You are talking a lot about some fantasy world others don't seem to share or even know.
You seem to be confused about this situation, so let me correct that.
This is about the furthest I have ever had to talk down to anyone in my entire time on this forum. It is extremely difficult. It is so difficult that I don't feel like I have actually conveyed any of my real thoughts, because the point I am making seems so incredibly simple.
True, I am using the wrong words, but only because these are the only words we are capable of having this conversation in.
I am not actually talking about a fantasy world. I know I said I was, but that was for your benefit. I am talking about the political substructure of the real world, I am talking about belief. Not conscious, deliberate belief, but belief in the assumptions that exist but never get questioned because they are so normalized that noone ever looks at them too closely. I am not talking about silly stereotypes of cartoon jocks bragging about their sexual conquests. If the hierarchy (which is a deliberate oversimplification of hegemony) I was talking about were so fragile people had to brag about it, it wouldn't be worth talking about. If it were so organized that it required people to consciously sort and order themselves by rank, it would have been immediately destroyed. If it couldn't incorporate nice middle aged Christian men in stable marriages, it would have alienated a significant proportion of the men who actually have power within this culture. Of course, nice middle aged Christian men still rape women..
How, exactly, could you arrange people into a competitive hierarchy in which somehow everyone knows their place in it but no one knows about the trait being used to arrange the hierarchy?
Fuck it, let's do a little excercise.
James Bond is a fantasy. He is a man who is not real. James Bond kills men and fucks women. There are tons of films about James Bond killing men and fucking women, and men love it. They love it so much new films keep being made. Men who have never killed anyone still love James Bond. Men who are happily married still love James Bond. Why? It makes no sense from this absurdly literal standpoint I've chosen to adopt for no reason save to be annoying.
See, it's almost like when these men watch James Bond, they aren't watching a perfect recreation of their own lives (amazing), it's almost like they d
on't care that they have more in common with the comic relief side characters and random mooks getting killed than they do with James Bond. Do they want to be James Bond? In a literal sense, maybe some of them do, but most of them probably don't want to kill anyone, or would miss their wives and kids or wouldn't want to be in constant peril.
So what is it, what is going on here?
James Bond is a man. He's a fantasy man who is not real. When you watch James Bond kill men and fuck women, James Bond is not you. He is
better than you. He is someone you could never be, with your stable marriages and ethical belief in the value of human life and inability to climb around on top of aeroplanes. But James Bond is a man, and you are a man. You exist on the same frame of reference. If James Bond is better than you, who are you better than?
It is not hard to form hierarchies. It is trivially easy in fact. It's so easy that the actual criticism you should be making is whether any of these hierarchies are stable or if they're constantly being formed, reformed and challenged by competing hierarchies.. to which the answer is yes. I'm not talking about a military or corporate hierarchy, I'm not talking about a system with ranks or positions in which everyone knows their place. I'm talking about an unstable cultural hierarchy (or a cultural hegemony, more accurately). The people who make up that hegemony don't even have to be real, in fact those at the top tend to either be unreal (like James Bond) or so divorced from the lives, experience and capability of most men that they may as well not be real.
Because, and I don't know how many times I have to say this,
masculinity is not real. The kind of automatic, harmless power which James Bond has over women does not exist in reality. It's a fiction created by the people who write the movies. If you try to replicate that power, you're going to end up hurting someone.