I agree with Mona Lisa again. Fully. I think how men "interpret" leadership is both askance of its actual definition, unnecessary and problematic for them and everyone else, a linguistic trap and slight of hand that creates a lever of control, and needs to end (especially since men do not value or cultivate skillsets or perspectives delineated as feminine that are necessary in tandem to create good leadership.
The dictionaries define leadership as the ability of an individual or a group of people to influence and guide followers or members of an organization, society or team. Headship. Leadership often is an attribute tied to a person's title, seniority or ranking in a hierarchy.
It's something that is either bestowed by status or taken by force most often. In super rare cases, it's something that is earned through networking, building trust, fostering helpful relationships, being amenable, really seeing people and putting them first.
How you used leadership in your comment to Mona Lisa isn't leadership, it's participation. While it's true that within a society participation like that can lead to true leadership (that rare kind where people choose to follow you rather than having your leadership foisted upon them by status or what have you), it takes many acts like that, consistently and prudently exercised over a very long period of time to establish a history of trustworthiness that makes people.actually want, respect, and crave your leadership enough to give up their own agency to follow you.
Thr mantle of leadership should be earned before the fact, not after, in order for it to have any meaning or be tied to any sort of higher purpose. Otherwise, it just ends up a lever of control, a subordinating mechanism of the self to an empire or civilization, e.g. "society".
Our "highest callings" are not be a sacrifice to anything. It's to know ourselves and be prudent in our agency.
And frankly, until one can control themselves, they've got zero business trying to "lead" anyone else. Again, that's tyranny and potentially abuse.
It becomes seen as something to endure, not something to appreciate or respect.
This dichotomy in what you can have vs what you have to work for presents a mental quandary for men. If your status as men in a dominance hierarchy gives you "leadership" rights over more than half the population (women and children) just by virtue of being a man and that rare form of leadership requires the sort of skillsets you've been socialized to devalue because they "belong to women" or are feminine, and in your culture you have to shred and remove everything deemed feminine out of you on order to be recognized as a man amongst your peers (validate your manhood) then......why would any man spend the years required to build and grow a following by choice instead of collecting one by rank when most people are inherently lazy by nature?
Answer. The vast majority wouldn't. Not unless their was no other way.
This is why people with low status tend to make the best leaders. There was no other way for them to lead than the long hard road, laid out brick by brick by their own blood, sweat, and tears.
[Here's to you, Black ladies!]
So in order to grow any sort of leadership that doesn't breed resentment in your followers or yourself because you have to be responsible for someone who will resist you, you have to betray your gender tropes.
The very ones that you used to grasp for leadership in the first place. Are we seeing the trap here yet? Seeing the internalized misandry? The road to self loathing?
And who do you think bears the brunt of that?
Alternatively, you could just check your pants. Grow up. Get to know yourself. Be content to participate in society, be a drop in the bucket. Use your agency in productive rather than destructive ways. Practice prudence and self control. Self discipline is generally a good idea too. Get over yourselves; decenter your egos.
