The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (5 page)

Even though masses of American boys will not commit violent crimes resulting in murder, the truth that no one wants to name is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within and act as benevolent young patriarchs. (More and more girls who embrace patriarchal thinking also embrace the notion that they must be violent to have power.) Talking to teenage girls of all classes who are being secretly hit or beaten by boyfriends (who say that they are “disciplining” them), one hears the same Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde narratives that grown women tell when talking about their relationships with abusive men. These girls describe seemingly nice guys who have rageful outbursts. Time and time again we hear on our national news about the seemingly kind, quiet young male whose violent underpinnings are suddenly revealed. Boys are encouraged by patriarchal thinking to claim rage as the easiest path to manliness. It should come as no surprise, then, that beneath the surface there is a seething anger in boys, a rage waiting for the moment to be heard.

Much of the anger boys express is itself a response to the demand that they not show any other emotions. Anger feels better than numbness because it often leads to more instrumental action. Anger can be, and usually is, the hiding place for fear and pain. In
The Heart of the Soul
authors Gary Zukav and Linda Francis explore the ways anger barricades the feeling self:

Certainly in almost all the situations where boys have killed, we discover narratives of rage that describe the emotional realities before they happen. Importantly, this anger is expressed cross a broad spectrum of class, race, and family circumstance. Violent boys from affluent homes often are as emotionally alienated as their ghetto counterparts.

At a time in our nation’s history when more boys than ever are being raised in single-parent, female-headed homes, mass media send the message that a single mother is unfit to raise a healthy boy child. All over our nation mothers worry that their parenting may be damaging their sons. This is the issue Olga Silverstein tackles head-on in
The Courage to Raise Good Men.
Commenting that many people still believe that mothers compromise their sons’ masculinity, she writes: “Most women, like most men, feel that a mother’s influence will ultimately be harmful to a male child, that it will weaken him and that only the example of a man can lead a son into manhood. Single mothers in particular are haunted by the dread of producing a sissy.” Homophobia underlies the fear that allowing boys to feel will turn them gay; this fear is often most intense in single-parent homes. As a consequence mothers in these families may be overly harsh and profoundly emotionally withholding with their sons, believing that this treatment will help the boys to be more masculine.

No matter that information abounds that lets the public know that many gay males come from two-parent homes and can be macho and woman-hating, misguided assumptions about what makes a male gay still flourish. Every day boys who express feelings are psychologically terrorized, and in extreme cases brutally beaten, by parents who fear that a man of feeling must be homosexual. Gay men share with straight men the same notions about acceptable masculinity. Luckily there have been and are individual gay men who dare to challenge patriarchal masculinity. However, most gay men in our culture are as embracing of sexist thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behavior that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men. Hence many gay men are as angry as their straight counterparts.

Just as maternal sadism flourishes in a world where women are made to feel that their emotional cruelty to sons makes them better prepared for manhood, paternal sadism is the natural outcome of patriarchal values. In the book
The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write about Their Fathers,
edited by Bruce Shenitz, many of the stories of boyhood describe rituals of paternal sadism. As James Saslow writes in “Daddy Was a Hot Number”:

Most patriarchal fathers in our nation do not use physical violence to keep their sons in check; they use various techniques of psychological terrorism, the primary one being the practice of shaming. Patriarchal fathers cannot love their sons because the rules of patriarchy dictate that they stand in competition with their sons, ready to prove that they are the real man, the one in charge. In his essay “Finding the Light and Keeping It in Front of Me,” Bob Vance describes walking behind his father as a boy longing to connect but knowing intuitively that no connection was possible: “Something inhibits me from asking him for what I need. I know, if a very young boy can intuit such things, that I am left out of his world and am somehow forbidden to ask him what I can do to have him take me into his world, to hold me playfully or tenderly. The rift begins here. This is the earliest memory I have of my father.”

To the patriarchal dad, sons can only be regarded as recruits in training, hence they must constantly be subjected to sadomasochistic power struggles designed to toughen them up, to prepare them to maintain the patriarchal legacy. As sons they inhabit a world where fathers strive to keep them in the one-down position; as patriarchs in training they must learn how to assume a one-up role. Real explains:

This flight from closeness is most intense in the lives of adolescent boys because in that liminal zone between childhood and young adulthood they are experiencing a range of emotions that leave them feeling out of control, fearful that they will not measure up to the standards of patriarchal masculinity. Suppressed rage is the perfect hiding place for all these fears.

