Maryland Commission for Men's Health Report on Domestic Violence (2010)

MenAreGood

July 23, 2024

I wrote this report when I was the vice-chair of the Maryland Commission for Men’s Health in 2008-2010. This was one of three reports that The Maryland Department of Health tried to deep six. It took us a year to track down what they had done and the reports finally made their way to the legislators. (The story of this event was a chapter in Janice Fiamengo’s excellent book Sons of Feminism: Men Have Their Say.) They really didn’t want this to get out and they succeeded since it was a year late. It was written with the idea of giving legislators a good sense of the bigoted path the domestic violence industry had taken in Maryland. It continues to be a good summary of how the feminists have built a lethal anti-male industry. It is amazing and shocking how little has changed since that time. Sad too.

The attached image was not a part of the original report. lol I couldn’t resist.😀

Perhaps the most confusing, perplexing, and controversial area in which men’s health needs are overlooked is the issue of male victims of domestic violence. One immediately noticeable trend is the strong tendency to focus solely on female victims and ignore male victims. This tendency is seen repeatedly. Most media, whether print or electronic, focuses on female victims of domestic violence and all too often fails to mention male victims. Almost every article in the newspaper and every program on TV about domestic violence focuses on female victims. We see the same focus in academia: courses in sociology and women’s studies repeat the message that women are the primary victims of domestic violence and rarely mention male victims. If you look on the internet at web sites of domestic violence agencies you will likely see a similar bias.1 One oft-quoted statistic is that according to a Department of Justice report, there are 1.5 million women each year in the United States who are victims of domestic violence. What you don’t see is that the same report also found that there are 834,000 male victims of domestic violence each year in the United States.2 Rather than adding the two and saying 2.3 million Americans suffer from domestic violence each year, all too often the only statistic highlighted is the one about women. One side of the story is told and the other side is ignored, as 834,000 men are omitted. Nationally, we have the “Violence Against Women Act” which boldly excludes men from its name. The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (a national group that teaches judges on the issue of domestic violence) offers a typical description which includes women but seems to minimize men: “Domestic violence puts millions of women and their families at risk each year and is one of the single greatest social ills impacting the nation.”3 There is no mention of men who might be at risk. Most organizations promote the idea that females are the overwhelming majority of victims of domestic violence. The general public has heard that message for decades and believes it to be the sole truth. But is it?

The National Council Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) offers a similar message that women are the vast majority of the victims of domestic violence. According to their definition of domestic violence: “There is not a typical woman who will be battered – the risk factor is being born female.”4 If “the” risk factor is being born female, that seems to exclude men from sharing the risk. But a look at their own statistics compiled from state governments tells a very different story. In the state of Maryland, according to NCADV statistics, men comprise 23% of the victims of domestic violence, and women are 23% of the perpetrators.5 Maryland State Police statistics reveal similar estimates, listing men as 25% of all victims of domestic violence.6 These numbers are confirmed and even exceeded when compared with peer-reviewed research. What you find is that men are a sizable portion of the victims of domestic violence, a much larger portion than is usually mentioned through a variety of sources. In fact, peer-reviewed research reveals that most domestic violence is characterized not by one person abusing the other, but by what is termed as “reciprocal” violence: a brawl between two partners.7 The bulk of the research also suggests that women are more often the initiators of the violence.8 This sharp contrast between the commonly-held public view of women as the vast majority of domestic violence victims with men as the sole perpetrators, versus the research and statistics compiled by authoritative sources, paint pictures that are hard to reconcile.

The domestic violence agencies in Maryland are obviously comprised of a compassionate group of people dedicated to fighting a horrible problem. The Maryland Commission for Men’s Health wholeheartedly agrees with them that domestic violence needs our attention and our resources. The issue that the commission finds worrisome is that it appears that only a part of the problem of domestic violence is being addressed in earnest: the female victims. The other parts are taking a back seat: male victims and female perpetrators. Due to this imbalance, some Marylanders go unserved and left in great pain.

There is a saying among NASA engineers that “an ounce of thrust at takeoff can mean thousands of miles down course.” The ounce of thrust that has thrown the domestic violence industry off course is the idea of holding men and masculinity solely responsible for the incidence of domestic violence. In its early years as a cause, many of those working in domestic violence assumed that men were the sole cause of domestic violence and, of course, women were seen as the only victims. It was this contention that has limited their vision to see the complexity of domestic violence and its many victims both male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. Over the years, various organizations and individuals have tried to offer feedback that males are in need of treatment as victims and females are in need of attention as perpetrators, but all too often their voices go noticably unheard.

How did things get to this point?

When domestic violence activism first started in the 1970’s, the leaders were mostly feminists who were rightly concerned about the lives and safety of women. What they saw was shocking: situations where muscular men were beating innocent women. Very quickly these stories started making their way to the media. People were shocked and outraged. The activists kept the stories flowing to the media and the media continued to alert the public to the truly awful horror stories. The feminist activists applied their ideological template to the issues of domestic violence. In the 1970’s, the feminist template presumed men were a major cause of women’s problems and were a large inhibiting factor holding women back from a variety of opportunities. Phrases like “all men are rapists” and “men are pigs” were commonplace. Men were routinely disdained and blamed. The horror of males committing domestic violence gave some reason to believe that these early misandrist stereotypes of men might hold some truth. Uncaring men, using their power to control and beat women, were observed repeatedly in these domestic violence situations, and this led to the assumption that it was men who were the underlying cause of a grievous social problem. Sadly, we now know that this idea of men being the underlying cause of the problem represents a truth but simply not the whole truth. What we now know is that although the stories of women being beaten by bullying men were certainly true, they told only part of the story. Researchers today characterize domestic violence as being 25% men beating women, 25% women beating men and 50% being more of a brawl between the two people.9 The brawling and the violent women had been overshadowed by the more shocking and outrageous examples of helpless women being beaten by bullying men.

This statistical breakdown of 25%-25%-50% is a shock to many and very difficult to believe. However, we have already seen how the premier national domestic violence organization, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), verifies that in Maryland, for example, men comprise 23% of the victims and females 23% of the perpetrators of domestic violence. Why would people not believe this to be the case? Could it be that an ideology that holds men as the primary culprits in incidences of domestic violence continues to inhibit them from seeing situations in which men are victimized by abusive women?

The feminist idea that men are wholly responsible for domestic violence found immediate traction. The horrible situations that were being reported were all of abusive men terrorizing defenseless women. This sort of scenario struck a chord in both men and women who heard these reports. The women were moved due to their own compassion for other women and children who might be vulnerable and in need. The men were moved since an important part of the man’s biological and social sex role is to provide and protect for women and children. Seeing women abused by out-of-control men was a very strong call to action for most men. It is little wonder then that most states quickly developed laws and the beginnings of support for these female victims. By the 1980s, only a few short years from the early activism of the 1970s, many states had already put domestic violence laws on their books. That’s moving pretty fast, for legislative bodies, who are known for their tendency to be circumspect when introducing whole new classes of penal laws.

