In this article, I explore the “Man Box”: a little history, recent work on experimental validation of the ideas, and some thoughts about what we do and do not know about it.
Author’s executive summary: strong agreement with a set of attitudes consistent with traditional hegemonic masculinity in the honor culture tradition is associated in young men with reports of committing and being victims of violence, and with depression and suicidal ideation. Because of the seriousness of the conditions, further investigation of the causes is warranted. However, most men rather disagree with these attitudes, despite feeling that culture tells them to be somewhat more that way. Despite being labeled the “Man Box”, it is certainly not Box-like, and is a very narrow window onto how men view manliness.
If you haven’t heard of the Man Box yet, I’ll explain it below, and provide links to learn more. But first, to set the stage, let’s tell a fairy tale.
Once upon a time, men (and boys) came in boxes. The boxes told the men and boys what to do. But the boxes were bad and made everyone sad: the men in them, and everyone else around them. Then, men started climbing out of the boxes and everyone lived happily ever after! Except for the bad sad men still in the boxes, until they killed each other or climbed out themselves. The end!
One doesn’t have to look very hard to notice that when certain extremely serious problems occur, they tend to be perpetrated by men. Whether it’s one-on-one physical violence, sexual violence, lethal self-violence, or organizing collective violence, the perpetrator is probably a man. This observation alone is enough to tell us that we ought to see if we can do something about those men. The most obvious places to “do something” are with laws, which are comparatively easy to pass but are only as effective and non-problematic as their enforcement; or with culture, which is comparatively difficult to change but which is largely self-enforcing if successful.
It would be foolish to discount the effectiveness of laws in curtailing the behavior of those men who would seek to use violence or other antagonistic behaviors to benefit themselves at others’ expense. If you look at failed states, whether it’s Somalia or Libya or the drug cartel subculture in Mexico, you find a horrifying level of suffering and abusiveness, the vast majority of which is happening at the hands of men. When there are no rules, and no consequences beyond what your enemies can impose on you, aggression works, at least in the sense that losing is much worse than winning.
However, in affluent countries with a well-established rule of law, the effectiveness of laws already appears to be pretty much exhausted. Various “tough on crime” efforts in the United States — attempting to dial up the power of laws even farther — have had comparatively little success at reducing crime. There have been reductions in crime — it’s just that these appear likely to have come from other factors, such as a reduction in lead exposure in young men. There may be specific areas where substantial improvement can still be made by creating laws, but overall, we should look elsewhere.
Perhaps for an answer we should look inside the Man Box.
An Academically-Focused History of the (Act Like a) Man Box
The idea of the “Act Like a Man” box originated with Paul Kivel and others at the Oakland Men’s Project in the 1980s. (For more details: https://remakingmanhood.medium.com/the-history-of-the-man-box-e6eed6d895c4). Paul Kivel and his compatriots noticed a pattern of problematic behavior in young men that they were trying to help, where social pressures to “act like a man” kept driving them to perpetuate negative behaviors. The set of problematic pressures were defined intuitively: there weren’t extensive studies on it, just observations by astute people trying to find ways to help young men overcome problematic behavior. As to the box-like nature of it, Kivel explained (in 2006): “One reason we know it’s a box is because every time a boy tries to step out he’s pushed back in [with taunts or fighting].” Fair enough as far as it goes. Not everything is a science (even a social science), and if one wanted to turn it into a serious study, one can consider this part of the hypothesis-generation step.
By the mid-2000s, there were a handful of instances of academic work that had mentioned the idea, talking about the “Act Like a Man Box”, but still as a conceptual framework to tackle certain types of antisocial male behavior.
Around 2010, people started switching to calling it the “Man Box” as well the “Act Like a Man Box” in academic literature, reflecting Tony Porter’s widely lauded TED talk and “simplification” of the term for greater effectiveness with tough audiences like prison inmates. This distinction might seem like a straightforward abbreviation, but the difference in implication is enormous. Act-Like-a-Man is a statement about behavior or expectation. In contrast, Man is an identity. The advice to criticize or critique behaviors, not people, is extremely widespread. Going against this advice is an extremely unfortunate consequence of the abbreviation.
I can’t tell whether the term “Man Box” was introduced a second time (again without the “Act Like a”) by Sara Acker; she seems to claim so in “Unclenching Our Fists”, a book published in 2013, though it seems more likely to me that she was just unaware of the origin of the term. Even though it was still not an organizing principle in studies, people started using the idea for student exercises and so on.
