Cambodia

The Khmer Rouge didn't just kill men — it specifically killed the men who represented intellectual, professional, and cultural masculinity: teachers, doctors, monks, artists, anyone who wore glasses. The men who survived did so by performing ignorance and rural simplicity. This survival strategy became an intergenerational transmission: fathers who survived by hiding their intelligence raised sons in a culture that was suspicious of education, reflection, and complexity — the very qualities that could help men process the trauma they inherited.

The domestic violence crisis in Cambodia is directly linked to the genocide's legacy. Men who grew up in the post-genocide period — raised by traumatized parents who had no model of healthy relationship, no therapeutic support, and a culture shattered to its foundations — express their unprocessed pain through the only channels available: alcohol and violence. The cheap rice wine consumed by Cambodian men in quantities that would alarm any public health authority is both symptom and cause — men drink to suppress memories they can't articulate, and the drinking produces the violence that creates new trauma. Meanwhile, the sex tourism industry in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap creates a different masculine crisis: the normalization of male exploitation of women and children in an economy where poverty makes everything for sale.