What prevented evidence of other forms of domestic violence from coming to the surface? One answer to this question comes from one of the original domestic violence activists, Ellen Pence. Pence was the author of an important book about domestic violence and the influential Duluth Model (discussed below). She was also the founder of the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project. Pence admits that there was an effort to avoid issues related to women’s violence and highlights the neglect of female abusers:

In many ways, we turned a blind eye to many women’s use of violence, their drug use and alcoholism, and their often harsh and violent treatment of their own children.10

Why would the original activists “turn a blind eye?” Did they not see that turning a blind eye put many innocent people in jeopardy? One of the reasons was surely that the theoretical framework of men being the “only abusers” left no room to see women as anything but victims. The norm for viewing female abusers came to be that a female abuser was considered to have been “abused in the past” and was acting this way out of hurt and self-defense, not evil or anything else. Their view of domestic violence simply did not allow room for the possibility of the woman as the abuser, plain and simple. As in all things, if your theoretical framework doesn’t account for a phenomenon to exist, it is much less likely to be recognized. It is also probably true that the media showed more interest in the stories where women were abused by men. These stories touched a cultural nerve and therefore sold more papers and air time. People wanted to read about female victims, but were not so interested in hearing about males who were abused by women. The early activists must have found that they could get the word out much more quickly and more powerfully by focusing on stories about men beating women.

The focus on male batterers and female victims has left us knowing a good deal less about female batterers. How could the less-physically powerful women ever batter or intimidate men? What we have since found out through research is that violent women make up for their lack of physical strength by using weapons and the tactic of surprise.11 In domestic violence situations, women will often use weapons when men are vulnerable. Think of Lorena Bobbitt who severed her husband’s penis while he slept or Mary Winkler who shot her husband in the back with a shotgun while he was sleeping, or Clara Harris who ran over her husband with her car as her daughter sat next to her. All are examples of women committing domestic violence by using the element of surprise paired with lethal weapons. Interestingly, none of these murders or incidents was ever portrayed by the media as domestic violence. The words “domestic violence” seem to be reserved exclusively for male-on-female violence only. When women do choose to be violent as in the above examples, muscles simply don’t matter. A shotgun will beat muscles every time. The national figures for the United States show that 30% of spousal murders, the most lethal form of domestic violence, are committed by women against their husbands or partners.12

It wasn’t just the domestic violence activists who intentionally ignored women’s violence. Our culture also tends to look the other way. For whatever reasons, a woman’s violence is simply not as upsetting to see. Just watch television shows or movies to see the frequency of women hitting or kicking men. In today’s world it is a given for women to hit men on TV but not the other way around. Everyone sees this but few seem to get upset or to protest. We are living with a huge double-standard where a woman’s violence against a man is something we see in cartoons, movies, commercials, or TV as innocuous or even comical. We see plenty of violence from men towards other men but when we see violence from men towards women it is seen as anything but comical or innocuous; it is seen as deadly. This double-standard likely increases the chances for women’s violence in relationships to be overlooked by the media, the general public and by domestic violence workers.

It is also likely true that once these activists were looking for funding for their endeavors from the government or private institutions, the stories about “vulnerable women in great need of safety” brought much more attention and promises of funding than did a similar story of a man being abused by his wife. Every politician wanted to be seen as the one helping solve this problem by “making women safe in their own homes”. Those stories about men as victims simply didn’t have the same traction. No politician wanted to touch those. For them, rather than help male victims in their lobbying for funds, the stories of abused men would likely muddy the waters and detract from the powerful images of women-in-need. The stories about men-in-need were also completely counter to the growing ideology that men were the source of all domestic violence. An abused man simply didn’t fit into that framework and would likely have decreased the success of any unisex funding efforts.

It is easy to see how the ideology of men as the source of the domestic violence problem likely developed over the initial years of domestic violence activism. It fit with the image that the media was helping to portray. It fit with the feminist idea that men were “the problem” and it surely helped in advocating for domestic violence funding. There were good reasons simply to not bring up men-as-victims.

The Duluth Model

In the early 1980s an important event transpired in the history of domestic violence prevention. A group of domestic violence activists met in Duluth, Minnesota after a particularly gruesome murder of a wife by a husband. The group started to put together what would eventually become the “Duluth Model”, which has since become a staple ideological protocol for most domestic violence agencies in the US. In some states, its use is mandated. In many ways it has become the handbook for those working with domestic violence victims and situations. It is important to understand the initial questions asked by the Duluth gathering at the inception of the Duluth Model theory. Here are questions asked by those at the initial gathering: “Why is she the target of his violence” “Why does he think he is entitled to have power?” “How does the community support his violence?”13 As you can see from the questions, the Duluth Model at its very beginnings was only about male violence towards women. It was never about mutual violence or a woman’s violence towards a man. It was only about men beating women. It had no remarks or suggestions for abused men or about female perpetrators. The flagship theory of the industry only focused on women as victims and men as perpetrators. Australian author Tom Graves has evaluated the Duluth Model and lists its major problems. Here are the first three:

1. It believes that violence is masculine and that men are responsible for violence
2. It refuses to remark or address the fact that men can be the recipients of violence
3. It holds only men responsible as change agents.14

These three errors play a huge part in the failure of the Duluth Model to address the needs of male victims and the needs of female perpetrators. Let’s hypothesize a possible example of the damage that can occur from stereotyping victims of domestic violence: Imagine both wife and husband have been drinking. The wife, in a burst of anger, throws a wine bottle at her husband who was hit on the arm as he blocked the bottle. The wife next comes after him with a wine glass and tries to throw wine in his face. He blocked that also and in the process, the wine glass breaks and cuts his wife. The police arrive. They find a bleeding and crying wife and a husband who claimed that he had been attacked. Their Duluth Model training has taught them that the vast majority of victims of domestic violence are female and so, what do they do? Arrest the man and put him in jail! No matter how much the man might try to explain his actions, the police would likely refuse to listen. In fact, once the wife realizes her husband was going to jail, she would probably start to tell the truth, that she was the attacker. The police would of course hear none of it and off to jail the man would go.

This man would be placed into a mandatory Duluth Model domestic violence “educational” group. He would not be allowed to speak the truth of what had happened. When he would try to explain that it was his wife who had attacked him, he would be told to be quiet and focus on his violence. The truth of his being abused would be seen by the group leaders as an “excuse” that keeps him from taking responsibility for his violence. He would be forced never to mention his wife’s violence. He would have two choices. One would be to tell the truth and not “graduate” from the educational sessions, which would leave him legally vulnerable. The other would be to lie and say he was the abuser. We could guess that this man would choose to lie simply in order to ”graduate” from the “training”.

This sort of example shows how the system can take on the role of what is being called a “third party” abuser. The spouse no longer has a need to batter. The police and community agencies are now taking over that role by treating the falsely-accused man in a manner that lacks respect for him as a human being who has been abused or as a citizen with the right to be presumed innocent or to have his side of a given unwitnessed incident fairly considererd. This is what can happen when pre-judgments arising from stereotypes are used instead of impartial mindsets coupled with factual analysis.

