, Executive summary

For decades the Netherlands has invested in the safety of women, yet the figures barely move. Every eight days a woman is killed in this country, and gender-based violence against women costs Dutch society an estimated 11 billion euros a year. The reason our efforts stall is that we have treated safety as a "women's project": we invest above all in protecting and building the resilience of the person it may happen to, and only a fraction of that in the source of the problem.

That source is an outdated norm of masculinity. This whitepaper shows that violence against women is not a collection of isolated incidents, but the predictable outcome of a system in which masculinity is a "precarious status": something a man has to prove anew every day and can lose at any moment. That constant need to prove himself (the "Man Box") is not only the breeding ground for transgressive behaviour, but also exacts a high toll on men themselves, in suicide, health damage and lost productivity. The man's cage is the woman's lack of safety.

The solution therefore does not lie in more symptom management, but in tackling the norm at its source. We offer men a more attractive alternative, the "complete man": not less masculine, but freer and more autonomous, with mastery over himself instead of control over others. This narrative is the entry point; beneath it lies a set of concrete, behaviourally grounded competencies (self-regulation, empathy, ownership and breaking the silence in the group) that align with the best-evidenced routes to actually reducing violence.

This calls for a joint approach. We propose a broad alliance of employers, governments, education and knowledge institutions willing to invest in prevention at the source. The question is not whether this transition is needed, but who takes responsibility for shaping it with us.

01Analysis

The blind spot

In 2026 the Netherlands finds itself in a paradox. Never before has the public debate about transgressive behaviour and gender equality been this loud. The terminology of diversity and inclusion has penetrated to the very capillaries of our boardrooms. And yet, when we open the bonnet of society, we see that the figures refuse to move. Women's safety has not meaningfully improved. In 2024 EIGE, FRA and Eurostat published the first large-scale repeat since 2014 of the European survey on violence against women, covering 114,023 women aged 18 to 74. A decade on, violence still affects one in three women in the EU.

The reason for this stagnation is that we have made safety a "women's project". We steer predominantly towards risk management by the person it may happen to. The overwhelming share of our effort goes into treating symptoms: resilience training for girls, street lighting, security cameras and emergency apps.

It is the policy equivalent of mopping endlessly while the tap of a faulty masculinity norm stays wide open behind us. But safety for her is not a women's project. It also depends on a man who no longer has to fight for his social status. For the man's cage is the woman's lack of safety. As long as the man remains held hostage by an outdated operating system of precarious status and constant need to prove himself, the world remains an unsafe place for women.

The link between the two is concrete: a man who must prove his status without pause lives with a nervous system permanently on alert, and that chronic tension makes him more prone to control, jealousy and explosive reactions, precisely at home, where most violence against women occurs. Remove the compulsion to perform, and you remove one of the most important breeding grounds beneath that behaviour.

Safety for her is not a women's project. It is the result of a man who no longer has to fight for his social status.

Analysing the system

Physical and psychological violence are not isolated incidents by individual perpetrators, but the predictable outcomes of a failing system. When we break down the figures, we see a pattern of chronic system exhaustion:

• Femicide: Averaged over the past ten years, a woman is killed in the Netherlands every eight days. In more than half of cases (52 per cent over 2020–2024) a partner or former partner is the suspected perpetrator. That amounts to one intimate partner killing every sixteen days, a number that has not shifted in fifteen years. The total number of women killed did fall over that period, but has been almost flat for the past ten years. In partner killings the term "domestic violence" is a euphemism: it is the fatal terminus of a script of coercive control and status preservation.
• The silent epidemic: While we teach men to simulate invulnerability, more than three men a day die by suicide. In 2025 the figure was 1,205 men against 553 women, more than twice as many. This restrictive norm (the "Man Box") is not only a danger to those around him, it is a deadly trap for the man himself.
• The generation gap: More than half of girls under 25 (54 per cent) have experienced physical sexual transgression, from unwanted touching to sex against their will. In 2017 that figure was 48 per cent. Among boys it rose from 18 to 23 per cent. The software fault in our culture of masculinity is not being repaired; it is simply passed on to the next generation.

These figures all point one way: the current model, built on performance, emotional repression and status anxiety, is unsustainable. It leads to the systematic destruction of human capital.

The Pyramid of Violence

Safety is often treated as a binary problem: either you use violence or you are a "good man". Behaviourally, this is incorrect. Violence is a pyramid, and the violent tip cannot exist without the broad, normalised base.

The base of the pyramid consists of everyday micro-aggressions: the sexist joke in the locker room that goes uncorrected, the objectification of women in group chats that gets laughed off, the man who stays silent when a boundary is crossed for fear of losing his own status within the group.

It is a numbers game, but at the level of society rather than the individual: these figures do not predict which man will use violence. What they do show is a gradient. In the Australian Man Box study of more than 3,500 men, the degree to which a man endorses the restrictive norm rises in step with his perpetration of intimate partner violence and sexual harassment; between the two highest groups alone the difference is a factor of three to five.

