A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss

Solving Maleness
August 23, 1999


At last week's annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, the usual gaggle of experts trotted out the usual bumper-sticker research.

Their message: the recent spate of school shootings is proof positive that bringing up boys the old-fashioned way is an invitation to disaster, and we need to reinvent maleness before it's too late.

Mind you, the news cycle dominates even the ivy-covered halls of Academe nowadays: no surprise, when you consider how most research is funded. The school shootings are red meat for hungry academics, who adroitly manipulate the most heartbreaking headlines in pursuit of scarce research dollars

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Among the great minds present at the APA meeting was Harvard Medical School psychologist William Pollack, whose field of expertise is the menace of maleness. For two decades, he's been a player in the gender wars, staking out his own little turf in the mushy terrain of the feminized university.

"I think we have a national crisis of boys in America," Pollack said urgently, conjuring up visions of lads so damaged by having to memorize the rules of manhood that they sometimes spontaneously explode into savagery.

Pollack and friends argue that the shootings, along with a miscellany of other horrors (depression, suicide, schoolyard bullying), occur because American boys are being raised to be too male. They need to be rescued from such John Wayne virtues as courage and stoicism, and taught instead to cry, and share.

"For some boys who are not allowed tears," Pollack warns, "they will cry with their fists or they will cry with bullets."

I'd have to guess that he's not counting the Menendez brothers, who wept with gusto through two trials for the brutal murder of their parents, thus demonstrating that some boys can cry with bullets AND with tears.

Actually, despite the screaming headlines, these violent outbursts are really exceedingly rare. Even in this bloody decade, school shootings have hardly been our daily bread. There were two in 1992, rising to six by 1998, with another half-dozen incidents so far this year, including the April horror in Littleton.

Shocking, yes: each such incident is a nightmare for the victims, an unbearable loss of innocence for the nation -- and an alarm bell in the night for us all.

Still, they hardly represent real life for most American kids. To argue that these shootings reveal much of anything about the soul-state of American boyhood is like arguing that Susan Smith (the young mother who, in the fall of 1994, killed her two little boys by driving them into a lake, helplessly tethered to their car-seats) exposed the invidious impact of feminism on American womanhood.

The shootings terrify us. When we send our children off to the uncertain sanctuary of the schoolroom, we can't help wondering, sometimes, Are we next? Is there worse to come? Little wonder that since Columbine, interest in home-schooling has soared, as frightened parents struggle to create some zone of safety for their kids.

But we're still overwhelmingly unlikely ever to have to face such violence in our own lives. In a nation of 270 million people, in which tens of millions of boys attend thousands of schools every day without incident, Mr. Pollack's 'national crisis' hardly lives up to its billing.

Most American boys -- like most American men -- are pretty nice fellows. They don't kill people or commit suicide or inflict mayhem on their communities.

Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), of the relatively small percentage of males who do engage in violent behavior, many aren't raised with a particularly strong sense of maleness. Instead, these bad boys frequently grow up in highly feminized environments, going from households in which Mom is the only parent present to schoolrooms dominated by female teachers. Their exemplars and authority-figures are women, not men.

The First Bad Boy himself grew up henpecked, or so we were recently told by Hillary Clinton, in her remarkably narcissistic 'Talk' magazine interview.

Mrs. Clinton implied that the president's misdeeds were byproducts of a childhood awash in feminine feelings, as his mother and grandmother competed for his love.

Heaven knows, the man is no John Wayne. He's a bundle of tears, hugs, and glossy chatter, a touchy-feely emotion junkie without so much as a trace of deadly machismo. If he were any more in touch with himself, he'd be against the law in 27 states.

Yet for all that, he's racked up a fairly spooky record. Alleged brutal acts against helpless women: shark politics of the most cold-blooded variety: the carpet-bombing of other people's countries. