In this article, James McCabe investigates the roots of patriarchy and the often overlooked connection between masculine norms and violence. When we understand that men’s violence is not a natural phenomenon but a product of particular social conditions, we can grasp how a vastly more humane world is possible.
We live in a world saturated with violence. The lives of millions of people today are scarred by war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. As capitalism is an economic system based on competition and exploitation, it has individualism, narcissism, coercion and abuse stitched into its very fabric. Even if we don’t experience physical violence regularly, the threat of violence is always hanging over us. If you don’t pay your rent or mortgage for a time, the police will eventually come to your door to forcibly remove you on behalf of a bank or a landlord. Police often use force to disperse street protests or quell workers’ strikes. The attacks by police against pro-Palestine activists in Germany, the US and Ireland are recent examples that show that the police are not politically neutral and act to uphold the status quo.
This system damages and brutalises people of all genders, who then often behave in toxic and abusive ways. However, there is a very particular relationship between violence and masculinity in capitalist society. And this relationship is so deeply rooted in mainstream culture that it is rarely critically analysed. Instead, it is treated as normal, natural, and even something to be embraced and celebrated.
Manosphere goes mainstream
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently sat down with Joe Rogan, presenter of the world’s biggest podcast, to discuss how big business needs to embrace masculinist values. “The corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” he said. Adding, “A culture that celebrates the aggression a little more has its own merits… masculine energy, I think, is good”.1 Like the other big tech oligarchs, Zuckerberg has embraced the Trump administration’s ultra-reactionary agenda, including its unashamedly male supremacist features. The term “manosphere” has become a common shorthand to describe a wide range of media content aimed at men, ranging from ultra-masculinist thug and social media influencer Andrew Tate to Joe Rogan’s podcast. Donald Trump leaned into this loose network to appeal to young men on the campaign trail. His campaign frequently included UFC chief executive Dana White, and he hosted MMA fighter Conor McGregor as his guest of honour in the White House on St Patrick’s Day.
During the MeToo era, the manosphere seemed like a fringe phenomenon. Now, its influence on the political outlook of a wide layer of young men is undeniable. Far-right figures like Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, and groups like the AFD in Germany, and so on, get disproportionate support from men and young men. The manosphere’s themes of anti-feminism, the casual objectification of women and the assertion of masculine energy are detrimentally impacting boys and young men. Algorithms are flooding the social media feeds of boys with the idea that being a man is based on the most hyper-masculine caricatures of masculinity.
The political momentum behind the far right is boosting manosphere culture today, and every previous reactionary or fascist movement has embraced masculinist values. Fascist aesthetics, physical culture and rhetoric have always been deeply influenced by militarism, imperialism and settler colonialism, and consequently have been drenched in hyper-masculinity. However, neither algorithms nor fascism explains the appeal of hyper-masculinity for young men. To better understand the relationship between masculinity and violence, we must investigate the concept of gender and capitalism’s reliance on a rigid gender binary.
The “boys will be boys” effect
Cis men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of physical violence across the world, but this aspect of gendered violence is rarely commented upon. Statistics are published about “how many women are assaulted each year”, rather than “how many men assault women each year”. The term “violence against women” is commonly used to refer to gender-based violence, but one issue with this term is that it removes the active agent from the sentence. Therefore, many anti-violence campaigners instead use the term “men’s violence against women” to bring the most common group of perpetrators into the spotlight. This term shifts the focus to how the socialisation of men is connected to the prevalence of violence in capitalist society.
The normalisation of sexual violence goes hand in hand with the normalisation of men’s violence. Dangerous and anti-social masculine behavioural norms are explained away as being normal and natural. In everyday language, the concept of “boys will be boys” legitimates problematic behaviours, and there is no equivalent term of “girls will be girls”. Even if one rejects the legitimacy of the concept of “boys will be boys”, it holds a particular meaning, whereas “girls will be girls” doesn’t have a specific meaning or connotation.
Because sexual violence is so broadly normalised, most men who commit rape don’t consider themselves to be rapists. When abuse is discussed in the abstract, the media tends to frame abusers as either monsters or weirdos and their actions are removed from any social context. In reality, many abusers and rapists are very “normal” fathers, teachers, doctors, sports coaches, community leaders and so on. But often, when specific examples of gender violence and femicide are discussed, the perpetrators are then humanised; particularly if they are white or “respectable” middle-class or upper-class men.