That is the logic of prevention at the source: you can target the small group at highest risk, or you can shift the distribution across the whole population. The second usually yields more in absolute numbers, precisely because the base is so much wider than the peak. The silence of the "good" majority is the oxygen for the violent minority. If we want to clear out the top, we have to make the base uninhabitable.

The same enforcement of the norm that pressures women also punishes anyone who deviates from the male script, gay, transgender and non-conforming men included. The violence is rooted in the binary thinking of the system itself; women are the largest, but not the only group this happens to.

The collective illusion

So why do men stay silent in the group? Here we hit the "glue" of the system: pluralistic ignorance. In the most recent large Man Box study, among more than 3,500 Australian men aged 18 to 45, roughly one in four (24 per cent) endorsed the restrictive rules of masculinity. Three in four did not. At the same time, 36 per cent did feel social pressure to live up to them. The vast majority long for a form of masculinity that leaves room for connection, tenderness and care. For that majority, then, connection, tenderness and care do not fall outside their idea of masculinity.

And yet the majority conform. They look at the group, see no one protesting, and wrongly conclude that they are the only ones with doubts. Research on men shows that men systematically underestimate other men's support for consent and intervention, and overestimate their sexism; and that it is precisely this misperception that determines whether a man intervenes or stays silent.

For fear of social exclusion (an ancient survival mechanism) they publicly take part in a play they themselves do not believe in. Collectively we keep a cage locked, while almost all of us want out.

The "Man Box Tax"

This debate is not only about morality; it is about the economic and physiological sustainability of our society. The outdated culture of masculinity levies a suffocating tax on all of us: the Man Box Tax.

• Healthcare costs: Men who suppress their humanity live in a chronic state of status anxiety. This raises cortisol and lowers heart-rate variability (HRV). Chronic stress of this kind is associated over time with a raised risk of cardiovascular disease and addiction. The man "eats his stress" until the system gives way, with sky-high medical costs as a result.
• Lost productivity: Companies lose billions to burnout and quiet quitting. The "ideal worker norm" forces men into performative invulnerability: grinding 60 hours a week to prove they have no need for care. The result is an exhausted workforce and a chronic lack of psychological safety, which directly penalises innovation.
• Justice costs: A considerable share of police and judicial effort goes to containing escalations that stem partly from a lack of emotional regulation. We pay billions for detention and enforcement, partly because we invest too little at the source.

The purpose of this deconstruction

The current model is bankrupt. We can no longer make do with funding compensation schemes for the people it happens to. We must turn off the tap.

The purpose of this story is not to condemn men, but to free them from a full-time job they never consciously chose: endlessly managing a fragile reputation. The precarious man has become an economic and social risk. Only when we enable the man to be sovereign and autonomous, without performance pressure on his identity, does room emerge for a world that is safe for everyone.

02The asymmetric revolution

We live in a society in which the role of women has been successfully reinvented, while the social norm for men has been left behind in the past.

The lack of safety in our society and the invisible crisis among men are not separate phenomena. They are the friction points of a shift we call the asymmetric revolution. While, in a hundred and fifty years, women underwent a radical, integral transformation, the norm for men stagnated. We are trying to navigate the complex reality of 2026 with the social software of 1850. That does not cause incidents; it causes system failure.

The full autonomy of women

The woman of 2026 is the result of an extraordinarily successful social transformation. At a historically breakneck pace, women have fundamentally rewritten their social blueprint. This did not happen organically; it was the result of four waves of transformation that evolved women from legal object to a state of full autonomy.

In the first wave women claimed their political existence: suffrage made them citizens rather than property for the first time. The second wave brought the fundamental break with the obligatory caregiving role: through the combination of the contraceptive pill and access to the labour market, women gained socio-economic sovereignty. They were no longer biologically or financially at the mercy of men.

The third wave went deeper and deconstructed female identity itself; the realisation that "femininity" is not a static concept but a social construct that can be arranged at one's own discretion. Today, in the fourth wave, we see the digital confrontation with systemic injustice (#metoo), in which women collectively refuse to keep bearing the "silent costs" of transgressive behaviour.

This evolution was not merely a series of victories, it was a fundamental reprogramming. Women learned that their social value is no longer dependent on a static role. They have become the architects of their own identity: they can be breadwinner, carer, leader, or all at once. Their script has been updated to the 21st century: adaptive, autonomous and free.

The male standstill: Windows 95 in an AI era

Against this female leap forward stands a male standstill that has by now become dysfunctional. While society changed beyond recognition, the man remained stuck in the Man Box: an outdated script of historical norms that have entirely lost their social return in today's world:

1. Physical dominance: In a knowledge economy of algorithms and networks, muscle is a personal choice, no longer a functional source of status.
2. Emotional repression: The adage "big boys don't cry" is not a sign of strength, but a physiological energy leak that leads to the suicide peaks we saw in the analysis.
3. The sole provider: In an age where women pay their own bills, the man loses his primary instrument of power and reason for being.