Despite major changes in gender roles in public life, in private many boys are traumatized by relationships with distant or absent fathers. Working with groups of men, listening as they talk about boyhood, I hear the stories they tell about their fathers’ lack of emotional connection. As they attempt to measure up to patriarchal expectations, many boys fear the wrath of the father. In
Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity,
Frank Pittman recalls: “Fearing I didn’t have enough of it, I was in awe of masculinity. I thought my father had some magical power he wasn’t passing on to me, a secret he hadn’t told me.” Again and again the same assumption appears, which suggests that there exists a masculine ideal that young males are not sure how to attain and that undermines their self-esteem. And the crisis of this longing seems most deeply felt by boys with absent fathers. Without a positive connection to a real adult man, they are far more likely to invest in a hypermasculine patriarchal ideal. Fear of not being able to attain the right degree of manliness is often translated into rage. Many teenage boys are angry because the fantasy emotional connection between father and son, the love that they imagine will be there, is never realized. In its place there is just a space of empty longing. Even when it becomes evident that the fantasy will not be fulfilled, that the “father wound” will not be healed, boys hold on to the longing. It may give them a sense of quest and purpose to feel they will someday find the father or, through having children, become the father they dream about.

Frustrated in their quest for father bonding, boys often feel tremendous sorrow and depression. They can mask these feelings because they are allowed to isolate themselves, to turn away from the world and escape into music, television, video games, etc. There is no emotional outlet for the grief of the disappointed teenage boy. Being able to mourn the loss of emotional connection with his father would be a healthy way to cope with disappointment. But boys have no space to mourn. This need for a space to grieve is poignantly portrayed in the film
Life as a House.
Learning that he has cancer and only a short time to live, the father in the film seeks to connect with his sexually confused, angry, drug-using teenage son, who lives with his mother and stepfather. In the short time he lives with his dad, the son is able to develop an emotional connection. When the son finds out that his dad is dying, he rages about being offered love that is not going to last. In Donald Dutton’s study of abusive men,
The Batterer,
he observes that there are few male models for grieving, and he emphasizes that “men in particular seem incapable of grieving and mourning on an individual basis. Trapped by a world that tells them boys should not express feelings, teenage males have nowhere to go where grief is accepted.” As much as grown-ups complain about adolescent male anger, most adults are more comfortable confronting a raging teenager than one who is overwhelmed by sorrow and cannot stop weeping. Boys learn to cover up grief with anger; the more troubled the boy, the more intense the mask of indifference. Shutting down emotionally is the best defense when the longing for connection must be denied.

Teenagers are the most unloved group in our nation. Teenagers are often feared precisely because they are often exposing the hypocrisy of parents and of the world around them. And no group of teenagers is more feared than a pack of teenage boys. Emotionally abandoned by parents and by society as a whole, many boys are angry, but no one really cares about this anger unless it leads to violent behavior. If boys take their rage and sit in front of a computer all day, never speaking, never relating, no one cares. If boys take their rage to the mall, no one cares, as long as it is contained. In
Lost Boys
therapist James Garbarino testifies that when it comes to boys, “neglect is more common than abuse: more kids are emotionally abandoned than are directly attacked, physically or emotionally.” Emotional neglect lays the groundwork for the emotional numbing that helps boys feel better about being cut off. Eruptions of rage in boys are most often deemed normal, explained by the age-old justification for adolescent patriarchal mis-behavior, “Boys will be boys.” Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred, and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict be found.

Ever since masses of American boys began, in the wake of the civil rights struggle, sexual liberation, and feminist movement, to demand their right to be psychologically whole and expressed those demands most visibly by refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, mass media as a propaganda tool for imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy have targeted young males and engaged in heavy-handed brainwashing to reinforce psychological patriarchy. Today small boys and young men are daily inundated with a poisonous pedagogy that supports male violence and male domination, that teaches boys that unchecked violence is acceptable, that teaches them to disrespect and hate women. Given this reality and the concomitant emotional abandonment of boys, it should surprise no one that boys are violent, that they are willing to kill; it should surprise us that the killing is not yet widespread.

Ruthless patriarchal assault on the self-esteem of teenage boys has become an accepted norm. There is a grave silence about adult male tyranny in relation to teenage boys. Much of the adult male terrorism of and competition with little boys and young males is conducted through mass media. Much of the mass media directed at young male consumers is created by self-hating, emotionally shutdown adult men who have only the pornography of violence to share with younger men. To that end they create images that make killing alluring and the sexual exploitation of females the seductive reward. In the wake of feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial critiques of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the backlash that aims to reinscribe patriarchy is fierce. While feminism may ignore boys and young males, capitalist patriarchal men do not. It was adult, white, wealthy males in this country who first read and fell in love with the
Harry Potter
books. Though written by a British female, initially described by the rich white American men who “discovered” her as a working-class single mom, J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter
books are clever modern reworkings of the English schoolboy novel. Harry as our modern-day hero is the supersmart, gifted, blessed, white boy genius (a mini patriarch) who “rules” over the equally smart kids, including an occasional girl and an occasional male of color. But these books also glorify war, depicted as killing on behalf of the “good.”