Men's "Tough Guise"

Last week, in a nauseating New York Times Magazine accolade, Michael Lewis thanked his high school coach for teaching him “What it Means to Be a Man” by breaking his nose with a baseball. Lewis learned the hard way that a man’s life is a battle and that he has to constantly “go to war” to win. And while his method of learning may have been unorthodox, the actual lessons—don’t be a girl, suck it up, and act tough—are unfortunately as American as apple pie.

Boys today are force-fed these categorical imperatives of manhood in the schoolyard, the backyard and from the greatest teacher of all: the mass media. Boys playing Halo, a popular game for the X-Box game console, for instance—where the objective is to shoot everything in sight—learn that manhood is about power and domination. Television reinforces the lesson, often advertising a violent brand of masculinity. TV shows celebrate hyper-violent male icons like wrestlers, football players and action-heroes, a.k.a. professional killers. Meanwhile, men who don’t put on what anti-violence educator Jackson Katz calls a “tough guise” are portrayed as spineless, ineffective, misdirected, and gay, or they’re not given air time at all. Seemingly harmless, these cultural projections of “real manhood” carry a high price for men and women.

It’s no coincidence that a society that teaches men to channel their emotions through anger and domination is plagued by crimes of power—date rape, domestic abuse and hate crimes. While male perpetrators often target women, man-on-man violence is more prevalent, accounting for 77 percent of all incidents. According to a United Nations report, men commit acts of violence against other men largely to maintain their own “hegemonic masculinity.” Threatened by other forms of masculinity, males often put down “deviant” males like metrosexuals. Those men who really diverge from accepted male behavior—homosexual men, for example, who can’t use the “I’m straight” card to defend their masculinity—suffer even more acute discrimination and violence.

It’s easy to chalk up male aggression to biology. When boys bully or harass their playmates, adults have a tendency to shake their heads and accept that “boys will be boys.” But with males responsible for 90 percent of violent crimes, this apathy is unacceptable.

To combat male violence, it is necessary first to highlight it. According to Katz, the media keeps male violence invisible. Newspapers write in the passive voice that “X number of women were raped last year” instead of reporting that “Men raped X number of women last year.” A few years ago, a CBS special on the high school massacre at Columbine addressed the problem of “kids killing kids” when it should have focused on “boys killing boys and girls.” Realizing that most crimes are committed by men is key for understanding how masculinity feeds the cycle of violence.

Lewis, in the end of his article, expresses his fear that his boys will miss out on his own masculine rite of passage. That his male children will not be subjected to his coach’s abuse is the most encouraging part of his piece. It’s unfortunate that—unless we start recognizing alternative notions of “real manhood”—his kids will learn the tough guise anyway.

Asya Troychansky ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Weld Hall.