America's Masculinity Crisis?

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Thu Dec 20, 2012 6:21 am

This would also fit into the Superstition thread because the pieces main focus is based on modern myth, but I thought this deserved it's own thread. This is really a terrific piece taken from Salon; offered by Rutgers history professor James Livingston

But still. Let us also ask the obvious question. Why do these young white male people whom we routinely characterize as crazyâ€”as exceptions to the rules of civilized comportment and moral choiceâ€”always rehearse and recite the same script? If each killer is so deviant, so inexplicable, so exceptional, why does the apocalyptic ending never vary?

The answer is equally obvious. Because American culture makes this scriptâ€”as against suicide, exile, incarceration, or oblivionâ€”not just available but plausible, actionable, and pleasurable. Semiautomatic, you might say.

Adam Lanza: America’s crisis of masculinity personified - Salon.com

everybodyisahypocrite · Thu Dec 20, 2012 7:34 am

I find all this very true and interesting...

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Thu Dec 20, 2012 4:56 pm

Evening all.

Ok, he's a history professor and he's allowed his opinion, but he's not a psychology prof and a masculinity crisis seems more in their field.

So I wonder about

He wasn’t making a moral choice when he shot his mother in the face with her own gun, and then killed 20 defenseless children.

How the heck does he know? To me killing your mother and 20 children is a very moral statement - it's a fundamental rejection of the values of the society he sees around him. I think the access to serious weaponry does make the shooting spree ending more common, but we've had similar incidents here - our Hungerford Massacre, for example - and the common feature identifiable to both is the social isolation of the killer: Both were rejected and both asserted their own existence by giving the ultimate proof of it - ending the existence of another. (I've a postgrad diploma in psychology, so have at least as much right as the author of the article to pontificate on the matter

)

On the historical side, I think the first complaint about how the young folk weren't as manly as their grandads in English History is traceable back to the Venerable Bede in about 700 AD and it's been going steady ever since. For what it's worth, my take on the matter is that once we are past the purely biological existence of kit it's about being the best of yourself.

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Thu Dec 20, 2012 6:43 pm

I interpreted the piece to be more about cultural myth than about psychology, I suppose it nearly impossible for them to not intersect to at least some extent.

Post by **LarsMac** » Thu Dec 20, 2012 8:06 pm

He makes a couple of interesting points, but I don't agree with his conclusions.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Fri Dec 21, 2012 4:03 am

Ahso!;1413562 wrote: I interpreted the piece to be more about cultural myth than about psychology, I suppose it nearly impossible for them to not intersect to at least some extent.

Fair point. It was certainly the psychological aspect that jumped out at me. There's been some talk of a male/masculinity crisis over here but I'm not sure it's generally regarded as a priority issue at the moment. Could be wrong though.

What in your view is the crisis? What is it to be a Man that men are not able to be?

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Fri Dec 21, 2012 6:15 am

The question of if there's a culture without a masculinity crisis is probably a relevant one. I'd say over the past 40 or 50 years there's definitely been many challenges to masculinity and manhood in the US from the feminist movement as Livingston addresses to the declining relevance of the ideal male being macho. I see it as part of the sexual selection process, and so I find merit in this piece.

Morality questions are always intriguing to me whether they be personal or cultural. I can see why Livingston makes the statement that the actions of Lanza are not a moral choice but of manly status. The idea that we (males) have lost some of our usefulness because we no long live in a hunter/gatherer wildlife setting and consequently some of us have the need to invent one, and so go on a self fulling mission, sort of speak, is plausible to me. It's a matter of survival, after all.

Why are so many men so worried about losing their guns unless they view their guns as an extension of their identity and relevance within the species? Men have proven largely to be greedy, inflexible, strategic minded and highly paranoid. More females are choosing to raise children without men and are becoming quite selective about who they'll procreate with. That's a big threat.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Sat Dec 22, 2012 5:56 am

The crazy thing is it is pefectly possible to go out and live like a hunter gatherer if you want. With as many mod cons as you like or don't like! I do from time to time, and really enjoy a few days or a week or so walking, but believe me it makes you appreciate how good it is that we aren't hunter gatherers any more, especially when the weather turns bad.

Or do some sort of contact sport. The release mechanisms are there, and they work for most people. So when we get this sort of massacre it is a more personal thing than a general angst about not having killed any Mammoth recently, it seems to me. I find the choice of target relevant in this case - killing children and women rather than police officers or at least men? I'm not sure exactly what it signifies, but I suspect a total rejection of the whole of his society and everything about it, because if you destroy the women and children of a society you destroy the future of that society.

gmc · Post by **gmc** » Sat Dec 22, 2012 8:21 am

What he's really saying is the once clearly defined male and female roles in society have changed and many men have difficulty coming to terms with it. Feminism hasn't led to the emasculation of the American male industrialisation and feminism has led to a situation where women can be economical independent and no longer have to stay in failed marriages for the sake of the children. It hasn't led to the break up of family values, they are still there, family values in a patriarchal society are just the hypocritical face of a siociety where women's rioles were defined in relation to the men in their life, wife mother etc etc. Some men can't accept such change so they bleat about a crisis of masculinity because they feel emasculated they thinkl all men do.

William James saw him coming in 1910. In a Protestant culture that had defined manhood and character as the result of real workâ€”a callingâ€”what would happen, he asked, when such work became elusive if not altogether unavailable? Would manhood survive? Or would war then become the principal means of rehabilitating the â€œmasculine virtuesâ€?

The overtly masculine or Macho culture is more usually associated with spain and latin america, I come from a protestant culture where your sense of worth was not a simple function of what you did for a living, "real work" was part of it not the whole thing. In the twenties and thirties and even in Victorian times often the women ended up the main breadwinner as they were the only ones that could get work no one ever suggested that those without work were somehow lesser. It's happening again with mass unemployment often part time female workers are the main breadwinners are their spouses somehow emasculated? Feminism started amongst the ordinary working class women in the factories when they realised they had economic power and hence choices.

He's looking for a simple explanation for something that is complicated. Lanza was alienated from those around him that's it. You get people like him all over the world the rampage he was able to embark was peculiarly american in nature your gun culture is unique.

America has a militaristic, jingoistic culture. It has bugger all to do with industrialisation and the changing gender roles in society it's a peculiarly American phenomenon.

halfway · Post by **halfway** » Sat Dec 22, 2012 10:03 am

It would appear gender reversal is bigger than expected in the USA.

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Sat Dec 22, 2012 11:06 am

halfway;1413718 wrote: It would appear gender reversal is bigger than expected in the USA.Do you mean men and women reversing roles or cosmetic?

halfway · Post by **halfway** » Sat Dec 22, 2012 11:07 am

I'm thinking both.

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Sat Dec 22, 2012 11:32 am

I see them as very different and separate issues.

halfway · Post by **halfway** » Sat Dec 22, 2012 12:36 pm

Ahso!;1413728 wrote: I see them as very different and separate issues.

Of course.

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Sat Dec 22, 2012 1:57 pm

I'm all ears, well eyes actually, but you know what I mean.