Why Are Men Still So Dangerous?

It's 2025

Evolutionarily, men are dangerous because they are animals who run on testosterone.

But also evolutionarily, dogs are wolves who want to kill and eat us, yet they now sleep in our beds and ride in bags on the subway and comfort hospitalized children. Dogs are not that dangerous anymore EXCEPT when the conditions in which they live are systemically toxic and chaotic AND when they are allowed to be. I don’t think we should forget this second part.

I’ve been pondering the question this week of why men are still so dangerous after witnessing the response to two images I posted in my Burned Haystack® social media group, one that I saw in a restaurant bathroom in real life and one that I shared from Instagram:

It’s impressive that some men are taking these measures, and I’m sincerely grateful—all women are grateful. But why do a few men have to be this creative to counteract the very real statistics that too many of their brethren are still generating?

There are people out there making this argument on men’s behalf: “Society is failing them”; they’re not being given “healthy models of masculinity”; they’re addicted to porn hub (and that’s somehow not their own fault or choice).

And note that I’m only citing the SANE people, the actual scholars who are making valid and defendable points. We don’t even need to get into the uninformed opinions of the Joe Rogans or the Andrew Tates.

I’ve read and listened to a lot of this valid scholarship, and while I don’t theoretically disagree with it, I’m not giving men a pass on this.

Women have also not been given healthy models of femininity. We were raised on rom-coms whose entire narrative structures were built upon rape culture, and we were encouraged to develop anorexia and to surgically alter our bodies in accordance with the preferences of the male gaze.

And yet in 2025 women are somehow doing really well.

Both individually and collectively, women simply decided to stop believing in the nonsense. [Note: every single one of those links goes to a different recent and viral article that has essentially the same thesis: “If this is how men are going to be, then women are done with them.”]

Instead of whittling our bodies down to nothing in the gym, we went to college and got degrees in sports medicine. Instead of accepting our bodies’ fate as receptacles and punching bags for male aggression, we are simply deciding to hold out for men who don’t aggress.

Many women, especially young women who are now encouraging each other to “decenter men,” are opting out entirely, and—and this is the important part—these women are happy.

And not only are they happy, but they are contributing to society in ways that are protective and generative and in service of lifting up the younger generations.

It’s not that there aren’t men doing this too; there definitely are. It’s just that, to return to the original premise, men are still too dangerous. They’re still too primitive and animalistic and brutal and selfish.

And I think there’s a lot of effort, especially within the halls of academia, which I myself inhabit, to untangle the social forces and failures of society that has either left or allowed too many of them to remain in this un-evolved state.

And maybe we should do all of that, we probably should, but I also think there are two equally relevant answers that no one wants to confront which respond to the “Why are men still so dangerous?” question, and I think those answers are:

1. Because they want to be.

2. Because they’re allowed to be.

I’m not sure what we do with these two uncomfortable truths, but amongst the very important psychological and sociological and political research in which we’re currently embroiled, I believe it’s important to hold individual men—the men we actually know—accountable for their own mindsets and decisions while we work on the larger systemic issues.

Those of us who teach and who are raising young men have seen bright spots and reasons to hope in both our students and our children (this is true for me personally), so I don’t want to end this article on a hopeless note, but I do want to end it on a realistic one.

Let’s let the researchers and qualified influencers work on these problems, but in the meantime let’s not continue to use them as excuses for straight-up criminal behavior.

In my own social media platforms—which are unapologetically feminist politically progressive—we still see far too many exhibitions of internalized misogyny, far too much excuse-making for men, far too many “Well, he’s feeling disenfranchised,” or “He’s living in a world which does not honor his masculine energy” (🤢🙄), or “Maybe he’s on the spectrum.”

We simply don’t do this for women; women have always been expected to “behave” in various ways and somehow we are still doing that while also recognizing the ways in which such mandates have held us back both individually and societally.

And here’s the amazing thing: We’ve stopped conforming to the nonsense and collectively improved our situation without hurting others. We’ve never assumed it was a zero sum game where only one gender could “win.”

I think this is all we’re now asking of men.