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Although research on compensatory manhood acts typically focuses on people who identify as men who are also members of marginalized groups (e.g., racial or sexual minorities), or are often under the control of organizational or institutional authorities (e.g., treatment centers, prisons), such studies also reveal common factors that lead men to desire and enact compensatory strategies.^[26] In the case of members of marginalized groups, for example, experiences with racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, or other inequalities related to their marginalized identities leads them to report feeling out of control or in need of asserting control or dominance in some other area of their lives. In the case of men in controlled settings, the absence of control over their own lives arises repeatedly in their emphasis on other “manly” behaviors and traits. As Schrock and Schwalbe^[27] note in an extensive review of masculinities literatures, the key element of manhood in most cases involves control.

Expanding this observation beyond the cases of men in marginalized groups or controlled settings, it is not difficult to recognize that a large percentage of the situations that make up contemporary social life may leave people who identify as men feeling out of control or controlled by others.^[28] If this is the fundamental cause of compensatory manhood acts, then it would not be surprising if men, no matter their standing vis-à-vis elements of the hegemonic ideal, will meet many scenarios wherein such strategies feel right, necessary, and important to their ongoing performance of manhood. This observation represents the central theoretical point of this book: All men will necessarily encounter situations where they are not in control and/or where they are controlled by others. As such, many men will respond to such conditions by using violence, which they were taught was a sign of manhood, to compensate for the perceived slights they experience in such scenarios.

At this point, an example of the way this process plays out may be useful. If, for instance, a man has been taught that he must be sexually desirable to women, he may then make sexual comments to a woman he sees in his daily life. If, however, the woman in question does not respond positively to this action (e.g., she does not affirm the sexual desirability he is supposed to have if he is a man), then he may seek to compensate for his perceived failure to be sexually desirable to women (like men are supposed to be) by verbally, physically, or otherwise attacking the woman in question (calling her derogatory names, following her, etc.). Next, if the woman responds to this violent act in any way, then he can interpret her reaction as evidence of his control over her. The man in question has thus compensated for the slight to his manhood (i.e., he is not sexually desirable to this woman) by using violence to re-establish his belief in his own manhood (i.e., he has control over this woman’s actions).

Note that in the example above, the man in question could be of any race, class, sex, and age, or of any sexual, religious, or geographic social location. In fact, researchers have demonstrated similar patterns of interaction in settings including but not limited to boardrooms, batterer intervention programs, schools, religious organizations, online platforms, grocery stores, daycare centers, and academic conferences.^[29] In all such cases and regardless of the other sociodemographic locations of the man in question, the process is similar. A man seeks to perform a manhood act by demonstrating an element of hegemonic masculinity (in this example, sexual desirability to women), fails to succeed in this performance, and responds with violence of some sort following this failure in order to demonstrate another element of the hegemonic ideal (i.e., using aggression to get fear or attention from others as in the example above). It is this pattern—how violence emerges as a compensatory strategy for people who identify as men—that I focus on throughout this book.

To this end, it is important to note just how common and widespread the pattern noted above is in the existing scientific literature and media concerning gender, violence, and the combination of these areas of study.^[30] In terms of locations, for example, researchers have noted (at least implicitly) a similar pattern in settings including but not limited to arcades, construction sites, public streets, churches, schools, families, political rallies, businesses, sports arenas, and media depictions of men and women. Similarly, in terms of violence, researchers have noted similar patterns, including but not limited to domestic battery, bullying, rape and sexual assault, hate crimes, mass shootings and broader gun violence, street harassment, state-sanctioned violence, sexual harassment in the workplace, and murder and manslaughter cases. In all such cases, variations on the same pattern repeat, wherein (1) there are people who were taught they should always be in control; (2) those people, quite naturally, experience many social moments where they are not in control; and (3) many of these people respond to moments when they are not in control by utilizing violence to restore the feeling of control in their own lives and over other people.