Searching for answers in the wake of another tragic school shooting, progressive actor Michael Ian Black posted a thread to Twitter blaming mass gun violence on social constructs of masculinity. Black’s thread rocketed quickly to viral reach.
Deeper even than the gun problem is this: boys are broken.
— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) February 15, 2018
Following from the sweeping thesis “boys are broken,” his argument veered at times into vacuous musings like “we know ourselves to be men, but don’t know how to be our whole selves,” though ultimately creeped into shared territory with some strange bedfellows for a progressive feminist.
“The last 50 years redefined womanhood: women were taught they can be anything,” Black said, observing “no commensurate movement for men” has yet arisen. “Men are adrift and nobody is talking about it and nobody’s doing anything about it and it’s killing us,” declared his final tweet.
Such sentiments are not novel, having been argued by conservatives and feminist dissidents for more than two decades at this point (often to reflexive charges of sexism from the Left).
Black’s conclusion that an epidemic of male terror — rooted in toxic masculine insecurity — should be held partially responsible for mass shootings, is not one that would be shared by the aforementioned coalition of conservatives and feminist dissidents.
Chief among those scholars is Christina Hoff Sommers, whose book The War Against Boys debunked feminist myths of masculinity first in 2000 and then again in 2013 upon re-release. In her work, Sommers helpfully distinguishes between “pathological” and “healthy” masculinity.
Here’s a key passage from The War Against Boys that fleshes out the distinction.
“Criminologists distinguish between ‘hypermasculinity’ (or ‘protest masculinity’) and the normal masculinity of healthy young males. Hypermasculine young men do indeed express their maleness through antisocial behavior—mostly against other males, but also through violent aggression toward and exploitation of women. Healthy young men express their manhood in competitive endeavors that are often physical. As they mature, they take on responsibility, strive for excellence, and achieve and ‘win.’ They assert their masculinity in ways that require physical and intellectual skills and self-discipline. In American society, the overwhelming majority of healthy, normal young men don’t batter, rape, or terrorize women; they respect them and treat them as friends.”
“Unfortunately,” Sommers continued, “many educators have become persuaded that there is truth in the relentlessly repeated proposition that masculinity per se is the cause of violence.”
Beginning with the premise that most violence is perpetrated by men, they move hastily, and fallaciously, to the proposition that maleness is the leading cause of violence. By this logic, every boy is a protopredator. Of course, when boys are violent or otherwise antisocially injurious to others, they must be disciplined, both for their own betterment and for the sake of society. But most boys’ physicality and masculinity are not expressed in violent ways. A small percentage of boys are destined to become batterers and rapists: boys with severe conduct disorders are at high risk of becoming criminal predators. Such boys do need strong intervention, the earlier the better. But their numbers are small. There is no justification for a gender-bias industry that looks upon millions of normal male children as pathologically dangerous.
Thus, it’s important not to assign qualities of pathological masculinity to all boys, but also to aggressively identify and address the minority that is struggling and at risk of acting out in violence. In fact, it’s the generalized rhetoric of mass panic first adopted by feminist academics, and echoed now by Black, that lead, as Sommers wrote in 2013, to “gender scholars [spending] the past twenty years trying to resocialize boys away from such ‘toxic’ masculine proclivities,” like mock sword fights and battles.
Here’s where there is agreement: American boys are struggling, and their plight has not received due attention. Black argues it’s because of the “rigid, outdated model of masculinity,” which is in diametric opposition to the thesis born out by the research of Sommers and others, which suggests widespread efforts to treat the “toxic masculinity” dwelling, allegedly, in every boy have lead to the increasing trends of underachievement now dogging young men.
But at least there is some agreement.