Finally, in 2017, some thirty years after the idea was introduced, a sizable study finally came out, run by an organization called Promundo (later renamed to Equimundo). The Equimundo study is not afraid to claim credit for systematizing the idea: “inspired by the work of Paul Kivel and the Oakland Men’s Project, we created a new scale of attitude items called the “Man Box.”” (https://www.equimundo.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/TheManBox-Full-EN-Final-29.03.2017-POSTPRINT.v3-web.pdf, p. 8, emphasis mine). They do not credit Tony Porter with any inspiration, or with the shortened name — in fact, the report doesn’t mention him at all.
After 2017, the number of academic publications talking about the “Man Box” increases further (but without a great deal of additional research). Also, the term “Man Box” becomes dominant; only rarely does anyone mention the “Act Like a” part anymore. Though it’s difficult to find evidence one way or the other, it seems awfully suspicious that the definitive turn from the constructive-criticism-enabling behavioral term to the destructive-criticism battle-enabling identity term coincided with high levels of culture war in the United States.
Regardless, there are now at least two boxes: a set of intuitively defined attitudes and consequences called the “Act Like a Man Box” dating back to the late 80s (with numerous refinements by Kivel and others by Porter); and a set of questions for social science studies defining the “Man Box” dating to 2017.
What is in the Act Like a Man Box? What are the consequences?
In Kivel’s conception, the Act Like a Man Box tells men that they should be tough, violent, unemotional, sexually promiscuous, in charge of women (and everything), etc.. The consequences of embracing the advice are feelings of confusion, anger, hopelessness, worthlessness, etc..
You can certainly find admonitions for men to be any or all of these things, and you also can find men who have any or all of those emotions. If hearing this helps shake someone out of complacency and allows them to better themselves in some way, great! But we might also want to know if this is true, and to what extent, and what the causal relationships are (e.g. does feeling worthless provoke violence, or does embracing violence provoke feelings of worthlessness, or both, or neither; and how much, if any).
You can find a good deal of relevant psychological literature, and more than a few case studies from individual accounts and literature, that provide some clues about whether the Act Like a Man Box model is true. (My sense of the best one-phrase summary is: “kinda, it’s complicated”.)
But now that people are doing studies directly on the Man Box, we have the potential to find out a lot more. We could gain greatly increased confidence, which would allow us to undertake more ambitious projects with a high expectation of success. We also could fool ourselves by reading out our own expectations and putting a stamp of “true” on them, which would, because of misplaced confidence, tend to result in ambitious projects with an especially low chance of success.
So we now leave Kivel (and Porter) behind and focus on the Equimundo report by Heilman, Barker, and Harrison, and follow-on academic work.
What is the Man Box?
The original Equimundo study provides a highly accessible starting picture of what is going on. The study was designed as a survey of 3000 men across three countries (self-reported information only), and was sponsored by Axe and Unilever (the personal care product companies). Possibly because of the corporate sponsorship, their report is full of simple, easily-digested graphics, and high-level summaries. Even their full report is like this — yes, there’s definitely data there, but it’s not exactly in the traditional style for an academic paper. The good thing about this is it’s really easy to absorb the messages that they are trying to convey; you don’t have to extract meaning from between a bunch of jargon and statistical tests. The bad thing is that there are fewer caveats, tests of methods, alternative hypothesis, and so on.
It is important to note that the set of questions are tailored to query the “Man Box” set of behaviors and beliefs (inspired by Kivel). They do not report a wide range of other personality traits — for example, they don’t include questions that would allow them to estimate IQ, the Big 5 personality traits, or generally pro-social behaviors (“a real man should always tell the truth”). That leaves this study blind to many possible positive (and negative!) outcomes that may correlate with the Man Box. So we have to be very cautious in interpreting absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
Furthermore, we need to observe that the study samples young men: 18 to 30, specifically. That’s reasonable, because men in that age range account for a large fraction of the blatantly socially detrimental behavior exhibited by men. Still, we need to keep the age restriction in mind and not extrapolate too much, because these things change with age (e.g. as described in https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-pressure-to-act-like-a-man-starts-in-preschool).
In order to assess whether someone was in the Man Box, they devised seventeen questions, asking things like, “Do you agree: Men should use violence to get respect, if necessary.” These were intended to probe seven hypothesized aspects of societal expectations of manliness: self-sufficiency, toughness, good looks, embrace of rigid gender roles, homophobia, hypersexuality, and aggression. (The full list is on p. 23, in figure 3.2, though it’s easier to read as answers in table 3.2 a couple pages later.) They asked people to report both their own views and, separately, the pressure they felt from society. They also asked a few questions about psychological health and social situations, presumably based on the long history of research that hypersexual hyperviolent men are quite often not totally okay psychologically and often both perpetrate and are targets of violence.
