This document was compiled by Annelise, Emet Ezell, and Evan with learnings from the 2019 JOIN for Justice Jewish community organizing fellowship cohort.
We were inspired to create this by Dismantling Racism’s document on white supremacy culture. As DR explains, “culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics listed below are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being proactively named or chosen by the group.” These norms, standards, behaviors, and beliefs are damaging because they promote toxic masculinity and fuel patriarchy.
A cultural lens is powerful because it challenges us to see toxic masculinity beyond individuals and interpersonal relationships. The characteristics below are not exclusive to masculinity and may also be central to other forms of toxic cultural power - for example, capitalism, white supremacy, Christian hegemony, settler-colonialism, and other forms of exploitation and oppression. Because we all live in a patriarchy fueled by masculinity culture, the characteristics below can show up through all of our attitudes and behaviors - people who identify as masculine and those of us who do not. These characteristics can show up in any group or organization regardless of the gender identities or expressions of its members.
Below is a list of characteristics of masculinity culture that we have experienced in our communities and/or in our organizing. The document is a work in progress - please edit and adapt it for your purposes!
Competitiveness could include:
Relationships built on competition, such as building bonds by breaking people down (ex. military, hazing, or slut shaming)
Sexist humor at another person’s expense
Experiencing others’ success and alignment as a threat to your own
Antidotes:
Practicing relationships and developing cultures that center care
Cultivating value and love for self/others that is not grounded in capitalist models of success
Professionalism could include:
Prioritizing work over relationships
Limiting intimacy in workplace relationships
Making judgements about someone’s abilities based on their “professional” self
Uplifting competition amongst co-workers for the sake of profit or hierarchical approval
Antidotes:
Developing genuine relationships at work
Entangling joy, rest, authenticity, and work
Refusing to divorce joy from responsibility, and responsibility from joy
Control/Power Over could include:
Control and/or individual ownership over bodies, resources, time, etc.
When we believe that the money we make belongs to us as an individual
When we engage in mutual aid only when we are in need
Pushing false purity, for example through promiscuity and/or “slut” shaming
Tying a person’s worth and access to the resources necessary to thrive to perceived productivity and work status (ex. employed, unemployed, underemployed)
Control over our boundaries - having rigid or no boundaries depending on the context
Antidotes:
Focus on both process and outcome
Power structures that are created with everyone’s consent
Resource sharing through traditional and creative means
Individualism could include:
Promoting the idea that we succeed alone (tied to meritocracy)
When we forget about or a culture that obscures our interdependence with people and planet
Blaming individuals for their decisions without recognizing the role of larger systems of oppression and economic exploitation (ex. capitalism)
Framing our relationships with pleasure as scarce, private, or something to be taken.
False scarcity and the culture of taking what you need out of fear or a belief that there is not enough for everyone
Seeing our actions as extensions of a singular self, rather than the interconnected and undergirded web of relations
Antidotes:
Acknowledging what makes our success possible (labor, land, and other forms of formal and informal acknowledgement)
Collaboration
Decisions that benefit people and the planet over individual profit
Empathy and compassion
Develop groups and organizations that embrace collective responsibility for project challenges and successes
Embracing pleasure as public, communal, deepening our relationships with self and others, something that is created.