Since its inception, the Duluth Model has been reworked and made more “gender neutral”, but it continues to fail miserably in its capacity to address the needs of men who are victimized and of women who are violent.

If you visit the Duluth Model web site, you can see that their primary focus on female victims continues to this day. The Duluth site claims that women account for as many as 97% of the victims of domestic violence.15 We know from both police reports and from peer-reviewed research that this is far from the truth. It does however show that the Duluth Model continues to be focused on female victims and has failed in taking current thinking and research into account, thus placing male victims at risk and allowing female perpetrators to go unchecked or psychiatrically untreated for their abusiveness.

The Duluth Model spreads to the community

As the domestic violence industry grew, the Duluth Model took a greater and greater hold on the theoretical practices of domestic violence agencies. As it took this greater hold, the ideas of domestic violence being only about men beating women spread farther. As funding grew for domestic violence agencies, the funding for trainings grew correspondingly. The 1994 federal Violence Against Women Act started pouring about one billion dollars per year into domestic violence endeavors. A part of that money was spent on trainings given to the court systems, judges, police, lawyers and domestic violence workers. The message the workshops broadcast was founded on the Duluth Model ideology that women were the vast majority of domestic violence victims and men were only a tiny minority. More and more, the ideas of the Duluth Model became the standard. It was presented as fact that domestic violence is pretty much only about women being abused by men. That ideology is now set firmly in place. The early work of the activists has focused exclusively on abused women and now the theoretical framework that guided their work is firmly planted in an ideology that focuses on female victims but ignores the needs of male victims and the actions of female perpetrators. Now these ideas have been spread successfully into our community agencies and public institutions.

Opposing Voices to the Duluth Model — Researchers

Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, and Susan Steinmetz are early researchers on issues of domestic violence. This group published a book in 1982 that ran counter to the feminist ideology. The book, Behind Closed Doors,16 said clearly that domestic violence was a two-way street with both men and women responsible as perpetrators and victims. The response was swift and powerful. Upon publication, Straus, Gelles and Steinmetz were immediately seen as enemies. Prior to their findings that there is gender symmetry in domestic violence, they had been praised and held in high esteem as instrumental in the early research on domestic violence. But once they found data that contradicted the feminist belief that men were the only perpetrators and women the only victims, things changed drastically. At that point, they lost their glow and became villains to those who supported the ideas of women as the only victims of domestic violence. Death threats and other avenues of intimidation were used to try to silence them. Murray Straus, Ph.D., describes his struggle with intimidation and explains his own reluctance to publish his results that went counter to the feminist domestic violence ideology:

Researchers who have an ideological commitment to the idea that men are almost always the sole perpetrator often conceal evidence that contradicts this belief. Among researchers not committed to that ideology, many (including me and some of my colleagues) have withheld results showing gender symmetry to avoid becoming victims of the vitriolic denunciations and ostracism. Thus, many researchers have published only the data on male perpetrators or female victims, deliberately omitting the data on female perpetrators and male victims.17

In essence, these researchers were being bullied. In fact, Straus published a paper in 2006 that describes not only the intimidation they suffered but also chronicles the specific ways that the feminist researchers made certain that their own data only produced the desired results that reflected the ideology that women were the primary victims of domestic violence.18

The research by Straus, Gelles, Steinmetz, and many others which clearly shows that men are victims has been available through journal articles for years.19 Some activists have drawn from the statistics and findings and tried to use this information to change the system to encourage existing services to include focus on male victims of domestic violence. When activists make such attempts, they are usually met with the same results most every time: the domestic violence industry claims that the peer-reviewed research is inaccurate and cites numbers from their own clinical settings, hospital settings, and emergency rooms. The numbers they cite are very different from the research numbers and clearly show that domestic violence is indeed primarily a “men beat women” problem. So who is correct? The quick answer is BOTH. The research numbers from scientists such as Strauss, Gelles, and Steinmetz are correct from their perspective and from the populations they studied. These numbers were usually drawn from the general population and reflect the “average” person or family.

But how about the domestic violence agencies numbers? Well, they are correct also, but one must note that the sample they draw from is very biased. They draw from a population that has been utilizing services specifically built for women who were abused. It is little wonder that they would therefore be more likely to show greater numbers of female victims. Imagine a hospital that was built specifically for the treatment of caucasian diabetics. When they look at their own numbers and stats they would assuredly say that the majority of victims of diabetes are white! Since their services are built to serve whites, that is exactly what their stats will show. One would also assume that they would be teaching in the community about whites and diabetes and also do Public Service Announcements for whites who might have diabetes. The same thing happens within the domestic violence industry. The entire system was originally built for women. The name of the law the Violence Against Women Act makes that very clear. It is little wonder that the statistics they compile and the research done within the domestic violence industry on their own populations would reflect that women were the primary victims. You see this idea filter down to the clinical level where almost every group for domestic violence victims in Maryland is for women only. The treatment groups are almost always built for male perpetrators and female victims. The overwhelming majority of public service announcements on domestic violence are focused on female victims. When you solicit for a certain type of victim, it is no surprise that your statistics, trainings and treatment will center around that particular type of client.

Opposing Voices to the Duluth Model — Clinicians

While the peer-reviewed research has been noting male victims for years, the clinical side of the equation has now started getting noticed. In 2007, the American Psychiatric Association published an article in the August issue of Psychiatric News titled: “Men Shouldn’t be Overlooked as Victims of Partner Violence.”20 The article cited some of the research findings about women being more likely then men in relationship to initiate domestic violence and focused on issues of reciprocal interpersonal violence versus nonreciprocal violence. Here is a quote from the article:

Regarding perpetration of violence, more women than men (25 percent versus 11 percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women.

And another:

As for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, it was more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal than nonreciprocal. And while injury was more likely when violence was perpetrated by men, in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the men who were injured more often (25 percent of the time) than were women (20 percent of the time). “This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious,” Whitaker and his group stressed.

The word is getting out that both men and women are perpetrators and victims of domestic violence.

Opposing Voices to the Duluth Model — The Courts

The courts are also starting to take notice of the discrimination that men face in the domestic violence industry. In the Woods et. al. vs California case in 2008, a Superior Court in Sacramento, ruled that male domestic violence victims had been unconstitutionally denied services. The court held that state laws violated men’s equal protection rights by excluding male victims from state-funded domestic violence services. The court found: “domestic violence is a serious problem for both women and men” and that “men experience significant levels of domestic violence as victims.”21 The court also found a percentage of state-funded programs deny men services they are entitled to receive.

Then, in October 2009, a West Virginia judge struck down state rules for regulating domestic violence shelters because they operate “on the premise that only men can be batterers and only women can be victims” and “exclude adult and adolescent males from their statutory right to safety and security free from domestic violence based only on their gender.”22

Are there men who fall through the cracks?

We have seen how the domestic violence industry has had a history of blaming men and masculinity for domestic violence. This sort of theoretical assumption has a negative impact on the willingness of men to seek help. The men, not unlike the early female victims of domestic violence in the 1970’s who were very reluctant to seek treatment, are certain that no one cares about their situation and are highly unlikely to seek out services when not invited. What compounds this problem for men is that their gender is blamed for the original problem.

