Picture a pair of three year old boys trading pretend blows
while play-fighting. They giggle,
laughing as they scream their war cries.
Even if they fell to the ground, wrestling each other as part of this
play—what is the tone of this interaction?
Would you feel the need to stop it? Or would you just shrug and say
‘boys will be boys…’?
Ten years later picture the same boy’s play-fighting, and
now add testosterone.
Ten years later again, add adulthood and adult male physicality.
What is the tone of each of these interactions? Would you, could you, stop it? Note your reaction and replay each of those
scenario’s, first with girls, then with a boy and a girl—do you feel the same
in each situation? If not it might give
you some insight into how you’ve been culturally gender-role conditioned.
We raise boys to be violent.
We promote it with toys,
advertising, sports, books, TV and videogames. Then as adults, we fill our prisons with the
children who grew up to be exactly what we taught them to be, while lamenting
the issue of violent men, and not the culture and or parenting that created
them.
So why do we raise boys to be violent men?
The foundation of glorifying violence is survival-focused
society (which all modern culture’s stem from)—cultures that are focused on just
trying to avoid going extinct. To populate a species you need many uteruses but
only a few penises to impregnate them.
In survival focused society, the value of human’s with a uterus
(females) is at a premium, and people without a uterus (males), are more
disposable—particularly when many of those uterus-bearers may die from
pregnancy, birth, or post-birth complications.
Even with the possibility of extinction, it’s incredibly
difficult to convince a gender to put “the greater good” before its own
survival. The gender role of 'mother' is much more difficult to avoid than the gender role of 'protector'. Sex is a lot of fun, but no one in their right mind wants to fight a bear with a pointy stick,
just because they are male.
In order to convince
men to be willing to face a potentially horrible and violent death at the hands of predators, you must sell to both
genders the idea that heroic death and violence is an incredibly good thing;
you market one gender as heroes, and one gender as needing to be saved.
Societally, even as we progressed from sticks, to spears, to
swords, to muskets, to guns—we have spent generation after generation selling
that idea hard (Why? See the
banana experiment).
We no longer experience a world overrun with natural
predators, women survive birth as the norm, yet we continue to societally ingrain
the idea of heroic death and violence into the masculine identity, and this type of masculinity
as essential to men being “good” and “desirable” males. At the same time we run campaigns to stop men
committing domestic violence against their partners, campaigns explaining to
men that ‘one punch kills’, campaigns that reinforce over and over that men, not the violence they were raised
with, is the problem.
How about teaching our children (of both genders) that boys don’t need to be violent, to be men?
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Reading this blog for the first time, and I think it's great to see what looks like a more moderate voice in the American men's movement. Reading this post, however, I had to point out that there's actually no evidence that playfighting or other kinds of violent play leads to real violence. On the contrary, it (along with other kinds of rough and tumble play) is a great way for kids to learn important social competencies -- especially if there's someone present who can help them communicate. This is important, because a lot of people think that playfighting, along with other violent play such as "cowboys and indians", is a terrible thing.
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