One Utah

Damn, damn, damn.

I really need to stop reading the other blogs because they’re so good they make me break my promises. 

Terrance at Republic of T has an astonishing series of posts - here, here and here - entitled The Queer Thing About School Shooters, highlighting the ways in school shooters are victims of hazing, teasing, bullying and a high school social hierarchy that rewards such behaviors.  Almost uniformly, school shooters have suffered from anti-gay bullying although they were apparently all heterosexual.  Almost uniformly, school shooters seem to have been unable to prove themselves fully “masculine” for the benefit of the school pecking order.

It’s not uncommon, when these experiences come to light, to hear members of the community say that the shooters should have been able to “take it.”  A real man, after all, can absorb physical and emotional abuse without experiencing any negative side effects.  They deserved what they got because they weren’t tough enough.  Jungle justice.

The idea that shooters simply snap seems wrong.  Like a glass of water, violence pours into them and into them and into them until they overflow - the overflow slowly creates a circle of water around the base of the glass - fantasies given voice, recorded, shared, perhaps even minimally acted out until at last the circle of water expands so far that they engage in actual acts of violence, striking out, striking back at a community they believe has done them entirely wrong.

So much male violence seems to arise out of a sense of misplaced or challenged masculinity.  Our culture sees masculinity and maleness as separate concepts.  Masculinity must be earned - earned by becoming hardened to pain (both physical and emotional).  Masculinity must be protected by a bright, sharp dividing line.  The idealized masculine is physically strong, aggressive, powerful (different than strength), emotionally distant, and perhaps most imporant, capable of and willing to engage in acts of brutality and violence.  Terrance writes:

When it comes to masculinity, details matter . . . my dad pointed it out to me. I would usually slice an apple into wedges before eating it, rather than just biting into it, as he instructed me a guy was supposed to. (I didn’t mention at the time that it hurt my teeth to do so.) If anybody saw me eating an apple like that, I was informed, they might think I was a little “funny.”

These details of masculinity govern how one walks, talks, interacts with others.  Consider the tests of masculinity:

The most important test is to prove you’re not feminine. The hidden agenda in every test of classic masculinity requires a boy to prove he is not “girlish” and therefore not “gay.”

The tests become more violent in violent environments. “We all have the same emotional lives, but we live in different environments,” notes Geoffrey Canada. “The more violent the environment, the more violent the tests of masculinity, and the more violent the expectations of what it means to be a man, the more violent we are likely to be.”

Boys compete daily to win these tests. Boys compete openly to be the best at running, at sports, at showing off, at boasting, at Pokemon, at Warhammer, and at mastering the internet. The winner boasts, “Because I won, I’m the best at being a boy.”

Successful athletes score the highest points. Most boys, whether they want to be athletic or not, measure themselves against the athletes in school, or against the kids in their neighborhood who are successful in town sports.

Boys act out to prove they’ve passed the test. They need to show other boys how well they’ve done and this is reflected in their behavior in social groups, on the streets, and at school, where this presents particular problems. “Educators need to realize that some of what is called misbehavior in classrooms should be viewed sympathetically as boys’ need to act out a masculine identity. For little boys this can include being a wise guy or a class clown. Older boys may prove themselves by being bullies,” says Joseph Tobin.

 Masculinity is almost entirely about behavior as indicator of identity.  One behaves appropriately to prove on is masculine enough.  The contrary notion - that a person secure in his male identity need not act out to prove his masculinity - is unwelcome in this construct and on the school yard.  For the gay teen, the torment handed out by other boys is, I believe, at least a little offset by recognition of one’s identity as a gay male.  For the straight male, the bullying, the anti-gay bullying can push him into desperate attempts to prove his masculinity. 

Sexual and sexualized violence, initiation and humiliation in schools seems pandemic.  My own experience in public school in small town Utah was one in which I witnessed a tremendous amount of sexualized violence - usually males performing for others males to prove their masculine bona fides.  This performance seems to be a huge element of the initiation rites in all male communities.  The military is another community in which masculinity is proven by acquiring and demonstrating one’s physical toughness.  Fraternity initiations are notoriously filled with shame-inducing requirements around nudity and sexuality.  CSI built an interesting murder case around a frat initiation rite in which a pledge got a pledgemaster’s girl friend to sign her name on his penis; the pledgemaster killed him for daring to “poach” his sexual territory (if I’ve messed up the details of the episode Pledging Mr. Johnson please let me know).