We have learned from Maryland State Police statistics that men comprise about 25% of the victims of domestic violence in Maryland.23 What we don’t know is the percentage of males seeking treatment as victims of domestic violence. In checking with a number of Maryland Domestic Violence agencies, they often say that the number of male victims is very small. Some of the treatment centers claim that men are only 4% of their clients. If the State Police count men as 25% of the 20,000 victims of domestic violence recorded annually in Maryland and the agencies that offer treatment for domestic violence say that men are only 4% of the victims that request treatment, that seems to leave a huge number of men who are untreated victims. It seems likely that a large percentage of the 5000+ men who are reported by State Police as victims of domestic violence in Maryland are falling through the cracks and not getting the help they need and are entitled to as citizens and residents.

What once started as a righteous cause to help battered women has evolved over the years to be something that seems to help battered women but also seems to neglect the needs of violent women and battered men and ignores the imperatives that the fundamental demands our tradition of justice holds dear. Both the media and academia seem to focus solely on female victims of domestic violence, with a much smaller focus or none at all on male victims. Researchers doing peer-reviewed research have consistently found evidence that men and women are both victims of domestic violence, but this finding has not been translated to changing the treatment that men receive in domestic violence agencies. Clinical groups such as the American Psychiatric Association are beginning to alert the public and clinicians that men are indeed a sizable percentage of domestic violence victims. The courts have also started pointing out the discrimination that is present in many domestic violence agencies that treat men and women differently.
This report is not claiming that men are never served through domestic violence agencies in the state of Maryland. It is however claiming that Maryland’s domestic violence services have traditionally been created for women only and this has a chilling effect on men’s usage of these facilities.

A Proposal For Practical Change

There is a domestic violence group named “Safe For All” that offers trainings nationwide and is particularly aware of the many issues around domestic violence, including those of male victims and of people in homosexual relationships, also an under-recognized and under-served group. Their web address is http://safe4all.org/24 The National Family Law Legislative Resource Center, www.nfvlrc.org25 represents the nation’s leading authorties, clinicians, and researchers on domestic violence and could also offer trainings and consultations.26

Although calls to Maryland shelters and crisis lines to test for discriminatory handling of reports have at the present time not been conducted, there is no question such testing can be conducted and most likely will be conducted in order to support lawsuits similar to the successful ones used in the legal cases in California and West Virginia cited above. The results of such testing in Maryland would likely mirror these results: In a national poll by Clark University, female researchers studied 302 abused men who sought help. Their key findings were that 63.9% of men who called hotlines were told they only helped women, and 68.7% said the hotlines were not at all helpful. Of those that contacted a local domestic violence (shelter) program, 95.3% said the program gave the impression that they were biased against men, 78.3% said they don’t help male victims, and 63.9% suggested the male caller was the batterer. (See; http://clarku.edu/faculty/dhines/results.htm.27 )

Therefore, in order to avoid costly and time-consuming lawsuits, it behooves the State of Maryland to require all domestic violence service organizations that receive pass-through federal funding or state funding of any type to receive training in non-discriminatory but practical approaches and techniques for handling domestic violence cases and suspected or reported cases. Such training is available via the two organizations referenced above, and also from others.

Whether or not gay and heterosexual men represent a small minority, a large minority, or an equal number of such victims as compared to women in the population is immaterial. The State of Maryland by its policies and procedures is obligated to encourage and support only those organizations that practice inclusion, diversity and non-discrimination. However, not even very large urban areas can financially support “separate but equal” domestic violence facilities and services for men and women. Not only is it not practical, but such a policy does little to combat discrimination and only encourages conflict over funding resources. 1. The purpose of this training is to provide guidance and directives in how to implement a non-discrimination policy in all service areas. 2. As part of this training program, a compliance coordination methodology shall be developed to assure that the non-discrimination policy is being carried out by agencies who participated in the training. 3. The training will provide cost-effective, implementable, and practical steps that each agency or organization can take to eliminate discrimination and incorporate gender and sexual orientation inclusive policies.

We respectfully request the Office of The Governor to immediately begin the implementation of such a training program.

REFERENCES

1 One example is the Allstate page <http://www.clicktoempower.org/> linked from the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV) web page that rightly claims that 3 women each day (actually it is closer to 4) die of domestic violence in the United States. They fail to mention that nearly 2 men die each day due to being murdered by their female partner. This is a glaring omission. In 2007 1640 women were murdered by their male intimates and 700 men were murdered by their female partners. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=971 Why are the male victims omitted?

2 “Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey | National Institute of Justice.” Office of Justice Programs. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/172837.htm>.

3 “Family Violence.” National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges . N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2009. <www.ncjfcj.org/content/view/20/94/>.

4 “National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.” National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.ncadv.org/learn/TheProblem.php>.

5 “Domestic Violence Facts: Maryland.” National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2009. <www.ncadv.org/files/Maryland.pdf>.

6 “Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV).” Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV). N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://mnadv.org/DV_Stats/ucr_stats.html>.

7 Whitaker, Daniel. “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence.” Journal of Public Health 97.May (2007): 941-947. Print.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Pence E. Some thoughts on philosophy. In Shepard M and Pence E (eds.): Coordinating Community Responses to Domestic Violence: Lessons from Duluth and Beyond. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishers, 1999, p. 30.

11 McNeely, R. L., Cook, P. W. & Torres, J. B. (2001). Is domestic violence a gender issue or a human issue? Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 4 (4), 227-251.

12 “Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) – Intimate partner violence.” Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) . N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2010. <http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=971>.

13 Paymar, Michael, and Ellen Pence. Education Groups for Men Who Batter: The Duluth Model. 1 ed. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1993. Print.

14 Graves, Tom. Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems. London: Tetradian, 2008. Print.

15 Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs, Home of the Duluth Model.” Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs, Home of the Duluth Model. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.theduluthmodel.org/wheelgallery.php>.

16 Gelles, Richard J., and Murray Straus. Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family. New Ed ed. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006. Print.

17 “Processes Explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symetry in Partner Violence.” University of New Hampshire. N.p., n.d. Web.18 Dec. 2009. <pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf>.

18 Ibid.

19 “REFERENCES EXAMINING ASSAULTS BY WOMEN ON THEIR SPOUSES OR MALE PARTNERS: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY.” California State University, Long Beach. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm>.

20 Arehart-Treichel, Joan. “Men Shouldn’t Be Overlooked as Victims of Partner Violence.” APA Psychiatric News 42.15 (2007): 31-33. Print.

21 “Appeals court decision supports battered men.” San Francisco Bay Area — News, Sports, Business, Entertainment, Classifieds: SFGate. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/15/BA3S13HOLS.DTL>.

22 Press, The Associated. “W.Va. domestic-violence program regulations voided – News – The Charleston Gazette – West Virginia News and Sports.” – – The Charleston Gazette – West Virginia News and Sports. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.wvgazette.com/News/200910080509>.

23 “Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV).” Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV). N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2009. <http://www.mnadv.org/DV_Stats/ucr_stats.html>.