An honest analysis acknowledges that the old system not only imposed costs on the man but also gave him structural advantages: on average a larger share of income and a smaller share of care. A genuine transition therefore means not only that the man gains calm and autonomy, but also that care, time and power are distributed more fairly. This is not a loss of masculinity, but the precondition for a system that is more stable and safer for everyone (including him).

The man has become an anachronism. He was raised for an economic reality that no longer exists, equipped with armour that creates unnecessary friction in the present day. The armour of the old norm is no longer his protection; it has become a constraint. Moreover, the "Man Box" does not look the same everywhere. The norm differs per environment (the building site, the student fraternity, the financial district, the sports canteen, the street) and the road to the complete man must therefore be translated per context, in the language and codes that apply there.

The status vacuum

Here lies the core of the pain: the man no longer feels needed. In the old system, "being a man" was largely synonymous with "being useful". The man was the physical protector and the primary breadwinner. Now that the welfare state has taken over physical protection and women are financially independent, the man falls into a status vacuum. Without a constructive new model of "being needed", some men logically fall back on the only historical source of status they still recognise: the need to prove themselves, and dominance.

This process does not begin only on the labour market, but already in the complex social dynamics of adolescence. In those years girls score, on average, slightly higher on emotion recognition and social competence than boys. That difference is small, is not present at birth and in fact grows with age, which suggests it is largely learned. But at a moment when young people measure their self-worth heavily against the group, that difference is felt: many boys feel socially disadvantaged or unseen, without anyone naming it.

When a boy, on what weighs most heavily for him, belonging and mattering, gets the feeling that he is falling short, a void emerges. And precisely in the absence of a constructive, positive script in which he is allowed to be valuable at that age, another offer lies ready: the manosphere.

Manosphere: the offer that is always there

This gap in the market is the logical breeding ground for figures like Andrew Tate. The manosphere is not the source of the crisis; it is a flawless market response to a deeply felt lack of direction. They offer what society currently fails to provide: brotherhood, a clear identity and a concrete step-by-step plan for status, for boys who feel irrelevant. While society mostly tells the man what he may no longer be, what the manosphere offers is the most visible answer to the question of what he can be.

The success of this model rests on addressing a number of social realities that are often ignored or denied in mainstream debate:

• The utility value of the man: The manosphere acknowledges the unwritten rule that a man's current social value is often not intrinsic but tied to his usefulness (competence, wealth, protection). Where society speaks of "unconditional self-worth", the manosphere confirms the lived reality of many men: you are what you can contribute.
• The gap between word and deed: They name the friction between what society says it rewards in relationships (vulnerability and gentleness) and what many men experience in practice (for example on the digital dating market) as success factors (status, physical presence and dominance). By taking this perceived gap seriously instead of waving it away, the manosphere gains credibility; even though, on closer inspection, that gap turns out to be partly a perception that is much less harsh in real encounters than men think.
• Radical ownership: In an age of system critique and victimhood, the manosphere offers an extreme focus on the internal locus of control. The message that you are responsible for your own physical and financial state gives a powerful sense of agency back to a generation that feels rudderless.
• Channelling biology: Instead of pathologising typically male impulses such as competitiveness and physical energy, the manosphere offers an arena in which these forces are valued and turned into discipline (for example through fitness and martial arts).

They sell a regressive script: a return to historical, hierarchical masculinity, to the era of the strong male leaders our history books are full of, wrapped in a modern coat of crypto, fitness and independence. It is an effective but addictive painkiller. For a boy who feels invisible, a dysfunctional script that tells him how to become "attractive" and "valuable" again is still more appealing than no script at all.

The strategic lesson

We cannot effectively compete with the manosphere merely by criticising or rejecting it. Moralising only activates defensive behaviour and increases the distance. We can only transcend this model with a better and more constructive story. A story that is simply more attractive and yields more for the man in the form of authentic status, attractiveness, healthy relationships and real calm.

This requires a different approach: we open the door with compassion. We treat masculinity not as a moral defect ("men are the problem"), but as the logical product of an outdated culture in which we all grew up. We are all (men and women) part of the same social system. We use a story that retains the effective elements of the manosphere (such as discipline, competence and radical ownership), but couples them to a superior end goal. Not regressive dominance born of insecurity, but real autonomy and calm.

This aligns with the work of Jackson Katz, who has argued for decades that violence against women is not a "women's issue" but a men's problem; and that every man is a bystander with a choice. Not the perpetrators, but the silent majority that normalises the behaviour, keeps the system in place. The complete man is therefore not a passive onlooker: he is the man who dares to recalibrate the norm in his own group.

