Important
These are my notes from a three hour lecture. I’m not drawing conclusions about the speaker’s character — I don’t know them. I’m drawing conclusions about the ideas, and about where they come from.
1Introcuction
Today I went to a lecture with measured optimism. A seminar on problematic masculinity at my workplace — skepticism felt warranted, especially when I learned the speaker came from a Department of Police Work at a nearby university. But they weren’t themselves a cop, and I thought: perhaps someone who has spent years teaching about toxic masculine norms inside one of the most “testosterone-saturated” institutional cultures imaginable might have something genuinely illuminating to offer. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.
And for a while, that generosity felt rewarded.
2The Part That Was Actually Good
The lecture opened with what sounded like serious, careful work. About twenty years ago, the speaker had followed a soccer team of fourteen-year-old boys — an etymological study of how young men talk when no one is supposed to be listening. Locker room language. The architecture of “fag distances” — the precise, unspoken spatial calibration boys perform to avoid appearing too close, too intimate, too soft — set against an equally powerful need for physical closeness and belonging. The way jargon functions as a kind of emotional encryption: a vocabulary that lets boys talk about fear, longing, grief, without ever quite saying so. This was rich, thoughtful material. It named something real.
There was also a genuinely illuminating parable about how gender expectations are learned and reproduced. Imagine a game of rounders: when a boy steps up to bat, everyone drifts back. When a girl steps up, everyone moves forward. No one announces this. No one is asked to do it. It simply happens, because everyone already “knows” how hard each is expected to hit. The speaker’s point was that we are playing rounders every day — constantly calibrating our expectations of girls and boys, women and men, in ways that feel like common sense but are anything but. This was the kind of structural insight I had hoped the lecture would sustain throughout. For a moment, it felt like the talk would go somewhere genuinely interesting.
Then came the pivot.
3Teaching Girls to Be Aggressive
The speaker raised a point that is, to be fair, often overlooked: that adults disproportionately corrects girls’ non-conforming behavior while leaving boys’ aggression unchecked. True enough. But the proposed corrective gave me pause. The solution, as framed, was to teach girls to be aggressive and boys to be non-aggressive.
I found this genuinely troubling — not because the underlying instinct was wrong, but because it accepts aggression as the operating currency of social power and just tries to redistribute it more equitably. What we actually need — what we can actually teach both boys and girls — is assertiveness: the capacity to advocate for yourself, hold your ground, and navigate conflict without domination as the default mode.
I initially wondered whether this was imprecise language rather than a considered framework. It wasn’t. The speaker clarified: this was about teaching girls and women how to dominate. And then, with a bluntness I found more revealing than they perhaps intended, they described such violence as “a working tool” — for police officers. Not a last resort. A tool.
I wasn’t surprised. I was just paying closer attention now.
4Redefining Violence Until It Means Nothing
The lecture’s most remarkable moment came when the speaker introduced their model for teaching about violence. They offered a redefinition: where violence, in this framework, could mean preventing someone from doing something.
The examples provided were: telling a child they can’t go out after a certain hour, or grabbing someone by the shirt to stop them from stepping into traffic in front of a car.
Now — there is a genuine philosophical tradition that frames all constraint of autonomy as a form of coercion, and it’s not without merit as a lens. But this isn’t that tradition. This is something more slippery. Because once “preventing someone from doing something” becomes your working definition of violence, and once protective intent becomes the thing that legitimizes it, you have built yourself a remarkably accommodating framework.
I raised my hand. I asked — roughly — whether there was any concern that “violence” defined this broadly could encompass something like controlling what a partner wears, or systematically limiting their individual autonomy. The kind of thing that doesn’t require a “culture of honor” to exist. The kind of thing that happens quietly, across many families and many relationships, in many different cultural contexts.
The speaker’s first response was to ask if I meant “culture of honor”.
I said no. I meant something more ordinary and more common than that.
Two things became clear to me in that exchange.
The first is structural: when your institution requires the routine use of physical force, you develop a professional interest in theories that make violence legible, bounded, and justifiable. A model that frames violence as protective action is not a neutral analytical tool — it is also, conveniently, a legitimating one. I’m not imputing bad faith to the speaker. I’m noting that ideas are not formed in a vacuum: they are shaped by the institutions that produce, reward, and reproduce them, and by the perspectives those institutions cultivate in their members.
The second is conceptual: the reflex to locate “real” problematic violence inside specific cultural formations — over there, in those communities, with their “culture of honor” — is a move that has a history. It’s the same move that allows certain kinds of everyday control and violence to remain invisible, naturalized, unmarked. The speaker’s instinct to reach for that frame when I raised the question of intimate domination was telling, even if unintentional.
5What Gets Left Out — and Why That’s the Whole Problem
Here is the irony I kept returning to: the lecture was titled Problematic Masculinity in Schools. And the speaker clearly understood, at least in part, that masculinity is a learned and socially reproduced phenomenon. The rounders parable proved that. They could see the mechanism. They just couldn’t — or wouldn’t — follow it all the way to its institutional conclusions.
Because if you take that parable seriously, you have to ask: which institutions are playing rounders with violence? Which environments systematically teach that aggression is a legitimate working tool, that dominance is an appropriate response to conflict, that force is something to be managed and deployed rather than questioned? The speaker was, professionally, embedded in one of the most obvious answers to that question — and yet the police force as an institution went entirely unexamined. Unnamed. Unremarkable.
This isn’t a small omission. A 2016 systematic review of seven studies found that self-reported rates of domestic violence perpetrated by police officers ranged from 4.8% to 40%, with a pooled estimate of 21.2% (Mennicke & Ropes, 2016). The wide range is largely attributable to differences in how studies defined domestic violence and how samples were constructed — not to any serious dispute about the direction of the finding. That these are self-reported figures matters: people do not reliably disclose their own abusive behavior on surveys, which means 21.2% is in all likelihood a conservative floor rather than a ceiling. If we are genuinely trying to understand where problematic masculinity is learned, reproduced, and protected from consequence, that data is not a footnote. It is part of the main argument.
The lecture was, on the whole, more valuable than I expected. The ethnographic work was careful. The structural intuition was there, even if it wasn’t followed through. But the minor details I found most troubling — the framing of violence as protective tool, the redefinition that makes domination invisible — aren’t minor at all when the topic is teaching children about masculinity. They are precisely the mechanisms by which “problematic” masculinity sustains itself: by making its own logic seem natural, necessary, and for everyone’s good.
Which is, perhaps, what you get when the people teaching about violence also need it to be a working tool.