When white American men perpetrate acts of terror such as mass shootings: the media and wider establishment often humanise these perpetrators, focusing on their mental health or their use of violent video games as causes for their acts of extreme violence. But the gendered aspect of the violence is rarely commented upon. By contrast, whenever a nonbinary or trans person has carried out a mass shooting, their gender identity becomes the main focus of the media, as the supposed cause of their violent behaviour. Reality is turned on its head in this example. The Gun Violence Archive recorded over 4,400 mass shootings during the 2010s, with known transgender suspects in fewer than 10 cases, translating to around 0.11% of all mass shootings.2 Additionally, The Violence Project, a research group that tracks US mass-shooting data dating back to 1966, found that a staggering 98% of these crimes were committed by cis men.3 (It’s also worth noting the Gun Violence Archive’s findings that in 68.2% of the mass shootings between 2014 and 2019, the perpetrators either killed family or intimate partners or the shooter had a history of domestic violence.)4
The “whataboutery” phenomenon
Some people may argue against the emphasis on “men’s violence” on the basis that some men are victims of intimate partner violence at the hands of women. Of course, many women act in physically and mentally abusive ways, but men’s violence goes in tandem with masculine gender norms, whereas women’s violence goes against stereotypically feminine gender norms.
Male supremacists like to point out how men have shorter life expectancy rates and higher suicide rates than women, as though this is ignored by feminism (women attempt suicide in higher numbers than men). But in reality, feminists were the first to uncover how men also suffer from the gendered nature of their existence. The men’s health movement was an outgrowth of the feminist movement, and feminists have been to the fore in highlighting that one in five men has been a victim of sexual abuse as a child. Men also constitute the overwhelming majority of murder victims and casualties of war. It should come as no surprise, then, that cis men have a strong self-interest in joining the socialist feminist struggle to end men’s violence.
Biological essentialism
On day one of Trump’s second presidency, he signed an executive order stating that a person can only be identified as either female or male under the law. An executive order also stated that a person’s “sex” identity starts from the moment of conception.5 Since all foetuses begin their development as phenotypically female, a case could be made that Trump’s order made every human in the US legally female (making Trump the first female US president!).
Of course, Trump’s orders were nothing more than a dog whistle attack on the lives of trans people. The reactionary and pseudo-scientific ideas behind this transphobia come under the umbrella of “biological essentialism” – the idea that a person’s nature or personality is innate, arising from, or connected to, their biological traits. As part of a more general rightwing backlash in recent years, the establishment and media in Britain have also increasingly pushed transphobic narratives. For example, one chief executive of a UK gender violence charity argued publicly that trans women should not have access to women’s refuge shelters. She stated, “You are not offering a trauma-informed environment if you, in your position of power, gaslight traumatised women and pretend that someone that you both really know is a man is actually a woman.”6 Feminist and trans woman Shon Faye has dismantled this sort of bigotry:
“The idea that anyone born with a penis is inherently more aggressive or violent because they have a penis is an anti-feminist idea: it actually suggests that men’s violence is linked to biological ‘essence’ and is therefore inevitable, immutable, perhaps not even truly men’s fault.”7
Male supremacists like Jordan Peterson double down in defence of hypermasculine norms in the belief that masculinity is innate, rather than a product of how men are socially conditioned under capitalism. In contrast to these ignorant and deeply pessimistic beliefs, Marxists see behaviours and gender norms as socially constructed rather than biologically determined.
Nothing “natural” about rigid gender norms
Amongst the wider population, people often associate the term “gender” specifically with women. The term “gender studies” is often assumed to be interchangeable with “women’s studies”, for example. To avoid confusion on this, we will investigate the concept of the gender binary. The gender binary describes how certain behaviours and character traits in society are categorised as distinctly feminine or distinctly masculine. Behaviours and traits are gendered, and masculinity and femininity are considered opposites. Gender identities are thus imposed on us at birth, based on our anatomy and genitalia. Growing numbers of intersex, trans and non-binary people reject their assigned genders, but most people interpret their assigned gender at birth as an essential part of their identity and continue to identify with that gender for the rest of their lives.