The physical and social safety of women is inextricably linked to the liberation of men. Only when he is given the space and the tools to navigate without constant status stress do we create a healthy, safe and functional basis for everyone. Updating our culture is a joint mission of liberation.

03The precarious architecture of manhood

To break the social stagnation of 2026, we must stop steering on the man's surface behaviour and begin dissecting his source code. For too long we have looked at the symptoms (the outbursts of anger, the silence, the dominance) and drawn the incorrect conclusion that the man is "bad". But behaviourally, we are looking at a "software defect" in the foundation of male identity. This is not a moral failing on the part of the man. It is a design fault in the system.

Masculinity as an exam

Masculinity is configured fundamentally differently from many other identities: it is rarely experienced as a stable starting point, but as a status that must be continually confirmed. In behavioural science this is called precarious manhood.

Masculinity is not a possession you acquire once and then keep safely in a vault. It is an exam the man must pass again every day. It is not a fixed status; it is a social subscription that the environment can cancel immediately, any day, at the first sign of deviant behaviour.

Because this status is "hard won" but "easily lost", the man lives in a chronic state of status stress. He does not own his identity; he leases it from the group. The rent? Performative behaviour. Taking risks. Dominance. The rigorous banishment of everything labelled "weak" or "feminine". The man is not free; he is a tenant of his own social acceptance.

Emotional incarceration

This precarious script forces the man into a phenomenon author Jason Wilson describes as emotional incarceration.

Picture the full human emotional spectrum as a box of 64 crayons. A man feels all 64 internally. He experiences deep fear, tenderness, insecurity, grief and euphoria. But the rules of the "Man Box" tell him he may use only 8 to express himself to the outside world. He is given a toolkit of exclusively primary, hard colours: anger, dominance, stoicism and lust. The other 56 crayons; the colours essential for connection and self-regulation (and that make him fully human), he must push deep into the box.

It costs the male brain an enormous amount of physiological and cognitive energy to constantly suppress these signals. This internal pressure is the source of the Man Box Tax mentioned earlier. It is not that men do not feel; it is that they were never taught and allowed to speak in the language of what they feel. They have been made emotionally illiterate by a system that only understands shouting.

The biological reaction

Why is it so hard for a man to step out of this cage? A useful explanatory model is that the brain partly processes status loss within the group as a form of physical threat.

When male status is challenged, by criticism, by a partner's success or by the loss of a job, the brain shows a threat response. In imaging research on social evaluation, the amygdala among other regions becomes more active, alongside a measurable rise in heart rate and cortisol. The body therefore handles the threat of social exclusion partly with the same apparatus it uses for physical danger. That is not surprising: in evolutionary history, exclusion from the group meant a reduced chance of survival.

Dominance, in this light, is not an expression of strength or leadership, but a reactive survival mechanism. Aggression or escalation is the attempt to neutralise the internal panic of looming status loss. The man who escalates in this way does so out of fear of losing his reason to exist. When this internal system is placed under constant high tension, the chance of it erupting increases.

04From emotional incarceration to systemic violence

When a man is trapped in an outdated system, violence is not an incidental short circuit. Abusive behaviour, in this context, follows two routes. On the first, the tension wins out over the regulation: a man who cannot regulate his internal signals turns to controlling external variables. On the second, there is no loss of control at all. Coercive control is deliberate and in fact requires restraint: the man who isolates his partner has no trouble holding himself back in front of his boss. Both routes grow out of the same norm, but they call for different answers, and it is the second that the escalation ladder later in this chapter describes.

External control as a regulation mechanism

As analysed earlier, the male brain registers status loss as an acute survival risk. In a society where women have rapidly become more autonomous, the man in the Man Box experiences this not as joint progress, but as a direct threat to his social relevance and reason for being.

Here the defect of the limited 8-crayon toolkit manifests. Because the man never learned to process emotions of fear, insecurity or sadness, these emotions accumulate. The internal pressure rises to a critical point. When a man lacks the capacities to regulate his own internal storms, he is left with only one instrument to restore calm in his system: reducing the autonomy of the other. Dominance, at this stage, is not a sign of leadership, but an inefficient and destructive attempt at self-regulation via the outside world.

The reduction of autonomy

Violence almost never begins with a physical blow. It begins much more subtly, with the step-by-step curtailing of the partner's freedom. In behavioural science this is known as coercive control.

The man tries to prop up his own precarious identity by removing the partner's room to move. This process is often cloaked in the language of "protection" or "passion", but the outcome is structural isolation. He acts as the administrator of a restrictive system he built out of sheer powerlessness. By cutting off her contact with friends, family and financial means, he creates a monopoly on her reality. The goal is the total dismantling of her autonomy, so that his own fragile status no longer experiences fluctuations through her behaviour.

