Men are pretty terrible people. They commit significantly more violent crimes, robberies and assaults each year than women do, according to the Department of Justice. They are more likely to show anger in the workplace and be rewarded for it while women are affected negatively for the same behaviors. They even take up too much space on public transportation when “manspreading”. I could keep going.

Men probably dominate all these “terrible” statistics because, now and throughout history, they’ve dominated the world. But that doesn’t give them a pass. They are still to blame even if they don’t know better, and it’s high time their dominant position – their entitled ignorance – was questioned and dismantled.

There is a “manhood in crisis” trend story to match each one pondering whether women can have it all. But manhood isn’t in crisis; it is the crisis. Still, last week author and activist Kevin Powell published an essay at CNN where he announced, yet again, that manhood is in society’s crosshairs, and recommended a way to fix it.

Powell, who recently released a memoir about his journey to manhood, wrote about spending time on a college campus, working with male college students to find a resolution to the “endless” rape allegations there.

He asked a group of men to name important women in history, which they did, but when pressed on what those women did, the men really couldn’t respond. This lack of actually knowing women’s lives led Powell to the conclusion that if these men couldn’t connect or care to intimately know about women’s lives, they weren’t able to respect them enough not to perpetrate violence against their bodies.

This led him to call for a re-education of men. He argues that men “actually [need to] learn about the contributions of women and girls to every aspect of American society” as a tactic to stop the violence. That is, they need to learn that there is more to women than a reproductive system.

This is theoretically a good next step to stopping the violence that is polluting not just college campuses but the entire world, but it’s very “us and them” rather than “we’re all human together”. It just lets men be more educated about the women they are perpetrating violence against.

Until men en masse consider women to be part of the same ecosystem, masculinity will continue to be primarily a rejection of everything feminine, the tool men use to measure and gauge their own self-worth to other men – the foundation of bro culture. And until then, when they feel that their masculinity is in jeopardy, when they don’t feel man enough, manly violence will seem like a reasonable way to react to their feelings.

“Violence is often the single most evident marker of manhood,” sociologist Michael Kimmel wrote in his 1994 essay Masculinity as Homophobia. “It is the willingness to fight, the desire to fight.”

He is correct. We see this violence from the bar fights over small issues to the violence that breaks out on streets when men are denied by women they catcall.

We’ve seen this recently with the high rate of reported transgender murders in the US – the number sits at 22 so far this year according to the National Anti-Violence Project. Many times, my reporting has shown, these women are murdered not for being transgender, but because their male lovers fear being found out, fear their masculinity being called into question.

All of this was humorously explored in the viral hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile, which through humor showed how men will respond so quickly, even violently, when they feel their manhood is being questioned. Which seems to happen a lot.

Instead of constantly putting manhood under perceived threat, we must rethink the concept entirely, and maybe – to be so daring – throw it out. Because we have centuries of war, of pillaging, of violence that show us that manhood was never in crisis, but always was central to this mayhem. So we may need to just rebuild everything with the whole concept of manhood excluded.