Female and male infants are dressed in pink or blue clothes to cultivate distinctly gendered identities before they can even talk. If you look through any toy shop, you will notice that young girls are encouraged to play with toy babies, Barbies, and cosmetics while boys are given action figures, toy tanks and guns. Girls are told “girls don’t fight”, while boys are told to “man up” and that “boys don’t cry”, and so on.
The gender binary is thus reproduced in each generation through social cultivation by parents and relatives, the media, the education system, and the state. Of course, in the real world, you have a wide spectrum where cis women display many masculine character traits and cis men display many feminine traits. On the whole, though, being submissive, caring, devoted, humble, and emotionally expressive are stereotypically feminine traits, while being seen as assertive, aggressive, and emotionally stoic are designated as masculine traits.
Man-box culture
In the fields of gender studies and masculinity studies, the concept of man box culture refers to the rigid set of expectations, behaviours and perceptions that are considered “manly”, and imposed on cis hetero men by capitalist society. Behaviours and beliefs of man-box culture include a sense of superiority towards women, emotional suppression, a sense of sexual and interpersonal entitlement, an unwillingness to admit weakness, a lack of emotional or physical intimacy with other men, being overly competitive, dehumanisation and objectification of women, and a degree of queerphobia. In addition, many middle-class or educated men incessantly compete intellectually with others, trying to prove their superior level of knowledge, etc.
In man-box culture, behaviours such as emotional expression, empathy and caregiving are gendered as feminine, and if boys – or even men – step outside of the man box, they get sanctioned through verbal taunting or physical threats. While openly gay cis masculinity has become a more accepted part of mainstream culture in some parts of the world, masculine norms have long been strongly associated with heteronormativity, and consequently, man-box culture operates to police heteronormativity in capitalist society.
Men’s violence should be viewed as an outgrowth of socially constructed masculine norms, with a continuum that contains mansplaining, manspreading and macho banter on one end of the spectrum, and mass shootings and femicide on the other. The global feminist wave of the 2010s brought the term “toxic masculinity” into the mainstream, as struggles against gender oppression created a more widespread critical consciousness towards hyper-masculine and masculine gender norms. Hyper-masculinity refers to the problems caused by accentuated masculine behaviour, whereas “toxic masculinity” can give the illusion that, in a patriarchal society, rigid gender norms can be healthy and positive, but are sometimes problematic. A further drawback with the term “toxic masculinity” is that it leans into the simplistic “good vs bad man” binary.
It’s worth noting that cis masculine identity in capitalist society is inseparable from the oppression of women and queer people. Of course, men can consciously reject hyper-masculine norms to try to be a “good person”; treating the people in their lives with respect, etc, but there’s no reason why we should celebrate femininity or masculinity in and of themselves, as the patriarchal gender binary inherently stifles individual development. Our lives are only shells of what they could be without these constricting gender norms. But the gender binary is not an incidental aspect of the capitalist mode of production, it is fundamental to it. Ultimately, ending the conditions that fortify the gender binary means ending capitalism.
Capitalism needs the gender binary
The central contradiction of capitalism is that capital is generated through the exploitation of working-class labour. This central contradiction creates an unavoidable class conflict that can only be fully resolved either through the development of class consciousness, workers’ power and socialist change, or through intensified exploitation, crisis, war, mass impoverishment and ruin. But the development of capitalism can’t be understood by explaining this aspect alone. When dealing with real social processes, we need to explain how this central contradiction of capitalism is expressed, often in very different forms in all the economic, political, cultural, legal and ideological aspects of society.
Capitalist ideology is used to divide working-class people in all sorts of ways, including by promoting racist, sexist, queerphobic and ableist ideas. As with racial oppression, the character of how gender oppression manifests and is reproduced has changed over time and from place to place, but on the whole, the capitalist system has never existed without gender oppression and can’t exist without it. Gender oppression is an inextricable feature of capitalism, not only because workers are divided along gender lines, but because capitalism relies on the unpaid labour that women provide in rearing children and caring for sick and elderly people. Women’s unpaid and virtually unlimited labour is vital for the functioning of capitalism as it ensures the reproduction of the next generation of wage workers to generate profits. Beyond the family, rigid gender roles are necessitated by many services and industries that allow capitalism to function. Nursing, care work, childcare, hospitality, and so forth are generally feminised and low-paid. As a result, feminine and hyper-feminine gender norms have a real material purpose for capitalism.