24 “Welcome!.” Stop Abuse for Everyone. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2009. <safe4all.org>.

25 Robinson, Michael. “National Family Violence Legislative Resource Center.” National Family Violence Legislative Resource Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. <http://www.nfvlrc.org/>.

26 Please consult with the Chairman or Vice-Chairman of the Maryland Commission for Men’s Health for more information on these organizations.

27 “Results from Study on Men’s Experiences of Partner Aggression.” Clark University | One of 40 “Colleges that Change Lives”. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. <http://clarku.edu/faculty/dhines/results.htm>.

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tgolden@tgolden

April 02, 2026

Are Family Courts at War with the Constitution?

In this conversation, I sit down with longtime scholar and author Stephen Baskerville to take a hard look at modern family courts, no-fault divorce, paternal rights, and the assumptions behind shared parenting. Stephen argues that what many people take for granted in divorce and custody law may be far more troubling than they realize—not only for fathers and children, but for the rule of law itself. Join us in this challenging and thought-provoking discussion that raises questions most people never hear asked.

Stephen's Substack
https://stephenbaskerville.substack.com/

STEPHENBASKERVILLE.SUBSTACK.COM

Stephen Baskerville's Newsletter | Substack

Unconventional perspectives on politics, history, religion, law, sex, and higher education. For better or worse, what you read here is definitely "outside the box" and perhaps outside your "comfort ...

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tgolden@tgolden

March 30, 2026

Blame it on the Manosphere

This short video takes a humorous look at the current panic among feminists and the media over what they call the manosphere. In reality, the manosphere is one of the places where their false narratives are being exposed. What we are seeing now is the creation of a straw man—something to blame, distort, and use as a distraction from the truth that is coming to light. More and more people are waking up to the game and beginning to see the hostility and self-interest that have been there all along.

(This video was produced largely with AI. I wrote the script, and the music and images were AI-generated.)

Men are Good!

00:03:05

tgolden@tgolden

March 23, 2026

From Description to Smear: The Guide to the Manosphere

Today’s video is a lively and revealing conversation with Jim Nuzzo about the growing panic over what the media and academia call “the manosphere.” Together, we take a close look at a new Australian guide for teachers that claims to help schools deal with so-called misogynistic behavior among boys. What we found was not careful scholarship, balanced concern, or genuine curiosity about boys. What we found was a familiar pattern: boys portrayed as the problem, their questions treated as threats, and their frustrations dismissed before they are even heard.

Jim brings his scientific eye to the discussion, and that makes this exchange especially valuable. We talk about the sudden explosion of academic and media attention on the manosphere, the way fear is being used to drive the narrative, and the striking absence of empathy for boys who feel blamed, dismissed, and alienated. We also explore something the guide never seriously asks: why are boys drawn to these spaces in the first ...

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JuanGoodman@JuanGoodman

April 09, 2026

Women an they just won’t!

JuanGoodman@JuanGoodman

March 14, 2026

This is on point and even this will be seen as anti woman

tgolden@tgolden

March 02, 2026

Men Don't Grieve the Way You Think

I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Jason MacKenzie, who runs the Man Down Substack—a publication dedicated to men and their unique paths to healing.

Many of you may not know that I spent many years working directly with men who were grappling with trauma and loss. Through that experience, it became strikingly clear to me that men and women are often treated very differently after a loss. Those early observations opened my eyes to the broader ways men face discrimination, misunderstanding, and hardship in our society. I hope you find the conversation interesting and worthwhile.

https://www.mandown.tools/p/men-dont-grieve-the-way-you-think?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

tgolden@tgolden

April 13, 2026

Research: Feminist Hate is Real

I recently read a study titled “Women Who Hate Men: A Comparative Analysis Across Extremist Reddit Communities.” It caught my attention for an obvious reason: it attempts to examine something that is rarely acknowledged in mainstream research—the existence of hostility toward men. That alone makes it worth looking at.

To its credit, the study does arrive at an important conclusion. It finds that gender-based hostility online is not confined to one direction. Both misogynistic and misandric communities show similar patterns of negativity, and in some cases, the levels of expressed “hate” are comparable—or even higher—in feminist spaces. In fact, one of the more striking findings was that the mainstream Feminism subreddit, not the more radical GenderCritical group, showed the highest “hate” levels in the study’s user-level emotional analysis, while the incel group skewed more toward sadness. That’s not a small finding. For years, the dominant narrative has been that hostility flows primarily from men toward women, while negative attitudes toward men are either minimal, reactive, or insignificant. This study quietly challenges that assumption.

But as I read through the paper, I found myself struck by something else. The conclusion may be balanced, but the path getting there is not.

The Framing Is Not Neutral

One of the first things that stood out was how much time the paper spends describing the dangers women face from misogyny. There are detailed references to harassment, violence, abuse of female public figures, and the broader cultural impact of anti-female hostility.

But there is no parallel effort to explore the harms faced by men. There is little discussion of male victimization, little acknowledgment of anti-male stereotypes, and almost no examination of how cultural narratives might shape hostility toward men and boys. So even in a study that claims to look at both sides, the starting point is not neutral. It begins from a familiar position: misogyny is the established problem. Misandry is something newer, something less understood, something that needs to be “added” to the conversation. That framing matters because it subtly positions one form of hostility as primary and the other as secondary.

The “Manosphere” Problem

Another moment gave me pause. The paper describes the “manosphere” as:

“a network of websites and social media groups that promote misogynistic beliefs.”

That’s not a finding. That’s a definition, and definitions matter. If you begin by defining a category as misogynistic, then study that category, you are not really testing whether it is misogynistic. You have already assumed the answer.

Now, to be fair, some spaces within what is often called the “manosphere” are openly hostile. Anyone who has spent time online knows that. But the term itself is broad. It includes a wide range of spaces—some focused on anger, yes, but others focused on fatherhood, men’s mental health, legal concerns, relationships, or simply trying to make sense of a changing world. To define all of that as inherently misogynistic collapses important distinctions. It turns a complex landscape into a single, pre-labeled category, and once that happens, the analysis begins to feel circular.

Reaction or Expression?

As I continued reading, I noticed something more subtle. Feminist spaces in the study are often framed—implicitly—as reacting to misogyny. The idea seems to be that negative attitudes toward men are, at least in part, a response to harm. That may sometimes be true, but it is not something the study actually tests.

Interestingly, the data itself complicates that assumption. When the researchers looked at emotional patterns—particularly expressions of “hate”—the feminist subreddit showed some of the highest levels at the user level. That’s a striking finding, because it suggests that hostility toward men is not always merely reactive. It can be active. It can be sustained. And in some cases, it may be as intense as the hostility it is presumed to respond to. The study reports this, but it does not fully grapple with what it means.

The Problem with Measuring “Hate”

The paper relies heavily on computational tools to measure toxicity and emotion. That’s understandable. Large datasets require some kind of automated analysis. But these tools have limits. They tend to detect what we might call explicit hostility—insults, threats, and dehumanizing language.