The eight stages of escalation

Femicide rarely comes out of nowhere. Case-file research by criminologist Jane Monckton-Smith shows that in virtually all the cases examined, a recognisable trajectory can be identified in hindsight. It is not a "moment of madness", but an escalation ladder of eight rungs.

Stage	Feature	The underlying mechanism
1. History	Obsessive behaviour	An established pattern of controlling behaviour in earlier relationships.
2. Love bombing	Intense early bonding	The relationship accelerates extremely; the perpetrator fully claims the partner to dampen his own status vacuum.
3. The cage	Coercive control	Systemic isolation; he becomes the owner of her time and social circle.
4. The trigger	Loss of control	A looming break-up, a new job or another external claim on her autonomy activates his survival threat.
5. Escalation	Raising the stakes	Stalking, suicide threats, violence; extreme measures to maintain control.
6. The turn	Revenge thinking	The perpetrator registers that restoring the dominant status has irreversibly failed.
7. Planning	The preparation	Operationally preparing the ultimate act of control; selecting a fatal moment.
8. The discharge	Femicide	The (attempted) murder of the partner, often immediately followed by suicide to complete the control.

This model shows that there are footholds for intervening earlier. Every rung on this ladder is a moment where the current social system fails the man by normalising his behaviour, and an opportunity for an intervention that addresses the source instead of merely recording the symptoms.

In the Netherlands, the Femicide Monitor led by Professor Marieke Liem has since 2025 been systematically mapping ten years of killings of women, precisely with the question of which signals precede them. Conversations with bereaved families surface a finding that goes to the heart of this argument: many of these women had never previously come to the attention of the police or the courts. Anyone who organises the response only at the back end therefore fails to reach them by definition.

Dominance as false safety

The paradox of this violence is that the man destroys the person his own system depends on, in an attempt to keep upright the outdated system in which he himself is trapped. Her obedience acts as a painkiller for his chronic status stress. As long as the external environment is tightly managed, he need not face his own lack of self-regulation.

This is an extremely inefficient strategy: dominance offers only a temporary illusion of safety. In reality it is the ultimate proof of emotional powerlessness. A man who is truly autonomous has no need to curtail another's freedom.

Safety through sovereignty

The way out of this spiral of violence is not achieved by investing solely in repression at the back end. The lasting solution lies in fundamentally updating male coping mechanisms. The transition to emotional sovereignty is therefore not a moral favour to women, but a necessary mission of liberation for both sexes.

When the need for control falls away, room emerges for the first time for genuine connection. For the woman this means the freedom to move without the constant shadow of his fear; she no longer has to be the involuntary risk manager of his insecurity. For the man it means liberation from the paranoid task of holding another's autonomy hostage; a task that holds himself captive first, in a state of constant insecurity and suspicion. A man who is truly master of his own inner storms no longer needs to colour another's world in black and white in order to feel safe.

05The social glue

If the "Man Box" is so inefficient and destructive for both the man and his environment, if it leads to a lack of social safety, healthcare costs and lost productivity, why don't we switch en masse to a new model that does not leak billions of euros and destroy lives on every side?

The answer lies in the system architecture: the cage is not locked, but held shut from the outside. By all of us. We find ourselves in a collective stalemate in which behavioural mechanisms, economic incentives and unconscious social rewards protect the outdated source code against any form of innovation.

Only in a crowd

The strongest lock on the cage is a phenomenon known in social psychology as pluralistic ignorance. It is the "lie of the majority".

Picture a room full of men. We already saw that the vast majority do not privately endorse the restrictive rules. They long for calm. They want to be with their children more often without feeling guilty. They want to talk about their fears without losing their status. But they don't.

Why not? Because they look at the other men in the room, see the impassive faces, and conclude that they are the only ones with these "weak" desires. Every man performs an act for an audience that is also performing. We sustain a norm almost no one believes in any more, out of sheer fear of social exclusion. The fear of being "unmasked" as less masculine is greater than the will to be free. We have become each other's prisoners and each other's guards.

The economic price of caring

Society calls for the "New Man", but the economic system still rewards the "Old Man". We talk about equality at the talk-show tables, but we pay for presence and dominance in the workplace.

Look at the data on the so-called fatherhood penalty. While companies flaunt their diversity figures, reality shows a different picture: men who interrupt their career for family reasons earn on average 26.4% less over the rest of their working life. For women the figure is 23.2%. The flexibility stigma therefore hits both, and that is exactly the point: the system prices visible care, regardless of who takes it on.

In the eyes of the current system, the "ideal worker" is still the man without visible caring duties; the man who is available 24/7 and minimises his emotions. As long as employers price caring or vulnerability in men as a liability, conforming to the Man Box remains the only rational, economic choice. Authenticity, in today's market, is a luxury many fathers simply cannot afford.

Cognitive dissonance on the dating market

There is a deep friction between what people say they find attractive and which signals men think are rewarded in practice. Nowhere is that friction as visible as on the dating market.

