The research behind the movement.

In chapter 2 of the story we use the pyramid of violence. It shows that the most severe forms of violence do not stand apart from the everyday, but rest on a broad base of behaviour we have come to see as normal. From sexist jokes and stereotypes, via harassment and victim blaming, to sexual violence and coercive control, up to femicide.

The model is a communication tool, not a research finding. It summarises what emerges from research: that gender-based violence arises from, and contributes to, gender norms and gender power inequalities.

Important for precision: the original pyramid has four layers. The bottom layer we show, the Man Box with its norm about how a ‘real man’ is supposed to be, was added by Emancipator. We adopt that layer because research on the Man Box shows that men who adhere strongly to those norms more often commit violence and harassment, and because it is the bridge to what the norm costs the man himself.

What you must not read into the pyramid: that one joke causally leads to femicide. The evidence is correlational and holds across groups, not for individuals.

Sources: Act4Respect (Atria & Rutgers), guide to the pyramid of violence; Emancipator, addition of the Man Box layer; Equimundo (formerly Promundo), The Man Box research; Sweeney (2020) and Westmarland (2016) on gender norms and violence.

Many men experience dating as harsh and superficial. That is not imagined: on apps the first selection is largely determined by a photo and a few lines of text. That experience deserves recognition, and in public debate it is often waved away.

But what people say in advance that they want is a poor predictor of who they actually find attractive. In speed-dating research, stated preferences bore almost no relation to who participants wanted to see again after a real meeting, and the sex difference in the weight given to looks and earning capacity largely disappeared. In person, then, personality and how someone comes across count for more than that superficial selection suggests.

On top of that, men judge their own vulnerability more harshly than other people do. Across seven studies, people judged exactly the same act — admitting a mistake, asking for help, saying what you feel — differently depending on who did it: in someone else it is called courage, in yourself weakness. That does not mean it never happens. Some people react badly to a partner’s vulnerability, and that can turn out painfully. But it is not a gendered rule, and it demonstrably happens less often than men expect. That is why nowhere do we claim that women systematically punish vulnerability: that claim does not hold up, and it is precisely that claim that is the foundation of the manosphere narrative. What we do describe is the brake that sits in the expectation.

Sources: Eastwick & Finkel (2008), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Eastwick, Luchies, Finkel & Hunt (2014), Psychological Bulletin (meta-analysis of preferences as a predictor). For the stated preferences: Buss (1989, 37 cultures) and Walter et al. (2020, replication in 45 countries). For the self-judgement of vulnerability: Bruk, Scholl & Bless (2018), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the so-called beautiful mess effect.

Violence against women never has a single cause. Power inequality between men and women, alcohol, financial stress and unemployment, and growing up with violence at home are all four well-evidenced risk factors. For some of them the evidence is harder than it is for masculinity norms.

We choose the norm not because it is the only thing that counts, but because it is the factor the Netherlands structurally invests in least, and because it cuts across the others: it determines what a man does with stress, with drink, with loss of status.

Tackling the norm makes the other factors less dangerous. But the norm on its own is not enough: those other factors have to be tackled too, by others than us.

In chapter 2 you see a wheel that shrinks from many colours to a handful. Those numbers are an image, not a finding: science has no fixed number of emotions. Ekman arrives at six basic emotions, Plutchik at eight, more recent research at twenty-seven, and constructivists hold that no fixed set exists at all.

What has been measured is the direction: at home and at school, boys are given less room and fewer words for what they feel than girls. The differences are small in young children and grow with age, and that pattern points to learning rather than to disposition.

Meta-analysis: Chaplin & Aldao (2013), Gender differences in emotion expression in children, Psychological Bulletin 139(4), 735–765. 166 studies.

In chapter 4 we show that the norm is already passed on at home, without anyone intending it. Fathers were recorded at home with a small wearable device: with daughters, language around sadness and the body came up more often; with sons, language around achievement, and there was more rough-and-tumble play.

What you should not read into this: that fathers deliberately treat their sons differently, or that this points to a single cause. These are average differences across a group, measured in a limited number of families.

Mascaro et al. (2017), Child gender influences paternal behavior, language, and brain function, Behavioral Neuroscience 131(3), 262–273. This study looked only at fathers. That mothers also talk about feelings more with daughters than with sons comes from other research into parents' emotion language (including Aznar & Tenenbaum, 2015; Van der Pol et al., 2015).