What they struggle to capture is something more subtle: generalized suspicion, moral framing, one-sided narratives about harm, and the steady pathologizing of a group. Hatred does not always announce itself clearly, and it does not always use harsh words. Sometimes it sounds like concern. Sometimes it sounds like analysis. Sometimes it even sounds like virtue. And that kind of hostility can be harder to measure—but no less real.

The Charts That Don’t Quite Clarify

I’ll admit something simple as well: the charts didn’t help much. There were clusters of colors, distributions, and visual patterns—but very few clear numbers that would allow a reader to easily compare groups. How much more hate? How much less? It was difficult to say.

The visuals looked scientific, but they didn’t always make the findings clearer. They gave an impression of precision without always delivering clarity.

An Important Step—But Not the Whole Picture

So where does that leave us? I do not think this is a bad study. In some ways, it is an important one. It takes a step that many researchers have been unwilling to take. It acknowledges that hostility toward men exists, that it can be measured, and that it should not be ignored. That matters.

At the same time, the study reflects the broader environment in which it was produced—an environment that still tends to treat men as the default source of harm, and women’s hostility as something more contextual, more explainable, or more justified. Because of that, the analysis feels uneven. The conclusion points toward balance, but the framing leans away from it.

And that, to me, is the most revealing part of all. The study is valuable not only for what it finds, but for what it unintentionally exposes about the culture surrounding the research itself.

The Deeper Issue

In the end, what struck me most is this: we are beginning to see evidence that hostility toward men is real and measurable, but we are still not willing to face it directly—not with the same seriousness, the same clarity, the same moral urgency, or the same willingness to question the stories we have been telling ourselves for decades.

If researchers truly want to understand gendered hostility, they cannot stop with fringe Reddit communities. They need to look at the media, the schools, the therapeutic world, public health messaging, and other major cultural institutions and ask a very simple question: Who is being portrayed as dangerous? Who is being treated as defective? Who is being blamed, pathologized, mocked, feared, or morally downgraded? Men or women?

That would be a far more revealing study. Because the most powerful forms of hatred are not always loud, crude, or obvious, and they are not always found in anonymous online forums. Sometimes they are found in respectable institutions. Sometimes they are taught in classrooms, repeated in headlines, embedded in therapy language, or smuggled into public discourse under the cover of compassion and progress.

And that is precisely what makes them so powerful. When contempt for men is framed as insight, when suspicion of men is framed as wisdom, and when the steady belittling of men is framed as moral sophistication, it becomes very difficult even to name what is happening.

Until we are willing to examine that honestly, we will keep misunderstanding the problem. We will keep measuring only the crudest forms of hate while ignoring the more polished and socially approved forms. We will keep pretending that hostility toward men is mostly reactive, incidental, or harmless, when in many settings it has become normalized.

And when a culture cannot honestly recognize the contempt it directs at half the human race, it does not become more just. It becomes more blind.

Men Are Good, as are you.

Coppolillo, Erica In: Scientific reports, 2025 Apr 22, volume 15, issue 1, page 13952

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-81567-9

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tgolden@tgolden

April 09, 2026

Men Aren’t Broken—Just Misread.

And that misunderstanding is damaging marriages, boys, fathers, therapy, and the workplace

For years now, we have been told that men need to become more open about their emotions. They need to talk more, reveal more, cry more, and process more directly. We hear this so often that it has taken on the status of settled truth. But almost no one asks the more unsettling question: what if many men have been emotionally present all along, but in ways our culture has failed to recognize? What if the real problem is not that men lack emotional depth, but that male emotional life is so often judged by female standards?

That question matters far more than most people realize. It matters in marriage, where a good man can be called emotionally unavailable simply because he does not process out loud. It matters in families, where boys are corrected for the very ways they regulate hurt, fear, and stress. It matters in schools, where male behavior is more likely to be treated as a problem to be managed than a difference to be understood. It matters in therapy, where men often discover that healing is quietly defined in ways that fit women better than men. It matters at work, where “emotional intelligence” can become a polished-sounding way of rewarding female-style expression and penalizing male reserve. It matters in the courts as well, where fathers can be misjudged because their love does not always arrive in the approved emotional form.

Again and again, men and boys are judged not by the depth of their feeling, but by the style of its expression. And the style most often treated as healthiest is often simply the female style. That is not a criticism of women. Women have every right to their own ways of feeling and expressing. The problem is that our culture has quietly taken one pattern of emotional life and turned it into the universal standard. Once that happens, men and boys are almost guaranteed to be misunderstood.

A man can love deeply, care intensely, lose sleep over conflict, and still be called emotionally shut down. A boy can feel grief, fear, shame, and tenderness, and still be seen as emotionally underdeveloped because he runs, jokes, wrestles, or goes quiet instead of talking it through. A father can pour his heart into his children through protection, practical devotion, guidance, and steady presence, and still be treated as emotionally secondary because he does not narrate his love in therapeutic language. That is not insight. It is a profound failure of recognition.

The marriage damaged by a false interpretation

I once worked with a couple whose marriage was in serious trouble. The wife was convinced her husband had little real emotional depth. Her evidence was familiar enough: he did not talk much, he did not process in real time, and he often went quiet during arguments. She felt alone, unmet, and unseen. As she described him, he sat there saying very little. To most observers, he would have looked exactly like the stereotype of the emotionally unavailable husband.

But when I got to know him better, a different picture emerged. After their conflicts, he would lie awake at night replaying every word. He worried deeply about her. He thought constantly about how to make things better. He held back in the moment because he knew that speaking too quickly often made the conflict worse. So he retreated inward, trying to understand what he felt before he spoke. He was not emotionally absent. He was emotionally cautious. He was not unfeeling. He was flooded. But because his distress did not take the form she recognized, it was translated into indifference.

This is where many relationships begin to fail. She wants immediate verbal connection because that is how she experiences emotional engagement. He goes inward because that is how he tries to organize emotional overload. She experiences his inward turn as abandonment. He experiences her pursuit as pressure, criticism, or emotional intrusion. The more she pushes, the more he withdraws. The more he withdraws, the more frightened or furious she becomes. Soon both are suffering, and both believe the other is the problem. But sometimes the deepest problem is simpler than that. Male emotional processing is being judged through a female lens, and two decent people end up trapped inside a misunderstanding.

The boy who is pathologized for normal boyhood

The same thing happens to boys, often from a very young age. A boy is energetic, physical, playful, impulsive, competitive, less verbally demonstrative, and inclined to work things out through movement, action, humor, mock conflict, and short cycles of upset and recovery. For most of human history, much of this would have been recognized as ordinary boyhood. Today it is often viewed with suspicion. He is too active, too rough, too defended, too inattentive to feelings, too quick to move on, too external, too much.

But much of the time what adults are seeing is not pathology. It is male-pattern emotional regulation. Many boys process discomfort through movement, challenge, joking, rough-and-tumble contact, temporary withdrawal, activity, and doing. I have seen boys laugh after getting hurt and watched adults interpret that as emotional shallowness, when often the laughter was simply a way of keeping the pain from overwhelming them. I have seen boys respond to disappointment by getting louder, more physical, or more active, only to be treated as if they had no inner life at all.

