Good afternoon, Edequity members!
I had written to Michael Kimmel this morning seeking his permission to
forward this posting (seen on Boysed) to Edequity. He agreed. (I met him
briefly in 1996 at the National Coalition for Sex Equity in Education
[NCSEE] conference in Princeton, as no doubt others on this list did.)
Anyhow, in case you hadn't seen it in a newspaper somewhere, here it is.
Best wishes,
Anne McAuliffe
Hamell601@aol.com; (978) 897-4566
McAuliffe@edc.org; (617) 618-2402
_____________________________________________
From: MichaelSKimmel <MichaelSKimmel@COMPUSERVE.COM>
I also wanted to add my own commentary on the most
recent shooting in Santee, CA. I have pasted it below. It was published
originally in NEWSDAY, and then syndicated and published subsequently in
the MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE and the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, and maybe
elsewhere for all I know...
Manhood and Violence: The Deadliest Equation by Michael Kimmel
For the next few days, the nation will once again stare at the
photograph of a slight, confused-looking teenage boy, trying to understand
the unfathomable - how Charles Andrew Williams, age 15, could open fire on
his classmates, killing two and wounding 13 other people. We'll stare at
those pictures as the explanation s begin to pour in from the experts and
the pundits alike.
We'll hear from psychologists who'll draw elaborate profiles of
misfits and loners, of adolescent depression and acting out. Cultural
critics will blame a host of problems -- violent video games, the
Internet,guns. All the while we will continue to miss the point - even
though it
is staring right back at us: Charles Andrew Williams is a middle-class
white
boy.Skeptical? Try a little thought experiment: imagine that all the
killers in all the school shootings in recent years - Littleton, Colorado;
Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro,
Arkansas - were all black girls from poor families who lived instead in
New Haven, Boston, Chicago, or Newark. 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. We'd hear about the culture of poverty; about how
life 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 becomeviolent in vain imitation of boys.
Yet the obvious fact that all these school killers were all middle
class white boys seems to have escaped everyone's notice. (In these
cases,actually, it's unclear that class or race played any part in the
shootings. But that's the point: Imagine the national reaction if black
boys had
targeted whites in school shootings. We would assume that race alone
explained the tragedy.)
That all these murders were committed young boys with guns raises
not a ripple. We continue to speak about "teen violence," "youth
violence," "school violence" without ever noticing the fact that all those
"teens" and "youth" are boys. One expert, already consulted about this
recent tragedy, equally missed the point. Paul Mones, author of a 1991
book, When a Child Kills suggested that the motivation for such deadly
violence is that "kids want to vent their anger, their worries, their
frustrations, their fantasies." Exactly what "kids" is he talking about?
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.
But what causes the unleashing of such homicidal rage? For the
past few months, I have been investigating all school shootings that took
place in the United States during the decade of the 1990s, as described in
a report released by the FBI this at November. All the shooters were
boys.And most described their school days as a relentless gauntlet of
bullying,gay-baiting epithets, physical assault and harassment until they
"snapped"
Their days were spent, apparently, fending off constant criticism of
their masculinity. (In that sense, President Bush's compassionless
characterization of Williams's attack as "a disgraceful act of cowardice"
actually makes matters worse, decrying his ostensible lack of manhood yet
again.)Reports indicate that Williams, too, was "constantly picked on" by
his classmates. In the coming days, we will come to know more about these
daily indignities and assaults to which he was subjected. In the
meantime,we might again listen to the words of Evan Todd, a 255- pound
linebacker
on the football team at Columbine High School, a representative of the
"jock
culture" that Dylan Harris and Eric Klebold found such an interminable
torment. "Columbine is a clean, good place, except for those rejects," Todd
says. "Sure we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to
school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? It's not just jocks;
the whole school's disgusted with them. They're a bunch of homos... If
you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease 'em. So the whole school
would call them homos" (cited in Time, 20 December 1999, p. 50-51).
In most cases, boys learn any number of coping strategies to deal with the
daily taunts of their classmates. Some turn inwards,self-medicate with
drugs or alcohol, become loners. A large number of teen suicides contain
stories of such daily abuse. And, in a very few cases,the anguish of
having one's masculinity challenged, ridiculed, denigrated builds until it
explodes in a cathartic rage that seeks to destroy the entire world.
The belief that retaliatory violence is manly is not a trait
arried 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 don't fight, most don't carry weapons, and almost all don't
kill: are they not boys?) Boys learn it. They learn it from their
fathers,nearly half of whom own a gun. (Notice that Williams's parents are
divorced, but that he lived with his father.)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.
Far more sweeping - and necessary - is a national meditation on how our
ideals of manhood became so entangled with violence. Make no mistake:
Charles Andrew Williams is a real boy. In a sense, he is not deviant, but
over-conformists to a definition of masculinity that prescribe violence as
a solution. Recall that famous bumper sticker: "I don't get mad; I get
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 nation's schools.
Comments, of course, appreciated.
Michael Kimmel
<MichaelSKimmel@COMPUSERVE.COM>
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