You can read their conclusions for yourself. Many aren’t surprising: men who endorse the Man Box traits strongly tend to be considerably more likely to perpetrate sexual harassment, sexual assault, and physical bullying…at least according to self-reports, because the study didn’t independently corroborate any claims. More surprisingly, people who agreed with the Man Box questions also were targets of violence and had higher rates of suicidal thoughts. It really is bad to be in deep agreement with the Man Box questions. This study can’t tell us which way causality goes: do ManBoxly men’s attitudes cause the problems? Or do the problems cause the attitudes? Or do external conditions cause both the attitudes and the problems (separately)? Or does it go every which way? But it does tell us: Something bad is going on here! Pay attention!
However, since the study was so heavily focused on a set of masculine ideals that often have negative consequences, they didn’t ask questions like, “In your opinion: a real man would always stand up for someone weaker than themselves.” This strikes me as weird, given how incredibly common the trope is. For instance, in Pacific Rim, where giant metal robots have to bash Godzilla-like monsters to save the Earth (missiles are ineffective because it’s not Man-Boxy enough, I guess), the absolutely essential pilots for the last few robots get into a fistfight with each other over one of them insulting a female pilot. It’s hard to imagine being more solidly in the box. But a key plot point is that the protagonist’s brother was killed in large part because they decided to save people on a fishing boat from a Godzilla. In John Wick Shoots or Punches Everything, a big part of Wick’s motivation is that thugs killed his puppy. Defend the weak is a big deal, but the Man Box study doesn’t investigate it, save for asking about breaking up fights between others. At-least-somewhat-ManBoxly men do say that they break up fights way more than the less-ManBoxly men (Table 4.14), but this effect may explained by the more ManBoxly men’s propensity to be involved on both sides of physical bullying (Tables 4.11, 4.12).
Anyway, if there is any possible major upside to strong endorsement of Man Box positions, the study doesn’t really probe for them.
But is the Man Box a “Man” “Box”?
One would hope, with such a provocative label, that the authors would justify that the label is apt or accurate. Unfortunately, they don’t really address the issue in any comprehensive way. But we can!
The first question is: is it Man?
The study doesn’t cover women, so we can’t answer this question by looking at the study itself. It sure seems like it should be, so we’ll tentatively assume they got man-specific things right, even though they didn’t document it in this study. But even if it is man-specific, do a majority of men actually endorse this stuff? No! They don’t! The only question that gets over 50% support (yes/no) is “Guys should act strong even if they feel scared or nervous inside”. Men in this demographic just don’t endorse these attitudes that heavily.
So it’s “sorta Man”. There’s more than nothing there. But it’s not ubiquitous — these are points of tension, not wide assent.
Next: is it a Box?
The key feature of a box is that there is a sharp distinction between being inside and being outside. Generally, your purchases from Amazon do not arrive with some percentile incorporation within a box. In particular, boxes tend to be bimodal (in/out), with a sharp and difficult-to-cross boundary. Recall Kivel: “One reason we know it’s a box is because every time a boy tries to step out he’s pushed back.”
Unfortunately, the Equimundo study does not appear to have any questions that specifically probe the supposed box-like property. Even though half their report says what it’s like “in” or “out” of the box, they don’t bother to show us that it’s a box. So it makes sense to wonder what shape it actually is.
We do know that there is a strong correlation across that particular set of attitudes because people (eventually) tested the number of principal components and found that a single component explains most of the variance (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32593728/#&gid=article-figures&pid=fig-1-uid-1). This means that, at least among the men tested, all the attitudes tend to be adopted or rejected together — for instance, there’s no evidence for a large subgroup of hypersexual men who aren’t also violence-prone. (And, aside — it means you don’t need so many questions to figure out whether someone embraces this problematic view of masculinity! That same study reduced it to five while showing that it still was predictive of violence, ) But this does not distinguish a box-like in/out from a Man Axis upon which one can move freely.
If it’s actually a box, what you expect is that if you’re in the box, you don’t particularly feel pressure to be even more in the box. As you approach the limits of what’s acceptable, however, you feel very strong pressure to get back in the box. But if you get outside, you’re free again. That’s how boxes work! They keep inside things inside, but don’t pull stuff in from outside.
