runs articles that challenge perceptions of masculinity and manliness, striking a tone somewhere between Esquire and Goop: “Understanding My Purpose”; “How ‘Can I Kiss You’ Changed My Life for the Better”; “The Little Ways We’re Sexist (and Why It Matters so Much).” Hickey stressed that she looks forward to the day when the site’s tagline — “The Conversation No One Else is Having” — becomes obsolete.
The Good Men Project hosts daily group calls for men all over the world, she told me. On Mondays, the men talk about sex, relationships, and sexism; on Tuesdays, it’s racism; on Wednesdays, it’s environmental activism; on Thursdays, it’s mental health. On a recent call, there were men from Pakistan, Canada, France. It’s easy to be skeptical of all this — a kneejerk reaction to men, again, being centred in the conversation. But, honestly, groups of men gathering around the world to talk about how to become better men sounded, to me, a whole lot better than them gathering on the internet to call women “roasties,” or to suggest a new nation of Stepford Wives.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” Hickey told me. “The conversations are game-changing.” I hoped she was right. Because as much as it seems like a cliché, the game does need changing. Of all the traps this new hyper-masculine power lays, perhaps the most insidious of them all is that it keeps forcing everyone else to keep playing the game by its (totally damaging) rules. And I don’t think we, any of us, know how much that is truly costing us.
73. University of British Columbia, Sauder School of Business. “A mandate to promote diverse leadership: Professor Jennifer Berdahl.” April 10, 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20180730212017/http://www.sauder.ubc.ca/News/2014/A_mandate_to_promote_diverse_leadership_Professor_Jennifer_Berdahl.
74. Berdahl, Jennifer. “Work as a Masculinity Contest.” Journal of Social Issues 74, no. 3 (2018), 422–8.
75. Berdahl, Jennifer. “Did President Arvind Gupta Lose the Masculinity Contest?” (blog post). August 8, 2015. http://jberdahl.blogspot.com/2015/08/did-president-arvind-gupta-lose.html.
76. Berdahl, Jennifer. “Academic Freedom and UBC.” (blog post) August 17, 2015. http://jberdahl.blogspot.com/2015/08/academic-freedom-and-ubc.html; interview with Jennifer Berdahl, December 12, 2018.
77. Smith, Charlie. “Documents show ex-UBC chair John Montalbano and ex-president Arvind Gupta had a sometimes rocky relationship.” Georgia Straight. January 27, 2016. https://www.straight.com/news/626851/documents-show-ex-ubc-chair-john-montalbano-and-ex-president-arvind-gupta-had-sometimes; Sherlock, Tracy. “UBC releases documents on former president’s departure but reason he left remains unclear.” Vancouver Sun. January 27, 2016. https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/ubc-releases-documents-on-former-presidents-departure-but-reason-he-left-remains-unclear.
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84. Walkom, Thomas. “How Doug Ford is different than Donald Trump.” Toronto Star. May 8, 2018. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/05/08/how-doug-ford-is-different-than-donald-trump.html; Brown, Drew. “Doug Ford Is Not Donald Trump North.” Vice. June 8, 2018. https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7xmdzd/doug-ford-is-not-donald-trump-north; Loewen, Peter. “Did Canada just elect a ‘Trump light’? Not exactly.” Washington Post. June 8, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/06/08/did-canada-just-elect-a-trump-light-not-exactly/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8e4aacb18e5d.
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86. McKeon, Lauren. “How Everyday Misogyny Feeds the Incel Movement.” The Walrus. May 7, 2018. http://thewalrus.ca/how-everyday-misogyny-feeds-the-incel-movement/.
87. Solon, Olivia. “‘Incel’: Reddit bans misogynist men’s group blaming women for their celibacy.” The Guardian. November 8, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/reddit-incel-involuntary-celibate-men-ban.
88. Since the time the author originally reported on these comments, the domain incel.me has been shut down. The forum was later reopened under a new domain name, incels.co. For a general impression of the conversations that took place on this subreddit, you can look at the quarantined Reddit page for “Braincels” at https://www.reddit.com/r/Braincels/?count=350&after=t3_8f31de.
89. Cain, Patrick. “What we learned from Alek Minassian’s Incel-linked Facebook page—and what we’d like to know.” Global News. April 24, 2018. https://globalnews.ca/news/4164340/alek-minassian-facebook-page/.
90. Rodger, Elliot. “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger.” https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1173808-elliot-rodger-manifesto.html.
91. Again, see the quarantined Reddit page for “Braincels” at https://www.reddit.com/r/Braincels/?count=350&after=t3_8f31de.
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105. Jeltsen, Melissa. “Trump’s Backwards Views On Parenting Could Have Disastrous Implications.” Huffington Post. June 29, 2016. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/trumps-backwards-views-on-parenting-are-dangerous-af_n_57717819e4b017b379f6d602; Ioffe, Julia. “Melania Trump on Her Rise, Her Family Secrets, and Her True Political Views: ‘Nobody Will Ever Know.’” GQ magazine. April 27, 2016. https://www.gq.com/story/melania-trump-gq-interview.
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108. This refers to the Canadian Symposium on Sexual Violence in Post-Secondary Education Institutions held at McGill University, May 30 to May 31, 2018.
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