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ON NOV. 5, a man
The story of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood suspect, has been national news because he worked on an Army base. But the story of Jason Rodriguez, suspected in the Florida incident, is yet one more of its kind and quickly faded from view.
We have also seen a recent increase in what we might call "family mass murders," in which the offender kills all family members before committing suicide.
What do all the perpetrators have in common? They are all males. If they were all young Latinas, we would be having a national conversation about "What's wrong with Latinas?" and "How does Latina culture encourage this violence?" But as
This is not about "men are bad." Often when we point out that gender is an important component of violent behavior, the charge of "male bashing" is used to shut down the discussion.
Fortunately, the vast majority of men are not violent. At the same time, the vast majority of violent people are men, and they are men who differ in important ways from normal and healthy males. Why do these men think that killing their co-workers, families, and often themselves is justified?
Masculinity is one part of the explanation. In America, masculinity mostly refers to being tough, not expressing your feelings, dominating others, not showing weakness, avoiding any behaviors or experiences even remotely connected to femininity, and being a provider.
When men lose their jobs, go deep into debt, are rejected by their wives, feel underappreciated or bullied by co-workers, or lose connection with their children, masculinity tells them they have two options. The un-masculine reaction is to passively accept the situation. The masculine reaction is to do something about it, and for some men, that means committing the kind of violence that we see in movies and television programs where the male hero regains his status through violent vengeance against the people who caused the problem and "deserve it."
When men commit mass murder, we explain away their behavior by saying that some sort of emasculation took place, and, hey, that's what men do, right? But there would be no emasculation and no acceptance of violence if we were to define masculinity in healthier ways.
The story plays out over and over again. He's being laid off or he's being transferred someplace horrible. He's talked to his boss and his boss's boss, but there's no choice; he has to go. But his job is who he is: It's how he defines himself and how others know who he is in the world. Without a job, who is he?
When he told his friends, they bought him a beer to cry into. But after a few days, they didn't want to hear it anymore. He couldn't stop thinking about his job, and it ate him up. His job was his identity, his purpose in life, and he'd lost it. Masculinity told him to be independent and not to ask for help, and he believed in masculinity, so the pressure kept building. He focused on the fact that his job had been taken away from him, concluded that it makes him look weak, and committed mass murder.
These men killed their co-workers because they believed that masculinity accepts and justifies violence. To a greater or lesser extent, we all participate in this cultural definition even though the vast majority of us are not violent, and we all have the potential to resist it.
But it is very difficult to resist a pressure that has no name, and when we attribute family mass murder and other men's violence solely to the individual--as if gender were not part of the equation--we avoid naming it. We all have a part to play in teaching men and boys the skills to manage their feelings without hurting other people.
Imagine an America where men were no more violent than women. It would be so much more peaceful that we would hardly recognize it. There would be 22,000 fewer violent crimes a year, 30 fewer murders a day, and a million and a half fewer people rotting away in our prisons and jails. It is time for a national conversation about the toxic aspects of masculinity and what we can do to create a more peaceful culture by transforming them.
It is time to help men and boys understand masculine cultural pressure so they can resist it when it conflicts with important life goals or hurts another person, making gendered behavior a conscious choice rather than an uncritically accepted program.
Christopher Kilmartin is a University of Mary Washington professor of psychology, and Andrew Smiler, of Wake Forest University, is a visiting assistant professor of psychology.
