"When Their Masculinity Is Threatened..."

Precarious manhood and the future of work and relationships.

That screenshot above is from this article at Northwestern, which is pretty good. Basically the article is about hyper-masculine work cultures where you constantly get told to “man up,” “sack up,” “nut up,” “be a man,” etc. Feelings in these places are nothing; “emotions” isn’t even a word. It’s just the epitome of hyper-intense male success. Eat what you kill type cultures. We all know these places. Here’s the basic hypothesis that the researchers were working off:

When their masculinity is threatened, this literature shows, men try to reassert it through aggressive behavior. In a bar, this might manifest as throwing a punch; at work, in nasty comments or petty theft.

As you’d expect, they found it to be largely true. When men get “bowed up” by other men at work, they take that anger at being challenged masculinity-wise and they go treat someone else like shit, or steal money, or do something else asinine and aggressive just because they need to recover the 0/1 binary they just lost to another hyper-masculine sales-type dude.

Phrased another way: the rise of the douchebags.