A girl who cries openly is often seen as emotionally healthy and in touch. A boy who grabs a ball, heads outside, goes silent, gets restless, or hides his distress behind humor is more likely to be seen as avoidant or emotionally blocked. That is not neutral observation. It is interpretive bias. We recognize female forms of distress more readily, and we recognize female forms of self-soothing more readily as well. We are more likely to view those forms as healthy, mature, and emotionally literate. Male forms are more likely to be treated as immaturity, dysfunction, or disorder. The message many boys receive, whether openly or indirectly, is a painful one: not only are your feelings a problem, but the very way you carry your feelings is a problem too. That is a brutal thing to teach a child.

The father whose love is invisible because it is practical

One of the deepest losses in all of this is our failure to recognize male love when it arrives through action. A mother comforts a hurting child with words and empathy, and we call that love, rightly so. A father takes the child for a drive, shows him how to fix something, throws a ball with him, sits beside him quietly, makes the home feel steady, and communicates care through protection, guidance, practical help, and dependable presence. Too often we call that something else. We call it less emotional.

But it is not less emotional. It is simply less verbal and less theatrical. Many fathers love through doing, through steadiness, through creating safety, through shared activity, and through showing up again and again. I have known fathers who worried constantly about their children and barely spoke of it. Fathers who carried heartbreak in silence while remaining steady for everyone around them. Fathers who poured love into daily acts of guidance, support, sacrifice, and reliability. Because they did not present that love in the approved emotional style, much of it went unseen.

That is not wisdom. It is a form of cultural illiteracy. A society that can no longer recognize male love unless it is translated into female emotional language is a society that has lost sight of something vital in fatherhood itself.

The workplace where bias wears the mask of enlightenment

The same dynamic now appears in professional life. “Emotional intelligence” can refer to something real and worthwhile. Self-awareness matters. Awareness of others matters. Emotional self-control matters. None of that is in dispute. But in practice, the term is often used in highly subjective ways. A man may be calm under pressure, perceptive about group tensions, fair-minded, difficult to rattle, and unusually good at maintaining perspective in conflict. Yet he may still be judged as lacking because he is not verbally expressive, not highly demonstrative, or not especially skilled at broadcasting emotional cues in the preferred style.

What is being measured in many workplaces is not emotional intelligence broadly understood. It is emotional style. And the style often being rewarded is more female-typical: visible emotional signaling, relational fluency, warmth display, and verbal processing. That means male restraint can be interpreted as coldness. Male caution can be read as distance. Male steadiness can be mislabeled as lack of empathy. Male problem-solving can be reframed as emotional avoidance. In this way, a cultural preference disguises itself as a moral virtue. A man can be downgraded not because he is interpersonally incompetent, but because he does not perform emotionality in the way evaluators most easily recognize. This is one of the more effective forms of bias because it comes wrapped in the language of progress.

The therapy room where men are taught to distrust their own path

This problem may be most painful in therapy. A man comes to therapy grieving, traumatized, depressed, or overwhelmed. He is already taking a risk. He is already doing something difficult. But often it does not take long before he senses that healing is supposed to look a certain way. He is expected to talk in a certain rhythm, disclose in a certain style, and move toward feeling in a certain order. If he needs silence before words, that may be called avoidance. If he thinks before he speaks, that may be called detachment. If he processes through walking, building, fixing, working, reflecting, or simply being alone for a while, that may be interpreted as resistance rather than understood as his actual path.

I have seen this for years. Many men are willing to heal, but they are often asked to heal in forms that do not fit them. A grieving man may not need to sit face-to-face and narrate everything immediately. He may need to build a memorial bench. He may need to work in his wife’s garden. He may need long walks, long silences, or practical acts that allow feeling to move through him without being forced into premature language. That is not failed grieving. It is often male grieving. But instead of being understood, many men leave therapy feeling that even their attempt to survive is somehow wrong.

Think about how tragic that is. A man comes in already wounded and then receives a second wound: shame about the way he is coping. Many men suffer not only from pain itself, but from the belief that the form their pain takes is itself evidence of deficiency.

The family story that gets told wrong

These misunderstandings often begin inside families. One child is called “the sensitive one” because she cries, talks, and seeks comfort in recognizable ways. Another child, often a boy, is called distant, hard, or difficult because he grows quiet, gets irritable, becomes restless, or disappears into activity. But often the so-called difficult child is feeling every bit as much, sometimes more. He is simply less readable to the adults around him.

So his distress gets mislabeled. He is treated as a behavior problem rather than a hurting person. He is corrected more than understood, managed more than known. And that family story can follow him for life. Not the hurting one. Not the overwhelmed one. Not the child trying desperately to regulate himself in the only way he knows. The difficult one.

There is a quiet cruelty in that. Many men grow up not necessarily feeling unloved, but feeling unseen. People responded to the surface form of their coping and missed the depth of what they were carrying.

What this misunderstanding costs us

When men are misread, the damage spreads everywhere. Good relationships are needlessly broken. Boys are shamed for normal male ways of handling emotion. Fathers are diminished. Men are judged unfairly at work. Therapy alienates the very men it claims to help. Families build false narratives about sons and husbands. And men themselves begin to internalize the accusation. They start to wonder whether they really are stunted, distant, or emotionally deficient, not because they feel less, but because they feel differently.

To be clear, this does not mean every male pattern is healthy. Men can avoid. Men can numb. Men can become defended and unreachable. Of course they can. But that is not the point. The point is that our culture has become so accustomed to treating female-pattern expression as the gold standard that it often cannot distinguish difference from dysfunction. And that confusion is doing immense harm.

Emotional depth and emotional style are not the same thing. A man can care deeply and still need silence. A boy can feel intensely and still recover through movement. A father can love powerfully and still show it more through action than words. A man can be heartbroken and still cope through work, humor, problem-solving, solitude, or responsibility. Those patterns do not automatically reveal emotional poverty. They may reveal a male way of carrying emotional life.

What would change if we finally understood this?

A wife might stop assuming her husband’s silence means he does not care. A mother might begin to see that her son’s joking is not shallowness but self-protection. A teacher might stop mistaking boyhood for pathology. A therapist might stop trying to turn men into women in order to call them healthy. A manager might learn the difference between emotional competence and emotional style. A court evaluator might begin to recognize that a father’s steadiness, reliability, and practical devotion are not lesser forms of love. And men themselves might stop feeling ashamed of the ways they have carried pain all their lives.

That would not be a small change. It would be the beginning of seeing men more clearly. Because until that changes, we will keep damaging good men, good boys, and good relationships. We will keep mistaking difference for deficiency. We will keep confusing female-pattern emotionality with emotional health itself. And we will keep calling that wisdom, when much of the time it is nothing more than ignorance with good manners.

Men and boys are good. As are you.

Read full Article

tgolden@tgolden

April 06, 2026

They Took Away Recess—And Then Wondered Why Boys Struggled

For years, schools have acted as though more learning comes from more sitting, more compliance, more desk time, and more control.