In this construct, masculinity is partly proven by sexualized conquests - a real man isn’t afraid to show his body, to fuck any woman who is willing, doesn’t care about physical privacy, doesn’t have womanly fears about his appearance or his body.  There are a number of flickr sets dedicated to photos of frat boys engaging in sexualized behavior - often wearing little or nothing and then interacting with clothed women.  In these photo sets, the message is painfully clear - you are man enough to be naked around women.  The women in the photos are often surrounded by three or four naked or nearly naked men who are doing everything possible to get their penises near the woman.  But the men are clearly posing for other men.

Initiation into male communities requires proving one is truly masculine enough.  I cannot begin to peel back all the layers of the onion that underly the resistance to allow openly gay men to serve in the military.  Suffice to say that the apparently jelly-legged fear that straight soldiers have of sharing a shower with a gay soldier reveals far too more about straight masculinity than it does about gay men.  It’s not sharing a shower with a closeted gay man that these soldiers apparently fear - no, it’s the notion of an openly gay man looking at them and thinking they’re sexually attractive that terrifies these physically hardened, battle ready men.  (I know there’s a joke here about ready for a firefight, but unprepared to say, “Thank you I prefer to have sex with women,” but it’s not taking shape.)  In ancient Egypt, the Pharoah had a footrest carved with the names of the nations he had conqueared, bearing a legend meaning, literally, “I have anally penetrated this land.”  To be the receptive partner in intercourse is incompatible with the traditional masculine identity.  To preseve the true masculine identity of the military, openly gay  men must be kept out.  It’s not the presence of gay men, it’s their honesty that threatens masculinity.  Go to any gym, you’ll see gay men with ideally masculine bodies, Greek statue kind of male bodies that far surpass their straight peers’ bodies.

Many of the school shooters are notoriously sexually unsuccessful.  Added to their failing the tests of masculinity, these males become desparate to prove their masculinity.  Less vulnerable individuals, individuals who for some reason possess greater emotional balance and resources, find ways to channel their frustration and anger; they find ways in which to pass tests of masculinity.  These school shooters, however, are uniquely vulnerable to the twin failures with males and females.  For gay teens, I think Terrance summarizes it well:

my folks’ various attempts to “make a man of me,” including stuff like making me stay in the Boy Scouts (all the way to Eagle Scout) when I said over and over again that I wanted out.Going off to camp,learning to tie knots, pitch tents, hiking,etc., were all things that I hated beyond measure, and things that I did not want to do in the least. Nevermind the things I was interested in and was good at. My problem was that I liked and wanted the wrong things. And if I wasn’t aggressive and assertive enough, it was because I wasn’t who I was supposed to be.

And therein lies the strength of the gay male - he likes the wrong things and so not fitting in with the boys is painful, he has something inside him to keep him going.  The straight male, tormented, denied by males and females his masculinity, bullied, shoved aside and brutalized, finally reaches a point at which he is almost insane to prove his masculinity.  He strikes out.  Because his masculine identity is unproven, he cannot rely on the hierarchy to protect him; the football players won’t close ranks and keep him safe.  He’s on his own.  Inchoate, impotent rage finally spills over so widely that it begins to engulf those around him.

Many school shooters report having been victimized while administrators and teachers did nothing to help them.  Sexualized violence directed a female students is pandemic.  Again, from my own experience, I remember seeing males grab females buttocks, breasts, legs, even at time their crotches; other times, boys would pretend to unzip their flies and dry-hump girls in the halls.  These incidents go vastly underreported as many girls believe they must simply accept such behavior, and other girls often as not require it as the price of entry to the cool clique.  (Cold Case recently aired an excellent episode addressing this dynamic where the cheerleader initiation required having sex with multiple members of the football team; when one girl opted out, she was murdered by a girl who didn’t opt out.)

The problem of school shootings is not limited to a few evil or crazy individuals.  Systemically, our schools are simply unwilling to address the epidemic of violence taking place in the halls.  Willing to pretend that the incidents that come to light are abberations or fake, parents and communities refuse to acknowledge what is actually taking place.  The price is paid in many ways - more commonly people who hated their school experiences and simply want them in the past.  Less commonly it is paid in suicide, in unreported rape and the outcomes.  Sometimes, when initiations go to far, students are physically and emotionally injured (remember the case in Utah a few years ago where a first year high school student was stripped naked and duct taped to the shower by his teammates?); most rarely and most easily dismissed as the behavior of one evil or deranged person are school shootings.  But they do not occur in a vaccum and they do not happen for no reason.  Violence, in the end, is as American as apple pie basebal and mom.

This entry was posted Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Sex, Society, Torture. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.