Let's be honest: many men experience that market as harsh and superficial, and that is not imagined. Before there is even a conversation (on apps, at a first impression) filters such as height, status and appearance weigh heavily, and for a large group of men they form a real barrier they can do nothing about. At the same time, men experience that insecurity or seeking validation penalises them. That experience is valid and deserves acknowledgement.

But the picture tilts once people genuinely meet. Eastwick and Finkel (2008) showed that the preferences people state in advance (and that seem so decisive on apps) predict much more poorly who they actually fall for once they truly get to know someone; the sex differences reported in advance then largely disappear. In other words: the man optimises for a pre-encounter signal that yields far less in a real connection than he assumes.

That is where the cognitive dissonance lies. Men get the message to be vulnerable, but believe (not without grounds) that the superficial market penalises that. What matters, though, is the distinction between vulnerability and insecurity: it is not the man who calmly shares what moves him from a stable base who repels, but the man who takes his validation from the other. The first is precisely the strength of the complete man; the second is the need-to-prove of the Man Box. As long as a man does not know that distinction, every form of vulnerability feels like a risk; and he stays stuck in a performative role that gives him neither deep connection.

The invisible guards

The man's cage is not guarded by men alone. We are all (employers, partners and educators) the system administrators of this norm.

• The employer who looks quizzical when a man says "no" to overtime because of a doctor's appointment for his child.
• The partner who withdraws when he shows doubt.
• The parent who tells a crying boy to pull himself together faster than a crying girl. That he must be "strong" or "big".

That middle point needs a qualification. It happens, but far less often than men fear. Bruk, Scholl and Bless (2018) showed that people judge their own vulnerability far more harshly than someone else’s: watch a friend ask for help and you call it courage; do it yourself and you assume you look weak. What holds him back is usually not her response, but his own prediction of it.

We reinforce the old script every day in small, almost invisible interactions. We demand that the man change, but we recoil when he actually does. The transition to a safer world requires not only a brave man, but an environment that welcomes this courage instead of punishing it.

This is not a reproach to any of these groups. We have all (men and women) grown up in the same culture and unconsciously pass on the same signals. Awareness of this is not a question of blame, but the first step in a joint liberation: the environment too may learn to recognise and reward the new, more complete man.

The power of the majority

The social glue that holds the cage shut can also become the fuel for a new society. Once we break the pluralistic ignorance and can show that three in four men do not endorse the norm, the legitimacy of the Man Box falls away.

For the man this means the discovery that he is not alone. The cage is a collective illusion; the moment we stop fooling each other, the prison dissolves. For the employer this yields the business case that an autonomously functioning man leads to less absenteeism, higher retention and better collaboration in a complex knowledge economy. For the partner this means the gain of safety and a real, deep connection instead of a performative façade.

The system upgrade

The analysis of the male source code exposes a fundamental inefficiency, but the conclusion is hopeful. It gives us the language to remove the unnecessary friction from the system. For the woman this insight means a radical shift from blame to system understanding. She no longer has to search for what she did "wrong"; she is not the instigator of his behaviour, but the witness of a man trapped in his own neurological alarm phase.

For the man, here lies the road to real autonomy: the transition from renting identity to owning identity. Whoever "rents" his masculinity must prove to the environment again every day that he is "man enough". It is an exhausting, daily audition for a role he never consciously signed up for.

The solution to this social stagnation is the transition from masculinity as a play to "complete masculinity". The end goal is a world in which a man no longer has to overcompensate to prove his relevance. We do not need to "repair" the man; we simply need to update his system, so that he is freed from the burden that currently, and unnecessarily, undermines his own health (and the safety of those around him).

06The upgrade – The complete man

The cage has been dissected. We now know why the system fails and why the man clings to a script that exhausts him. But you don't dismantle the cage by criticising him, you dismantle it by offering the man an alternative that is stronger, more attractive and more effective than traditional masculinity. We introduce that upgrade: the complete man.

This is not a plea for "less" masculinity or for "feminising" the man. It is a blueprint for more masculinity. Where classical psychology lingered for decades in the deficit model (analysing what is "wrong" with men), we choose, in line with the broader shift towards a strengths-based approach, the opposite premise: male strength does not need to be erased, but completed. We do not leave the cage by making ourselves smaller, but by growing out of it.

The difference between the old norm and the complete man does not lie in how much of a man you are. It lies in one question. The Man Box asks: "Do the others still accept me?" A question you must answer anew every day, and which the group (other men, your partner, your employer) can answer with "no" at any moment. Your status is borrowed; you live in a permanent audition. The complete man asks a different question: "Am I free?" Not free from strength; free from the need to prove yourself. This is not a weaker form of masculinity; it is a stronger one. Because the man who no longer needs anyone's approval can no longer be pushed back into the cage by anyone.

