In light of recent events, I think now’s the perfect time to talk about my favorite topic…again. Toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is defined as “the socially constructed attitudes that describe the masculine gender role as violent, unemotional and sexually aggressive.” The key phrase here is “socially constructed.”
Toxic masculinity is taught to boys the second the pop out of the womb. To be a man, one must earn the title and then continue to prove they deserve it. In order to do that, boys have to perform the opposite of how girls perform. They must be loud and rude. They must be aggressive in all ways, and use their fists first and sort it out later. Failure to perform in this way will result in boys, as young as 4 being told to “act like a man” or “stop acting like a pussy.”
All of these things begin to lay the foundation of equating women with weakness and as servants to men. When boys grow older and begin to reach sexual maturity, the dialogue changes. They’re taught to go after girls and not take no for an answer. The word “rape” gets tossed around as another word for dominate, destroy or dehumanize. Violence is glorified in every way and is equated to being tough and in charge of one’s environment. Don’t believe me? Check out this commercial for Modern Warfare 3 that features Jonah Hill and Sam Worthington shooting off military grade weapons like they’re child’s toys.
When we tie masculinity to all-out aggression and sexual power and then make masculinity something that needs to be earned every second, we are setting up our young men for failure.
Last week I wrote about my experience with depression. Men are more likely to develop mental illness than women and are also less likely to seek treatment for their health. Any sign of weakness is something that must be hidden and the cycle continues because feeling less than a man leads to feelings of inadequacy.
When looking at the perpetrators of the most recent mass shootings, the profile is always that of a loner. Someone society has shunned for not fitting it. Somehow, these men become convinced that in order to regain their masculinity they must kill and harm innocent people.
More often than not it’s to kill people belonging to the group that they perceived as having wronged them. In Columbine, the shooters aimed to murder the "popular people" who made them feel inadequate. In the Virginia Tech Massacre, the shooter posted a video where he said that he was retaliating against the people who made him feel weak, and through out the video he was parading around trying to evoke a hyper masculine renegade.
We won’t know the motives for the most recent massacre in Orlando, and we can never truly know the motives of any criminal, but I am fairly certain that authorities will determine that it was caused by someone who believed he needed to kill 49 people to feel like a man.
I am in no way defending the actions of Omar Mateen. He killed those people in cold blood and caused so much sadness in our country. I am simply using him as an example of the effects of a problem that we have in our society.
We are creating these monsters. When Brock Turner was given down the most pathetic sentence I’ve ever seen, some boy saw that and was "told" that his pleasure trumps another person’s pain. When Omar Mateen killed all those people in Orlando and all that was offered up were “thoughts and prayers” some boy saw that and realized that if he wanted, he could buy a gun later in his life and use it to carry out his aggression.
I am all for gun control, and I know that’s a very divisive opinion. The fact that semi-automatic weapons are easier to get in America than Hamilton tickets is a real problem. We need to take measures to prevent mentally unstable individuals the opportunity to carry out such massive amount of death. We also need to do more to punish those who sexually assault others.
But in conjunction with changing policies, we also need to have a larger conversation about how we’re raising our young boys to act. Sexual aggression is not natural, neither is physical aggression. No boy is born with the desire to fight, that's something we learn through our interactions. I should know, I too was brought up to practice toxic masculinity, I just see through the crap and it's time everyone else did too.