Similarly, the materialist roots for rigid masculine norms lie in capitalism’s dependence on organised violence and men’s role in the oppression of women. The hyper-masculinity celebrated in Hollywood, sports culture, rock, hip-hop, video games, and literature is an outgrowth of the militarism and gendered violence inherent to capitalism. Countless folk tales and stories worldwide are centred around the “man as hero” trope, while the dominant narratives in the Western world centre the experiences of the white, formally educated man as the supposedly neutral, universal human experience.
You can’t spell manufacturing without ‘man’
The manosphere has hailed Trump’s tariffs and trade war. In the conspiratorial worldview of right-wing, misogynistic men, women in the Global North have achieved a degree of independence and self-sufficiency through service sector employment. Manophere X users refer to these as “email jobs”, so they are backing the Trump administration’s onslaught on public sector jobs. They also believe that a recession will destroy “email jobs” in the private sector, paving the way for the elusive, well-paid, male-dominated manufacturing jobs that Trump is promising will return to the US. Journalist Constance Grady noted that these men believe that by the time the above process ends: “Men will be gainfully employed and now-destitute women will be incentivised to sleep with them, and the world will be returned to its proper order. To be clear, this worldview is deeply deluded.”8
Ideas about men “gaining” from the destitution of women are extraordinarily hateful and reactionary, to put it mildly. It should be added that there is nothing inherent in manufacturing that amounts to well-paid jobs. A majority of the world’s textile manufacturing workers are super-exploited women, working in very dangerous conditions. Rather than a grand conspiracy of women working well-paid “email jobs” through DEI programmes, women are lower paid than men on average. The US meat processing industry is made up of growing numbers of migrant workers, women, and even children. These are not well-paid manufacturing jobs. There is a grain of truth behind Trump’s promotion of a mythical past of well-paid manufacturing jobs. But the truth is that the superior wages and conditions in the post-war era were won by a militant, well-organised labour movement that united women, men, migrants and people of colour in struggles against their bosses for better living standards and against racism, sexism and xenophobia in the workplace.
The intersectional approach
Because the working class is the only force that can end capitalism, socialists have always correctly emphasised what unites workers rather than what divides them. But in doing so, some socialists have crudely argued that interpersonal and state violence are ultimately products of capitalism, and therefore the connection between men and violence should be downplayed. This usually comes from a concern that drawing attention to the relationship between masculinity, violence and capitalism could be misinterpreted as socialists saying that all men are inherently violent. But in fact, the opposite is true and ignoring the connection between masculinity, violence, and capitalism inadvertently legitimises the false mainstream narrative that men are naturally and innately violent.
It’s not enough to win men to be empathetic to women’s suffering or sympathetic to women’s struggles. Suppose men develop an understanding of how they have been socialised in a particular way for the benefit of capitalism’s oppression of women? In that case, it can lead them to a more profound outlook towards the struggle against capitalism and the gender binary it relies upon.
Socialists need to recognise that the ruling class fosters material and cultural advantages for cis, masc-presenting and heteronormative workers as part of the oppression of women and queer people. It’s no accident that married men live longer than unmarried men, while unmarried women live longer than their married counterparts.9 However, although working-class men have advantages over working-class women, such as having more free time and fewer care responsibilities within families, because they are workers, their fundamental material interests align with the struggle for socialist change.
Traditionalist backlash
The organised backlash against feminism and MeToo by the manosphere is gaining widespread traction globally. Fortunately, there is also a growing layer of men who have been positively impacted by MeToo and feminism and are reflecting critically on their past behaviour and conditioning. Socialist feminist men can draw on their lived experience to combat the cringeworthy nonsense arguments of male supremacists amongst their male peers. And they can go a step further by fighting alongside women and queer people against capitalism.
