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Jonathan Martin – the player for the Miami Dolphins who left football, at least temporarily, as a result of relentless locker room bullying – has prompted some voluminous soul-searching. (Whether it leads to meaningful action remains to be seen.) I want to suggest that there have been two profoundly wrong assumptions made in most coverage of this case, and end with a conclusion about how we, and he, should think of Jonathan's Martin's own behavior.

Trigger alert: discussions of misogyny, abuse,  bullying, etc. below.

First mistake: this is not primarily an issue about Richie Incognito, the Miami Dolphins, or the culture of the NFL.  Sure, Incognito sounds like a world-class asshole, the Dolphins have institutionalized abusive male culture to record setting extremes, and toxic masculinity is probably more deeply rooted in the NFL than in any other institution of society. Let's stipulate all that. But if we look at the general categories of what went on – demeaning someone for not being strong enough; suggesting that lack of strength or phsyical prowess implies being either gay or feminine which are, of course, bad; using misogynist insults of women close to a man to challenge him; etc. – they perfectly well characterize the boy-culture of a typical middle school or high school in America. These are not distinctively NFL categories of socialization; they are standard operating procedure for teaching boys to be men in our society.

I certainly experienced all these categories of abuse on numerous occasions growing up. If I didn't take part in misogynist discourse about girls, I was a "pussy" or a "fag". If I did not succeed in athletics, or displayed my masculinity in the wrong way, I was physically assaulted. At times, my mom was the target of abuse as a test to see if I was "man enough" to stand up for her.  (At 5'11", 135 lbs, awkward and not very fit, I most certainly was not.)  Those who are perceived as being biological male are systematically, forcefully, consistently, and often violently trained to be sexist assholes. Yes, it is not entirely consistent; there are alternative schools that manage to institute different practices. Yes, there are ways to resist; and some do so heroically. Yes, there is support; anti-bullying campaigns and the like. But all this is sporadic and unevenly distributed. (There is a reason why Jonathan Martin thought his  "soft white private schools" let him down.) And the sporadic and unevenly distributed exceptions do not change the dominant practices of enculturation. If we ever hope to seriously address the aspects of male culture that many of us find abhorrent, we need to get beyond the simplistic "men are assholes" or "it's testosterone" or "just punish the bad ones." We need to take a serious look at how patterns of social enforcement work across the vast majority of our society, take a seriously look at our own complicity in those patterns (whatever our own gender identification), and figure out ways to change it from the ground up.

The second, and to my mind deeply sad, mistake in the discourse around this case is the assessment of how Martin reacted to his sytematic bullying. Both he and commentators have accepted that the problem in this case was that he was too sensititve and did not fight back effectively. In a fairly typical analysis in today's NYT by William C Rhoden we read the following:

"By the time I finished the report, what also became clear is that Martin could use a season away from football to sort through a range of complex emotional issues that have been aggravated, not eased, by the culture of a brutal sport. The question that repeatedly came to my mind as I read the Wells report is, Why didn’t Martin retaliate? Martin wondered why as well. As Wells wrote, “Martin came to view his failure to stand up to his teammates as a personal shortcoming.”

Indeed, his ambivalence is at the root of mental health issues that have not been properly dealt with. According to the report, Martin contemplated suicide at least twice in 2013. In each case, he was pushed to the brink by his lack of response to nonstop verbal attacks on his mother and his sister.

At one point, Martin blamed “mostly the soft schools” he attended in middle and high school. Martin said the private school experience reinforced his self-image as a pushover. In an email to his mother, he said, “I suppose it’s white private school conditioning, turning the other cheek.” Martin’s father, who attended Harvard, acknowledged in a text message that he had “punked out many times” when confronted by whites who used the “N” word."

So Martin accepted that he was a "pushover". Martin's father thought he "punked out". The writer of this article not only finds the salient question to be "why didn't he stand up for himself?" but thinks that "he was pushed to the brink [of suicide] by his lack of response to nonstop verbal attacks on his mother and his sister." In case there is any doubt about how Mr. Rhoden stands on the right way to deal with bullies, we get this adulatory vignette from the world of male socialization: "We all have our stories about learning to cope with bullies. My mother responded to my complaints about a bully next door by giving me an impromptu boxing lesson in our kitchen. (Her brothers were boxers.) Her advice to me was to punch Billy Boy in his face the next time he got in mine." Note the lesson on how to be a good mother: teach your boys to be tougher than the bully.

Well, not to belabor the obvious, but what exactly would have been gained by punching Billy Boy or Richie Incognito in the face? If successful, the bully will stop terrorizing you. He will be humiliated in the process, and so in all likelihood be even more bullying to someone else, someone less able to punch him in the face.  (And let's be honest, some of us are just not going to be able to successfully punch some of you in the face. Us 135 lb band nerds are not going to punch young Richie after young Jonathan humiliates him.) Nor is the harm of this strategy limited to the fact that it merely moves the violence over to the next victim. Rather, it reinforces precisely the toxic masculine ideals that led to, and are a function of, the bulllying in the first place.  You confront bullying designed to construct a particular sort of violent masculinity by proving that you are, in fact, a good violent man, and by humiliating your bully, so that he has to find a new way to prove this of himself. 

Lest anyone think to object, I am not here arguing that violent self-defense is always wrong. Sometimes, the threat of immediate harm is so great, and the options so limited, that it might be the best available option to defend onself with violence. But be clear: punches, cops, court cases, and academic firings are bandaids. At best they prevent particular cases of violent masculinity by particular people against particular victims. They do not address the root causes of our society's most dreadful social invention – violent masculinity. Indeed, punching bullies in the face, even if it is the best option in a bad situation, is always a form of complicity in the system that constructs this. If we actually want to change the systems that make so many of us into "men" in this sense in the first place, we better find other ways of responding and other ways of intervening.  Which brings me to my final point.

There was another option available to Jonathan Martin: namely the very option he embraced. He found himself a part of a vicious, aggressive, violent, misogynist cultural practice. He could not survive in that practice without adopting the behavior and attitudes at work around him. His options in this NFL lockerroom were embrace the violent masculinity, or be humiliated. Instead, he left. And it seems to me completely clear that this was the right thing to do. In a forced choice between this and participation in profound evil, one must leave, refuse, withdraw. Jonathan, you'll probably never read this, but I see you as a conscientious objector to a system of vicious misogynist enforced masculinity. You are a conscientious objector to an unjust war on women and boys, just as surely as anyone who lays down their gun rather than massacre civilians. You did the right thing – you ripped this behavior from the locker room to the New York Times; there would be no discussion of this systematic brutalization without your refusal to be involved.  You did the brave thing. You did the human thing.  You sacrificed your career rather than your humanity. Be proud of that.