As a school football player, I was given a “Head-hunter Award” for being the “most blood-thirsty” player. I wasn’t blood-thirsty, but the fact that adults would encourage that level of violence now makes me shake my head. Forty years later, not much has changed. One of my son’s basketball coaches told the boys not to help up opponents who fall, because empathy would dull their competitive edge. A local sports talk radio host recently ranted against sportsmanship, because it made kids “soft.” A national sports talker said games are more fun to watch when the players hate each other.
Violence, statistically, is a male thing. In the U.S., males commit 90.5 percent of murders, 98 percent of forcible rapes, and 89 percent of robberies. Males are 80 percent of those arrested for offenses against family and children, and 78 percent of those arrested for aggravated assault. At least a third of all female homicide victims in the U.S. are killed by male intimate partners — husbands and ex-husbands, boyfriends and estranged lovers. Gun violence is also a male thing. Since 1982, the U.S. has had 82 shootings in which three or more were killed, and 80 involved a male shooter. More than half the women killed by intimate partners from 2001 to 2012 were killed using a gun.
While gun violence gets a lot of attention in the news, our problem is bigger than gun violence. More than 91 percent of the violence we encounter does not involve use of a gun. The Bureau of Justice Statistics says an estimated 3 million people aged 12 and up in the U.S. were victims of one or more violent crimes in 2014, with 5.3 million total victimizations; of those crimes, 466,110 involved a gun. One gun crime is 100 percent too many, but clearly our problem with violence is far greater than guns. If we focus our response to a small sliver of violence, we’re not likely to be very effective.
Violence is statistically a male thing because violence is culturally a male thing. The central themes of our masculinity are aggression, dominance, and emotional incompetence. From infancy, we enculturate males to ignore and suppress their emotions, to shun close relationships in favor of rugged individualism, and to measure their manliness by how well they can dominate others. We too often feed our boys and men the toxic cultural messages that it’s “better mad than sad” and that violence is the way to prove one’s self, even to show who’s boss.
We’ve long known this unhealthy masculinity is deadly to men, but it’s also deadly to others because it encourages us to be violent. We teach boys from infancy to suppress emotion, because our male culture says feelings are a weakness and weakness is unmanly. Unable to handle emotion, we grow up lacking empathy, and lacking empathy makes it too easy to see other people as mere objects. Seeing others as objects makes it much easier to use, hurt, rape, and kill them.
Oddly, violence arises both from living up to and failing to live up to the macho man icon. Guys who are stressed because they think they are seen as less masculine often try to “prove” themselves, and too often it’s through violence. Research has also shown “threatened” men are more supportive of war, show more prejudice toward gay men and lesbians, and are more likely to say they believe in the natural superiority of males.
At Family Service Madison, we have some of the nation’s most successful anti-domestic violence and anti-aggression therapy programs, and a large part of that therapy is helping men see and move beyond the unhealthy masculinity our culture has taught them. But our work at FSM happens after the crimes have been committed, and if we Americans are serious about addressing violence, we’re obligated to change male culture, to redefine manhood, so we set our boys on a healthy path early in life.
Changing a culture will take much longer than most other ideas offered, but without it our short-term responses will fail over time. It will take courage and commitment, but it’s something you and I can start today.