Under the archway at a major Eastern University, another college tour with my daughter came to conclusion. Our tour guide, a confident and brassy senior, in reply to a question about freshman living arrangements, noted "There are upper class residents in every unit and specially trained peer counselors for Black, Hispanic, Native American, and women students." Many nodded approvingly, but I was stunned. "Why didn’t she say," I thought to myself, "for everyone but men?"
Looked at objectively, this was unquestionable discrimination, but it appeared to go unnoticed. How could something so blatant be unrecognized? Aaron Kipnis in Knights Without Armor, states that "in America today there appears to be an attitude that boys do not need or deserve the same degree of nurturance, safety, intimacy, love, and support to which girls are entitled."
The evidence for that need is irrefutable. Adolescent males commit suicide nine times more often than their female counterparts. They are admitted into mental hospitals and juvenile institutions seven times more often, succumb far more frequently to substance abuse, and are 20 times more likely to be incarcerated for trouble with the law. They were also a minority in the aforementioned institution’s incoming freshman class. Although the evidence for that need is overwhelming, the perception of that need barely exists. Why?
There seems to be several reasons: First, our current social ideology blinds us to men’s plight. Warren Farrel, in Why Men Are The Way They Are, points out that as society has begun to understand women’s experience of powerlessness, we have unconsciously made a false assumption: that men must have the power women do not have. The view of women as victim, discriminated-against, and oppressed seems to imply that men must be powerful, advantaged, oppressors who either have it good or whose problems are minimal compared to women’s.
The experienced reality of most men is not one of power. Yet the view of "Man as Powerful" permeates our public attitudes, flying in the face of all evidence to the contrary. One reason is that it’s difficult to see what we lack categories for. In experiments in which subjects are asked to identify playing cards overturned from a deck, the subjects will perceive "spades" which have been colored red as a "spade" or "heart" long after the sense "there’s something wrong here" is well established.
Perception is not a passive process; we see only what we have models for. The suffering and oppression of men is such a red spade. When the evidence doesn’t fit our ideology, it’s the evidence we tend to sacrifice.
Our inability to acknowledge men’s suffering and needs is compounded by our conditioning to see male pain as normal. "Women and children first" implies that men’s deaths are more acceptable, their loss of life less a tragedy; they are, in some way, less important, expendable. We have been taught this all through life. Kipnis notes that "In films and television, more than 90 percent of the characters who die are men." Male death becomes normalized, the pain of men invisible, even glorified in sports such as football, hockey, auto racing, boxing . . . . As violence against women and children grows as a political issue, sparking outrage and protest, men having their bones broken and faces bloodied continues to be public entertainment.
Finally, men’s needs are ignored because of the silence of men themselves. This silence has several roots. Somehow different from Mother, their primary caretaker, made of "snakes and snails and puppy dog tails," boys learn early on that their inner life, their core is shameful, something to be hidden. They carry this feeling into adulthood, having no positive, active men to teach them differently, to initiate them into manhood.
Exploring one’s wounds, needs and desires requires sharing and opening to our deepest feelings, and the deepest feeling of men is often that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Avoiding these areas is a high priority for most men, and they are in a double blind when attacked, labeled "wrong" for not expressing feelings. Men have also been trained to be silent.
"Real men" don’t express need. Boys are humiliated for crying; they are taught to push through pain, not express it, and certainly not give into it. The male hero is someone who can go it alone, who can "take it," who doesn’t have to ask for help. For boys, needing and wanting help is defined as "complaining," "whining," something done by "sissies" (i.e. girlish like your sister), and stating those needs is associated with humiliation and abuse, not comfort.
Finally, and perhaps worse of all, men have become invisible to themselves, blind to their disposability. Over 36% of high school and college football players are seriously injured each year; the average life span of a professional athlete is 54 years, and this is what every boy has been trained or pressured to aspire to. They alone submit to selective service registration. Farrell notes that if only Jews, or black Americans were subject to the draft, it would be called discrimination, racism, genocide. Men, taught to suffer in silence, say nothing. Male disposability is called heroism, their silence is a source of pride.
To die for someone else; to lose capacity for pleasure in order to turn one’s body into a weapon for the entertainment or protection of others... This is expandability, yet we name it "privilege" and "power."
I learned as youth that animals are most dangerous when wounded or cornered. Men are wounded. They’ve all learned how to play hurt. It’s normal to them. They might say so if they could, but most can’t. Defined as powerful, the oppressor, we don’t offer counseling or social services for mens’ problems, we see them as the problem. Anesthetized and rendered mute by their own training, the current myth of Man the Monster has backed men into a corner, and when the bottled-up rage explodes in our homes and on our streets we wonder why.
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