Thursday, December 20, 2012

Manhood

What Michael Kimmel says:

In the coming weeks, we’ll learn more about Adam Lanza, his motives, his particular madness. We’ll hear how he “snapped” or that he was seriously mentally ill. We’ll try to explain it by setting him apart, by distancing him from the rest of us.
And we’ll continue to miss the point. Not only are those children at Sandy Hook Elementary School our children. Adam Lanza is our child also. Of course, he was mad — as were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Lee Loughner, James Eagan Holmes, and Wade Michael Page — and the ever-longer list of boys and young men who have exploded in a paroxysm of vengeful violence in recent years. In a sense, they weren’t deviants, but over-conformists to norms of masculinity that prescribe violence as a solution. Like real men, they didn’t just get mad, they got even. Until we transform that definition of manhood, this terrible equation of masculinity and violence will continue to produce such horrific sums.
I was telling a friend this morning that I think gender equality is as much about access for women and gender minorities as it is a much improved standard of behaviour from men. Kimmel's essay describes the problem acutely, much of the world suffers a toddler-manhood centred on a whinging "you're not the boss of me" narrative backed up by infantry-grade firepower.

Pathetic.

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