Here, the Australian version of the Man Box study is more informative than the original (https://cdn.jss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/28093247/The-Man-Box-A-study-on-being-a-young-man-in-Australia.pdf). The Man Box questionnaire asks men both to rate themselves on the Man Box scale and also to rate what they feel expectations are “to be a man”. The Australian study breaks it down based on how ManBoxly the men are — and this is precisely what we need to detect a box! Very ManBoxly men should feel that they match the social expectations (happily in the box). A narrow border of men should feel strong pressure to be more ManBoxly (they’re trying to push out of the box). And maybe some that aren’t ManBoxly don’t feel pressure.
Aside from the rather questionable decision to have six “quintiles” in their graphs, we see that, indeed, the most ManBoxly men view themselves as perfect representatives of what (Australian) society wants. So do the least ManBoxly men — they too view themselves as a perfect match to society’s ideal! This is pretty weird, because the two ideals are incredibly different, and suggests that those sets of men inhabit quite different environments. But the majority of men feel pressure to adhere more strongly to the Man Box traits.
But this means it isn’t a box! It’s a slide. You can sit on the top or bottom comfortably, but for most of the slide it’s trying to pull you in one direction.
Everything else reported in the studies are consistent with it not being a box at all, but rather sliding along the axis towards “acting like a man”.
The implications are actually very important. If you just hear “Man Box” you might think either of two things that aren’t in line with the data at all. First, you might think it’s hard to resist. But it’s not! The majority of men report having moderately less aggressive and sexually exploitative attitudes than they think the societal norm for men is. Secondly, you might think the pressure can be easily escaped. But the pressure to “Act Like a Man” in a more aggressive way is everywhere, save for the top and bottom “quintiles” (whatever that means when there are six).
Understanding the Act-Like-a-Man Axis
If you read the studies yourself — and why not, they’re a pretty easy read! — keep in mind (1) that low scores put men further in the Man Box, I guess with the justification that “low is bad and so is homophobia and violence”, but it’s a bit weird that you name a phenomenon and then when measuring it big numbers under that name mean you don’t have it; (2) you should realize that every single “in/out” call on whether someone’s in the Man Box is based on literally just dividing the pool of men in half based on score, even though if there is a wall to the box or bad effects from being in the box it is very assuredly not in the middle but around the lowest quintile (when broken out into quintiles, the large majority of negative impacts on actually engaging in violence, having suicidal thoughts, and so on, are felt by only that lowest quintile, not the lower half); and (3) the studies aren’t that large and the sophistication of the data analysis leaves very much to be desired so don’t read too much into any particular result — for all I know they could have botched half this stuff (indeed, some results smell a little suspicious) and nobody would have been the wiser. The data isn’t open access, for instance.
But basically, if we assume that the studies are doing a decent job of reporting on the data, Kivel was right originally and the Equimundo authors were wrong, when it comes to the first part of the term: it’s “Act Like a Man”, not “Man”, because the attitudes aren’t endorsed by a majority of men (even if they feel it pushes them that way), and certainly they aren’t endorsed strongly enough to cause or be associated with major (reported) problems, with an exception in the case of sexual harassment (see Figures 5.2 to 5.4 in the original study and Figure 31 in the Aussie version). And neither was right, unless Kivel had a different demographic, about Box — the pressure just isn’t box-like.
It’s also worth reading other investigations of related phenomena. One of the best overlaps (still very readable) is from Pew Research on gender differences in expectations of people (large sample size, but U.S. only).
The key point, overall, is that people feel various expectations to act in certain ways consistent with their gender. However, if you are a young man, and were to go all-in on the big-strong-tough-sexual-honor-society-style expectations and follow them wherever they lead, you could well end up in a deeply problematic place, both in terms of what you would do (bullying, violence, sexual violence) and how it would impact you (being bullied and atarget of violence, and having suicidal thoughts).
So, you know, if you’re in that young man category, please don’t do that for fun (even if Tate tells you to!), unless you’re already in a social setting where you have to be that way to survive. Wouldn’t be prudent (not that you’re old enough to know what that’s from).
And if you’re not in that category, please understand that only a modest portion of young men are really living up to the strongest of those expectations, and that it’s not a box holding a bunch of men in. Men’s attitudes and actions, even when restricted to this axis that is intended to draw out negative traits, are a spectrum. The Man Box isn’t a very good cognitive framework with which to understand men in society. This doesn’t mean that strong endorsement of these attitudes aren’t at associated with problematic behaviors — they absolutely are, and the Man Box research documents this! But while Kivel and Porter may indeed have found a box holding in the particular groups of young men that they were trying to help, in broader society there’s not much box, just a bit of pressure.
So don’t think inside the box. Don’t think out of the box. Instead, try to realize the truth: there is no box, and you do not have to bend to fit yourself or others within one.