But children do not learn best by being treated like machines.

And boys, especially, often do not thrive when movement, noise, spontaneity, and unstructured play are stripped from the school day.

One of the revealing things about modern education is how casually it has pushed recess aside. What was once understood as a normal and necessary part of childhood is now often treated as expendable—a frill, a reward, or a distraction from the “real work” of school. But the research points in the opposite direction. Recent reviews continue to find that recess is associated with academic and cognitive benefits, behavioral and emotional benefits, physical benefits, and social benefits. The strongest modern claim is not that recess is a magic cure for every school problem, but that it helps children function better and does so without harming academic achievement.

That matters for all children.

But it matters in a special way for boys.

Not because girls do not need recess. They do. But many boys are more movement-driven, more physically expressive, and more likely to regulate themselves through action. A school culture built around prolonged stillness can turn normal boyhood into a problem to be managed. Then, when boys struggle under those conditions, the system acts as though the flaw lies in the boy rather than in the environment. Recent research continues to find sex differences in recess physical activity, with boys on average being more physically active during recess than girls.

Recess Is Not Separate From Learning

One of the most persistent myths in education is the idea that recess takes time away from learning.

The better way to say it is this: recess helps make learning possible.

The brain cannot sustain focused attention indefinitely. Children need a break in cognitive demand. They need contrast. They need a change in setting, activity, and pace in order to come back ready to concentrate again. That is one reason the evidence on recess remains so steady. Newer reviews find positive effects especially in behavior and classroom functioning, while finding either positive or neutral effects on academic outcomes rather than academic harm. The CDC’s current guidance likewise says recess supports students’ mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

That fits ordinary human experience.

Many of us remember exactly what recess did for us. You got outside. You ran. You played. You argued over the rules. You laughed. You blew off steam. Then you came back into the classroom feeling more alive and more ready to focus.

That was not wasted time.

That was recovery time for the brain, and practice time for life.

The Overlooked Power of Unstructured Play

This is the part too many adults miss.

Recess is not valuable only because children move their bodies. It is valuable because, at its best, it gives children unstructured play.

And unstructured play is one of the great training grounds of childhood.

In the classroom, adults set the agenda. Adults decide what matters. Adults define the rules, the timing, the task, the outcome, and the acceptable behavior. In physical education, the same thing usually happens. But during recess, children often have to organize themselves. They have to decide what to play, how to play it, who goes first, what counts as fair, what to do when someone cheats, and how to keep the game going when conflict arises.

That is not trivial.

That is where children learn to negotiate, cooperate, improvise, resolve conflict, advocate for themselves, accept limits, and sometimes lead. Reviews of unstructured play and playground play consistently describe benefits in children’s decision-making, problem-solving, emotional regulation, peer interaction, resilience, and creativity. Even when researchers note that freedom can sometimes bring more visible conflict or disruptive behavior, that is not necessarily evidence against play. It is often part of the process by which children learn how to handle themselves and one another.

In other words, recess is one of the few places left in childhood where children get to practice self-government.

They learn how to make a world with other children in it.

They learn how to form rules, bend rules, defend rules, repair ruptures, and keep a shared activity alive without adults hovering over every move.

That is deeply educational.

In some ways, it is more educational than much of what passes for education now.

Why This Matters So Much for Boys

For many boys, recess is not just pleasant. It is regulatory.

A school day built around silence, sitting, verbal restraint, and passivity fits some children far better than others. Boys who are high-energy, physically expressive, or inclined to think through movement are often treated as though they are defective learners rather than differently wired learners. Recess gives those boys something they genuinely need: a chance to move, reset, experiment, compete, collaborate, and return with a better chance of succeeding in the classroom.

The newer research does not justify saying that only boys benefit from recess, or that every boy benefits more than every girl. That would be too broad. But it does support saying that recess is especially important for many movement-oriented children, and that boys, on average, tend to be more physically active during recess. That alone should make us cautious about cutting away one of the few parts of the school day that so clearly fits the needs of many boys.

And this is where the larger cultural issue enters.

For a long time now, schools have been moving toward a model of childhood that rewards the qualities girls more often display in classroom settings: stillness, verbal compliance, behavioral neatness, and early self-containment. The more schools define those qualities as the norm, the more ordinary boy behavior gets framed as a disruption.

Then schools remove recess, narrow the outlets for movement, and act surprised when boys do worse.

That is not insight.

That is a setup.

High-Performing Systems Do Not All Worship Seat Time

One of the assumptions behind cutting recess is that more time in class must automatically mean more learning.

But that assumption has never been as obvious as administrators pretend.

Countries such as Japan, Korea, and Finland have shown that academic success does not depend on keeping children seated for as many minutes as possible. On PISA 2022, Japan and Korea both outperformed the United States across math, reading, and science, while Finland outperformed the United States in math and science. In some of these countries, children may get as much as fifteen minutes of recess for every hour of instruction. That does not prove recess alone explains their success. Many factors shape educational outcomes. But it does call into question a deeply held assumption—that the way to improve learning is to take movement, play, and reset time away from children.

The deeper point is not that America should copy another country mechanically.

It is that high-performing systems do not all treat children as if the road to excellence is endless confinement.

Some of them appear to understand a truth we have forgotten: children need rhythm. They need intensity and release. Focus and reset. Work and play.

The Case for Recess Is Stronger Than It Looks

One reason recess has been easy to cut is that adults often think of it as optional. It sounds soft. It sounds unserious. It sounds like something schools can sacrifice in the name of rigor.

But the evidence does not point that way.

Recent reviews continue to find benefits in behavior, social functioning, physical activity, and well-being, with either positive or neutral effects on academics. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy on recess was reaffirmed in 2023, and it argues that recess should be considered a necessary break in the school day for optimizing a child’s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development—not something to be withheld for punishment or extra academic drills. CDC guidance likewise continues to support recess and points schools toward evidence-based strategies rather than retreat from it.

That is worth pausing over.

The mainstream evidence base is not saying, “Recess is a luxury, but maybe a nice one.”

It is saying something much closer to this: recess supports healthy child development, improves important aspects of school functioning, and should not be casually taken away.

What We Need to Recover

We need to recover some sanity here.

Children are not improved by endless management.

They are not made healthier, wiser, or more teachable by removing one of the few parts of the day that allows them to move freely, improvise socially, and reset their minds.

And boys should not be treated as defective girls.

If a school system is built in ways that pathologize normal boyhood, then that system should be questioned. If it keeps cutting away the very things that help many boys regulate and engage, then it should not be surprised when boys disengage, resist, or fall behind.

Recess is not a distraction from education.

It is part of education.

Not because it is sentimental.

Because it is developmental.

Because it supports attention, behavior, social learning, and physical well-being.

Because unstructured play teaches things adults cannot easily teach from the front of the room.

And because one of the simplest ways to help boys in school may be to stop taking away one of the few parts of school that still makes sense to them.

Read.
Write.
Arithmetic.
And recess.

That is not a joke.

That is closer to wisdom than much of what passes for reform.

Men are good, as are you.

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