Mark Greene > Quotes

“When I see any women walking down the street, avoiding all eye contact, I feel a deep sense of empathy.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“We are very close to pathologizing emotional awareness in men. Because we continue to insist that thick skinned emotionally distant men are the baseline for masculinity.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“It is the self-suppression of men's desires and aspirations that contributes to epidemic levels of male anger and reactivity, depression, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce and suicide.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“To imply that domestic abuse is only inflicted against women by men is at best, ill informed, and at worst, intentionally deceptive. To acknowledge domestic violence against men does not diminish the injustices suffered by women. In fact, it gives men and women common cause to go forward together.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Please, choose to be a traditional American man if that is how you want to perform masculinity, that's fine. But it’s not the only way to be a man. There are many ways. Too many to count. And in the moment you ditch the part of the Man Box that says everyone has to be like you, you free all of us. Men, women and children. And you free yourself.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Before all else, men are expected to be good providers. Our parent's generation expects it of us, the family courts expect it of us, women on first dates often expect it, and in the event of an early death, our life insurance policies pre-suppose it. The simple mechanics of being a good provider excludes men from a number of other spaces, which, not coincidentally, are reserved for women. What more, as they aspire to switch traditional breadwinner roles with men in our evolving economy, even highly successful professional women collapse into the expectation that men are supposed to provide.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“When a child loses someone or some place dear to them, you had best be ready to replace it with something warm and real, or you will haunt your child with loss.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“It's in economically driven spaces that the most lowbrow expressions of gender conformity are enforced and adopted to the detriment of all. Because people make the most blunt and general conceptual alliances when they perceive their economic interests to be at stake, often overcompensating in ways that damage their internal sense of personal integrity. Sadly, the most oppressive gender conformity-enforcing economic spaces do not exist where money is earned. They exist where it is spent. For many men are seeking to express their gender in more diverse ways, the most potent adversary to change can end up being their own wives and families.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Not only do we men distrust others in this muddled realm of physical touch, years of shaming and judgement have left us distrusting ourselves. Did I enjoy that too much? Am I having taboo thoughts? This distrust leaves us uncertain about touching another human being unless we have established very clear rules of engagement. Often we give up and simply reduce those rules to being in a relationship.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“The crappy mass media narratives about men will continue. They will go on telling our sons, brothers and fathers that the way to be a man is through your wallet or your fists. Our responsibility is to add other stories and other ideas to the cultural mix. Yes, men can be tough focused warriors. But they can also be gentle and loving and playful and funny and sweet and yes, feminine. They can be healers and caregivers and poets and artists and everything else under the sun.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Many of the women I glance at are intentionally not looking at me. They are avoiding all eye contact, seemingly staring into some specific spot on the street that does not contain a man's eyes. If they glance and notice I'm looking at them, they look away very quickly. What I see in that moment is someone being careful. Very very careful.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“My problem was, I really didn't know how to be still. To just sit still and be with him. Whatever your strengths might be, babies will always need something you didn't naturally arrive with. Because, basically, they need everything. And they need it for years. It's like staring down a long hallway with no exits and only one path forward.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“We live in a society that asks man to whitewash their narratives and keep a lid on their emotions. This is both killing men and damaging the boys coming along behind.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“These are the voices of men who have bottled up so much pain that self-reflection is seemingly impossible. You might as well stare into the sun. And so they blame everyone else. Unable to see their own pain in others, because no one saw it in them. And unable to connect emotionally after a lifetime of conditioning to adopt tough alpha male stoicism over emotional connection.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“For the record, I track men much more carefully than I do women and for exactly the same set of reasons that women do, because men like to project power. And some men, a very few, like to project power by verbally or physically abusing strangers.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“When I see any women walking down the street, avoiding all eye contact, I feel a deep sense of empathy. Accordingly, I don't look for more than a second and I don't let my gaze linger. I do all these things out of respect for a simple fact---women don't feel safe.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“But we must all be conscious of the power of our archaic internal dialogues. Of how they weave themselves through our public discourses and our unspoken expectations of each other. Good provider? Think it over. What are you doing to a man when you call him a good provider? Are you normalizing and reinforcing the Man Box paradigm of a man who sacrifices his emotional expression and hidden aspirations to insure a steady stream of revenue for his family? Are you relegating him to some space outside the daily emotional sphere of the family and by extension, depriving the family of crucial male emotional modeling and connection?”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Put simply, liberated views of gender and manhood are all fun and games until a baby shows up. Then the gender roles men are expected to fulfill can suddenly become far more draconian and rigid. It's as if the twenty-year economic timeline that a baby represents creates a panic in which cultural complexity, uncertainty and risk-taking are dismissed as dangerous indulgences that must be put aside for the good of the family.  ”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“In American, shame is how we make people do what we want.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Men who chose (or are forced) to reside in the Man Box are the first to talk about freedom and personal liberty. The fact that they are living within the mind numbingly narrow perimeters of the Man Box is so deeply ironic that it boggles the mind.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Boys are dumped on a desert island of physical isolation, and the only way they can find any comfort is to enter the blended space of sexual contact to get the connection they need. Which makes sexual relations a vastly more high stakes experience than it already should be.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Is the pleasure of human contact inherently sexual to some degree?  I doubt it’s a question the average Italian man would ever ask himself. But here in America, generations of Puritanical sexual shaming have made it a central question.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“In American culture, we believe that men can never be entirely trusted in the realm of the physical.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“The ability to be cared for and comforted is a crucial human capacity, without which we can not live fully connected emotionally intimate lives.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Those moments with my father carried me through some very dark times. He loved me. His warmth and his charm wasn't enough to quell the demons that wrecked his marriage, but he left me with a sense that I was special, and that I was loved. Even now, when I sit with my son, after a divorce and after moving him out of the house he was born into, I remember the lesson my father taught me. That the love of a father can heal wounds; heal the emptiness of loss. Even when that very love itself is what is lost.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“The sooner being gay is completely normalized, the sooner homophobic prohibitions against touch will be taken off straight men. As much as gay men have faced the brunt of homophobic violence, straight men have been banished to a desert of physical isolation by these same homophobic fanatics who police lesbians and gays in our society.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Millions of men are experiencing a sense of deep loss that haunts them even though they are engaged in fully realized romantic relationships, marriages and families.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Adults without kids are free to create their own patterns for living. Yes, they have jobs and yes they have in-laws, but these influences are not pattern wrecking. They are pattern adjusting. The illusion of control over one's life remains intact.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change

“Each kid did his own survival calculations in the moment the pink bellies started. Some raced in to attack the victims, hoping to align themselves with the aggressors. This rarely worked. Their turns came soon enough. Others stood rooted to the spot, sickly half smiles on their faces, preferring to take their pain up front, than to be hunted over the length of the afternoon.”
― Mark Greene, Remaking Manhood: The Modern Masculinity Movement: Stories From the Front Lines of Change