An Omaha or a Columbine makes us cry out, “What’s making our children kill?” In fact, it is not our children who are killing. It is our sons.
Why? Pundits compete: “It’s violence in the media”; “it’s the availability of handguns”; “it’s poor family values”. But our daughters are of the same family’s values, also exposed to violence in the media, also able to find the same guns in the same homes. And our daughters are not killing.
What distinguishes our sons’ lives from our daughters’? A lot.
Start with suicide. Each boy who kills is also committing suicide. People who commit suicide generally have four things in common: they feel either no one loves them or really respects them; that no one needs them; that there’s little hope of that changing; and they feel they can’t discuss their feelings about this without being mocked or making things worse.
It is that last characteristic in particular that is especially common among male adolescents. Boys and girls at the age of 9 are equally likely to commit suicide; by the age of 14, boys are twice as likely; by 19, four times as likely; by 24, six times. Both the male role and suicide are highly correlated with the repression of emotions. A Columbine or an Omaha may be prevented in the future by reporting boys’ gun-related jokes or shadow-side fantasies. But that’s only telling boys to express their feelings so we can control the feelings they express. What we repress in one place will pop up in another. Unless we care enough to be boy-sensitive at the deepest level.
Being boy-sensitive challenges our genetic heritage. For millennia societies that survived prepared their sons for disposability in war, or as workers. We have an unconscious investment in readying our boys for disposability–which is why no one questions male-only draft registration of our sons at eighteen. And why parents often cheer sons playing football who are learning to call physical abuse glory even as our daughters learn to call the police. Before we can find boys’ inner world, we must decide what we want to emerge from their cocoon: a gun or a butterfly.
Instead, our sons are experiencing the Vietnamization of masculinity. In Vietnam, we condemned only our sons for what we drafted only our sons to do. Today our sons face a Catch-22: they see the football players being cheered for even as we condemn their macho. The doctors and dotcommers are still considered most eligible for love, but often their focus on work and money does not make them lovable. The Vietnamization of our sons is rewarding them for playing the old role and condemning them for having the mentality the old roles breed.
Suicide is also correlated with the failure to feel loved or needed. There is no area in which young teenage boys feel more vulnerable than in love and sex. Robert Hawkins, like Charles Andy Williams of the Santee killings, had just broken up with his girlfriend. Boy-sensitive programs in our schools would also be sensitive to the nature of our sons’ vulnerabilities in love and sex.
What would boy-sensitivity look like? It would question our daughters now having the option to initiate even as only our sons still have the expectation. Most boys soon learn that by the Junior or Senior year the more attractive girls are doing less and less of the initiating. We still say sex is dirty, and still expect our sons to initiate the dirt. Yet, when our sons know little about either girls or sex, they are expected not only to risk sexual rejection, but lectured about their penis transmitting STD’s; they fear going too slowly and being a wimp or loser; or going too quickly and being a date rapist. They have most of the old role, many new expectations and very few programs focused on either encouraging our daughters to share responsibility for sexual rejection or guiding our sons through the emotional traumas induced by their old role with new demands.
Suicide is decreasing for our daughters as we increase our daughters’ ways of succeeding; it is increasing for our sons as we increase our sons’ ways of failing. Our schools are focused on raising the self-esteem of girls, on special programs for girls in math and science, on scholarships for females only. But it is our sons who are more likely to have ADHD, be loners, anti-social, and have run-ins with the law, like Robert Hawkins… Any parent knows that if we pay attention to one child and ignore the other, there is no question that the ignored child will act out; the only questions are how and when.
Good guidance begins with the guide. The Vietnamization of masculinity has produced mixed messages and confused sons. When we care as much about saving males as saving whales, we will also save ourselves. When we seek to find boys’ inner world, we will give a gift to our sons in the 21st Century that we gave to our daughters in the 20th Century.
Dr. Warren Farrell’s books include Why Men Are the Way They Are, as well as Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say and Father and Child Reunion. He has taught at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego and currently lives with his wife and daughters in Mill Valley, California, and virtually at www.warrenfarrell.com.