The family and the state are key institutions for capitalism, and both play a particular role in shaping gender norms. However, in the broad sweep of human evolution, the nuclear family and the state are relatively recent developments. Defenders of the modern family argue that rigid gender norms and men’s domination over women and children are both natural and eternal. The cliché of the man out hunting to bring food back to his partner, who is the sole carer of their children, is the result of people taking the (idealised) modern nuclear family and crudely imposing it onto our early ancestors.
Women hunters, male carers
Archaeological evidence often contradicts gender stereotypes. For example, the remains of a 9,000-year-old female skeleton found in Peru indicated that she was a hunter of big game.10 Further excavations of the area where she was buried pointed to the significant involvement of women in big-game hunting.
For 99% of human evolution, people lived in hunter-gatherer, foraging societies. Of all the world’s people today, immediate-return foragers live a lifestyle that most closely resembles the way the earliest humans lived. They are the most egalitarian type of hunter-gatherers. These people aren’t egalitarian because of some inherent moral purity, but because they need social cohesion to survive in groups of 50 to 100 people. Any displays of interpersonal aggression and violence are severely frowned upon in these societies. Sanctions are employed against bullies, braggers or those deemed stingy, as sharing and cooperative dependence are essential survival skills for the entire group.
Contrary to the bio-essentialist stereotypes, fathers also play a much greater role in childcare in foraging societies than they do within the nuclear family unit under capitalism. Fathers amongst the Aka people who live in the Congo Rainforest remain within their babies’ eyesight 88% of the time. They are within arm’s reach 50% of the time and hold babies 22% of the time. The Aka people hunt with nets, and often a mother will go into the forest to hunt with a group of relatives while fathers stay at home to look after their offspring.11
The roots of gender oppression
The foraging lifestyle that our early ancestors practised to survive required gender equality. Since this was a hand-to-mouth existence, there was no surplus wealth to cream off, which would allow some people to live a non-labouring life. So everyone was working. Before the development of agriculture, there was no class division, there was no state, no property, no money, and no rulers. The point to bear in mind is that humans are physiologically predisposed to favour pro-social behaviour, and men are also predisposed to be carers.
Concerning the relationship between masculinity and violence, it’s worth emphasising that there is no evidence of intergroup warfare in human populations before the development of agriculture.
The onset of farming thousands of years ago saw populations grow. Farming societies with large surpluses of food and wealth became more complex, hierarchical and stratified. Some men began to monopolise wealth through the coercion of other people’s labour and surplus produce. Class divisions, the private ownership of wealth and the exploitation of labour developed alongside the rise of the state. The need for police and armies to protect the wealth of rulers and enforce labour exploitation meant that a (violent) macho culture developed to maintain the status quo.
The sexual double standard
These first states also saw the development of the patriarchal family unit and monogamous marriage, as ruling-class men and better-off farmers wanted to pass their property down to their sons. To ensure the paternity of their children, a culture developed curtailing the freedom of association and freedom of movement of women. The idea was that in the absence of strict monogamy, a property-holding man could not be certain that his wife’s children were also his own and that his wealth would be passed on to his biological children. This led to a sexual double standard that required monogamy for women only. In classical patriarchal families of Greece or Rome, women were legally restricted to monogamy while men were allowed to have multiple wives.12 In Ancient Babylon, the Code of Hammurabi made female infidelity punishable by death.13
The hallmarks of polygyny (a man having more than one wife) and early forms of monogamous marriage are still visible in Western culture today. Despite polygyny being legally abolished in most societies long ago, men continue to enjoy greater sexual freedom than women. If men are sexually promiscuous, they are graciously labelled with epithets such as ladies’ man, heartbreaker or player, while women generally lose social status by being promiscuous. And these cultural norms sometimes lead to men feeling a sense of entitlement to control their partner. This double standard normalises male sexual jealousy and the slut-shaming and victim-blaming of women.
The dynamics of the nuclear family mean that men can leave the family and won’t face the same social pressure to be fully responsible for their children, whereas women can never “abandon” their children without facing major social stigma and potential ostracisation. That reality alone creates a power imbalance that favours men and enables abusive relationships to develop.