The strongest man in the room is not the one everyone fears; it is the one who needs no one's validation.

This is not a contest you win from someone else. It is a freedom you give back to yourself.

From dominance to sovereignty

In the old source code, strength was synonymous with dominating others. In the new source code, strength is the ability to lead yourself. A man who cannot regulate his own emotions is not strong; he is a slave to his impulses. The complete man breaks with the binary lie that a man must be either an aggressive dominant or a passive follower. He no longer rents his status from the locker room or the open-plan office; he owns it himself. The core of this upgrade is emotional sovereignty: mastery over your own inner world instead of control over the outer world.

Mastery over the entire human spectrum

The complete man has the emotional toolbox of 64 colours instead of 8. This lets him meet any moment: he can fight when he must and be gentle when needed, without losing any of his strength. He is not fixed in one role; precisely in that flexibility lies his strength. A man who can only fight is incomplete. A man who can only nurture is equally incomplete. The upgrade is the integration of both poles.

That mastery is no vague ideal, but something you train across five concrete domains:

1. Mastery over your own nervous system. The man who stays calm when others explode. Not a "soft skill"; it is what top athletes and elite units train to stay sharp under extreme pressure. Whoever masters his own internal storm need not control the world around him.
2. Being able to read people. The strategic advantage of genuinely understanding what is going on in another instead of being surprised by it: the negotiator who senses when to push and when to stay silent; the father who sees that behind his son's anger there is actually fear. Empathy is not the opposite of strength; it is a form of intelligence.
3. Genuine connection. Not the man who is admired, but the man who is trusted. The capacity for real intimacy that no conquest or acted dominance ever yields (the partner, friend or father around whom the people near him can lower their masks). He is seen for who he is, not for the role he plays.
4. Ownership. The strength to carry your own share and repair your mistakes. Only someone secure in himself can say "sorry"; evasion is the sign of a fragile man.
5. Daring to break the silence. The signature of the complete man: the man who is first to say something when a boundary is crossed; not the man who laughs along out of fear of being excluded himself. He sets the group's norm; he does not just go along.

Here is what that last point looks like in practice. Take the locker room. A remark is made about a woman; four of the five men laugh along uncomfortably; not because they find it funny, but because they think the rest do. That is the Man Box at its strongest: a norm almost no one personally supports, but which everyone sustains out of fear of the group. The complete man is the one with enough status and calm to be the first to say: "Come on, that's not okay." At that moment the other four discover they were not the only ones, and the norm tips over. Not the perpetrators, but the silence of the "good" majority keeps the system standing. Precisely there lies the greatest leverage: mobilising that majority is, behaviourally, one of the best-evidenced routes to actually reducing violence.

Emotional intelligence as a high-performance tool

For the sceptic who thinks this is "soft": the data speaks a different language. Emotional intelligence adds something measurable on top of intelligence and personality as a predictor of success. It is not a soft skill; it is a high-performance tool. And the engine beneath the first domain of mastery.

• The labour market: The meta-analysis by O’Boyle et al. (2011) shows that emotional intelligence is a robust predictor of job performance, even after controlling for IQ and personality; with the strongest predictive value in roles with high emotional demands. Why? Because a complete man causes fewer conflicts, collaborates better and leads more effectively under pressure.
• Elite performance: A randomised controlled trial in an Australian elite military setting shows that men who received EQ training performed significantly better under extreme stress than the control group; with lower physiological stress values and, for example, a shooting accuracy of 94% versus 52%. They could calm their nervous system faster, keeping their cognitive functions sharp while others froze in "fight mode".

The complete man is simply a more effective human being. He leaks no energy to status anxiety, so all his capacity can go to performance, creativity and connection.

The end of the audition

The greatest gain of the upgrade is for the man himself. It is a mission of liberation from loneliness and the threat of an early death.

• Radical calm: The end of constant status stress. The complete man no longer has to prove that he is "man enough". That question has become irrelevant because he has built his own foundation.
• More years of life: By shedding the armour of the Man Box, the chronic stress level drops. This means a direct reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease and addiction.
• Deeper connection: The complete man experiences real intimacy. He no longer has to play a role with his partner or children and can open himself up. He is seen for who he is, not for what he achieves.

When the man makes the upgrade to complete masculinity, the flywheel of society changes. For the woman this means a partner who is a safe haven instead of a safety risk. For society this means the definitive end of the Man Box Tax.

The complete man is the beginning of true humanity.

07Investing at the source

The story of the complete man is powerful; but a story changes who a man wants to be, not automatically what he does. A more attractive story about masculinity is the necessary narrative, but it is not the solution on its own. Research on behavioural change is clear about this: a new ideal changes who a man wants to be, but lasting different behaviour only emerges through repeated, guided practice, through correcting what men think their environment expects of them, and through changing the structures and incentives around them. The story of the complete man is therefore the door; the real change lies in the room behind it. Precisely for this reason this is not a plea for a single campaign, but for a coherent approach; an alliance and a plan of action that translate the story into concrete training, environment and policy. These stand ready.

