06en_vio ... Violence

Manhood and Violence:The Deadliest Equation

by Michael Kimmel
5/05/99

Michael Scott Kimmel (born 1951) is an American sociologist. His focus is pro-feminism. He teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in New York and is the editor of Men and Masculinities. Kimmel is a spokesperson of NOMAS (The National Organization For Men Against Sexism)[1]. He is the husband of Amy Aronson, a Fordham University Professor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Kimmel 

Manhood and Violence: The Deadliest Equation 
by Michael Kimmel

For the past few days, the nation has stared at the pictures of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, trying to understand the unfathomable -- how these two young boys could arm themselves to the teeth, and open fire on their classmates and teachers. Well stare at those pictures as the explanation s begin to pour in from the experts and the pundits alike.

Well hear from psychologists wholl draw elaborate profiles of misfits and loners, of adolescent depression and acting out. Cultural critics on the right will throw some blame on Goth music, Marilyn Manson, violent video games, the Internet. More liberal critics will tell us its guns. President Clinton chimed in about violence in the media. Perhaps well soon hear about fatherlessness or the disappearance of modesty. The Denver school board has already banned the wearing of black trench coats.

All the while we will continue to miss the point -- even though it is staring right back at us: The killers were middle class white boys who live in gun states.

Skeptical? Try a little thought experiment: imagine that the killers in Littleton - and in Pearl, Mississippi, Paducah, Kentucky, Springfield, Oregon, and Jonesboro, Arkansas - were all black girls from poor families who lived in New Haven, Connecticut, Newark, New Jersey, or Providence, Rhode Island.

I believe we'd now be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would invent a new term for their behavior, as they did with "wilding" a decade ago after the attack on the Central Park jogger. Wed hear about the culture of poverty; about how living in the city breeds crime and violence; about some putative natural tendency among blacks towards violence. Someone would even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in vain imitation of boys.

Yet the obvious fact that these school killers were all middle class white boys seems to have escaped everyones notice. In these cases, actually, its unclear that class or race played any part in the shootings, although the killers in Colorado did target some black students. But thats the point: Imagine the national reaction if black boys had targeted whites in school shootings. We would assume that race alone explained the tragedy. (Some would, of course, blame rap music and violent movies.) Or if poor boys had targeted those with the fancy cars, wed assume that class-based resentment caused the boys rage. (That Dylan Klebold drove a BMW has not prompted the Denver school board to consider banning those cars, has it?) That all these murders were committed young boys with guns raises not a ripple. We continue to call them "teens," "youth," or "children" rather than what they really are: boys.

Yet gender is the single most obvious and intractable difference when it comes to violence in America. Men and boys are responsible for 95% of all violent crimes in this country. Every day twelve boys and young men commit suicide -- seven times the number of girls. Every day eighteen boys and young men die from homicide -- ten times the number of girls.

>From an early age, boys learn that violence is not only an acceptable form of conflict resolution, but one that is admired. Four times more teenage boys than teenage girls think fighting is appropriate when someone cuts into the front of a line. Half of all teenage boys get into a physical fight each year. The belief that violence is manly is not a trait carried on any chromosome, not soldered into the wiring of the right or left hemisphere, not juiced by testosterone. (It is still the case that half the boys dont fight, most dont carry weapons, and almost all dont kill: are they not boys?) Boys learn it.

They learn it from their fathers, nearly half of whom own a gun. They learn it from a media that glorifies it, from sports heroes who commit felonies and get big contracts, from a culture saturated in images of heroic and redemptive violence. They learn it from each other.

And this parallel education is made more lethal in states where gun control laws are most lax, where gun-lobbyists are most powerful. Because all available evidence suggests that all the increases in the deadliness of school violence is attributable to guns. Boys have resorted to violence for a long time, but sticks and fists and even the occasional switchblade do not create the bloodbaths of the past few years. Nearly 90% of all homicides among boys aged 15 to 19 are firearm related, and 80% of the victims are boys.If the rumble in West Side Story were to take place today, the death toll would not be just Riff and Bernardo, but all the Sharks and all the Jets -- and probably several dozen bystanders.

Some will throw up their hands and sigh that "boys will be boys." In the face of these tragic killings, such resignation is unacceptable. And it doesnt answer the policy question; it begs the question: if boys have a natural propensity towards violence and aggression, do we organize society to maximize that tendency, or to minimize it?

Perhaps the most sensible reform that could come from these tragedies is stricter gun control laws, at least on assault weapons and handguns. Far more sweeping - and necessary - is a national meditation on how our ideals of manhood became so entangled with violence.

Make no mistake: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were real boys. In a sense, they werent deviants, but over-conformists to norms of masculinity that prescribe violence as a solution. Like real men, they didnt just get mad, they got even. Until we transform that definition of manhood, this terrible equation of masculinity and violence will add up to an increasing death toll at our nations schools.