A socialist society striving to end the oppressive ideas and norms of capitalist society would necessitate ending the gendered nature of childcare. Free, well-resourced, quality public childcare, housing, cafés and restaurants are important aspects of a programme for socialist change to free women from the socially coerced, unpaid labour that they are forced to perform in capitalist society. Only a working-class struggle from below can achieve the revolutionary change necessary to improve the quality of life for all and end the violence of capitalist state rule and the coercion inherent in the family.
Gendered nature of state violence today
To safeguard their private property, the ruling class needs a state apparatus of armed forces such as the police and military. These institutions have developed in tandem with hyper-masculine gender norms. The capitalist class maintains its rule primarily through ideological means, but its repressive apparatus is essential. The military is built on a foundation of moulding mainly young men into trained killers. So, armies and hyper-masculinity are tied together like copy and paste. The protection of capitalist class rule through the state has been maintained, in part, by macho culture. Research consistently shows that male soldiers perpetrate intimate partner violence at three times the level of the general population.14 There is also consistent evidence that family violence is four times higher among police officers than in the general male population.15
Hyper-masculinity is also central to illegal industries like the drug trade, where dealers and suppliers enact violence against their competitors to gain a bigger slice of the market. Wherever there has been a rise in drug trade-related violence, there has been a corresponding increase in gender violence, as seen in Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico and Brazil.
One of the most detrimental aspects of the dominant masculine ideal is the notion that men should be fully self-reliant and should not invest too much in relationships with friends, family or community because they can only depend on themselves at the end of the day. This unattainable and anti-social ideal runs deeply through hustle-bro culture today and only accentuates the feelings of alienation that are inherent to life under capitalism.
Macho culture has also long been cultivated in particular industries with high rates of physical injuries and death. Flight engineers, fishing and oil rig workers, construction workers, roofers and so on are encouraged to take hazardous risks for the sake of their profiteering bosses. Ten times more men than women die in workplace accidents every year in the US, for example.16
In the struggle for real workers’ unity, revolutionaries can’t ignore the sophisticated ways that capitalist institutions and ideology divide the working class. A stronger grasp of these divisions will clear the path to greater solidarity and mutual respect. There are countless reasons why working-class cis men should fight alongside women and queerfolk against capitalism. Working-class men have a strong interest in organising against both the capitalist exploitation they face and the rigid gender norms and hyper-masculinity that are so destructive to themselves and those around them. They have everything to gain.
Notes:
1. Joseph Bernstein, Feb 2025, ‘Trump, Zuckerberg, Rogan and the New Masculine Environment’, The New York Times
2. Christopher Wiggins, Jan 2024, ‘Right-wing influencers seem happy that Iowa school shooter might be LGBTQ+’, www.advocate.com
3. Emma Bowman, Mar 2021, ‘Why nearly all mass shooters are men’, npr.org
4. Carrie N. Baker, June 2021 ‘Over two-thirds of mass shooters are domestic violence perpetrators’, Ms. Magazine
5. Arwa Mahdawi, Jan 2025, ‘After his executive orders on sex, is Trump legally the first female president?’, The Guardian
6. Shon Faye, 2021, The Trans Gender Issue: An Argument for Justice, Allen Lane, p 57
7. Ibid, p 241
8. Constance Grady, 14 April 2025, ‘The strange link between Trump’s tariffs and incel ideology: meet the lonely men who think the tariffs will get them girlfriends’, Vox, www.vox.com
9. Sian Cain, May 2019, ‘Women are happier without children or a spouse, says happiness expert’, The Guardian
10. James Gorman, Nov 2020, ‘Ancient remains in Peru reveal female big-game hunter’, The New York Times
11. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, 2011, Mothers and Others, Harvard University Press, pp128 & 163
12. Sharon Smith, 2015, Women and Socialism: Class, Race, and Capital, Haymarket, p 33
13. Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson, 1986, Women’s Work, Men’s Property: The Origins of Gender & Class, Verso, p 153
14. Rachel Jewkes, July 2022, ‘Increased risk of intimate partner violence among military personnel requires effective prevention programming’, www.thelancet.com
15. Conor Fiedersdorf, Sept 2014. ‘Police have a much bigger domestic-abuse problem than the NFL does’, The Atlantic
16. March 2025, ‘Occupational injury deaths by gender U.S. 2003-2023’, www.statista.com