We stand at a social and economic tipping point. The choice before us goes further than a marginal adjustment of existing policy: we must decide whether we keep funding the symptoms of insecurity and dropout, or whether we jointly carry out the fundamental system upgrade that eliminates these problems at the source.

The conclusion of our analysis is as critical as it is liberating. The current approach to social safety is based on an understandable but unsustainable strategy: the focus on risk management by the person it may happen to. With the best intentions, over recent decades we have invested billions in cameras, lighting, emergency apps and resilience training. These are necessary operational band-aids; they function as the emergency room of our society, and it is more likely to be underfunded than overfunded.

The result is a society that has become more alert, but not safer. While we perfected the "intensive care" for victims, we left the tap of the faulty culture of masculinity wide open. It is time for a collective shift. We move the focus to the place where real, lasting change can be achieved: from now on we invest massively in the source code of the man.

The strategic shift

Real safety is not a coincidence or the result of endless surveillance. It becomes far more likely when a man no longer has to fight for his standing, and that is precisely the side where we underinvest. This transition is not an isolated project; it is a collective design task.

The societal costs of gender-based violence in the EU-27 are estimated at 366.3 billion euros a year, of which 290.3 billion euros concerns violence against women. Translated to the Netherlands, that comes to 14.2 billion euros for violence against women and men together, and 11.2 billion euros for the share concerning women. By way of comparison: the entire budget of the national police force stands at 8.5 billion euros in 2026. Yet the vast majority of public budgets still go to the aftermath rather than to prevention at the source. We propose a radical reallocation of priorities. We no longer invest only in how women or organisations can avoid violence or dropout, but in the system with which we stop producing it. We invest in enabling the Complete Man.

The economic case for the Netherlands

For the sceptic not persuaded by safety or humanity, we present the business case. Investing in the transformation of the man is one of the most profitable and impactful investments we can make as a society:

• Health dividend: A structural decline in health costs through less cardiovascular disease, addiction care and suicide. Every eight days a woman is killed and every day more than three men die by suicide. The gain in lives saved is immeasurable; the reduction in societal crisis costs is quantifiably enormous.
• Productivity gain: An emotionally sovereign man works more sustainably and performs more effectively. He deploys his full cognitive capacity for innovation and collaboration, not for reputation management. This results in higher psychological safety, less absenteeism through status stress and burnout.
• Safety dividend: Once the base of society is trained in self-regulation, the broad breeding ground of the Pyramid of Violence dries up. That means structural relief of the pressure on police, courts and shelters. Every percentage point of reduction translates, given the scale of the current costs, into tens of millions of euros a year.

This proposal does not start from zero. Prevention work has been going on in the Netherlands for years, among others by knowledge institutes and organisations focusing specifically on boys and men; what is missing is not the knowledge or the provision, but the scale and the continuity to make that work permanently present in the daily world of every boy.

A joint mission of liberation

Safety for her is not a women's project. It also requires a man who has found the freedom to no longer have to fight for his status. A man who no longer has to prove himself also does not have to control the other in order to feel safe. The norm that exhausts him is the same norm that makes her less safe: address one and you affect the other. This mission of liberation is a joint task because we have all (men and women) been raised in the same culture and unconsciously sustain the system together. We are all both the product and the administrator of the norms that now constrain us. The transition to a safe and healthy culture is a collective struggle of all of us against a system that no longer works for anyone.

The frictions in the current system have been exposed and the software upgrade stands ready. But such cultural change cannot be achieved with a one-off campaign or from a single isolated organisation. It requires a coalition of employers, policymakers, education and the media that refuse to be the invisible guards of an outdated system any longer.

To turn this theory into actual, measurable social change, I propose a broadly supported alliance. We already have a plan of action ready for this. This is the operational infrastructure for companies, municipalities and governments that recognise the "Man Box Tax" as an unacceptable burden on their human capital and social impact. No more loose initiatives, but one data-driven, joint engine for cultural change.

The cage is open. The plan is ready. The Netherlands has a unique opportunity to turn off the tap of insecurity at the source and to set the standard internationally. The question is not whether we will begin this transition, but which leaders take responsibility for building this new reality with us.

About the author

Ilia ten Böhmer, founder of The Nami Foundation, is the author of the EchtMannelijk narrative and developed the culture-change strategy on which this whitepaper rests. He has a background as a film director and screenwriter and founded the video production company Waves in 2017; his film Inundation had its world premiere at the Giffoni Film Festival in 2025. He founded Nami out of the conviction that every change in history began with a story. Design that story exactly right, with the right analysis, strategy and craft, and with the support of enough people, and you turn hope into real change.

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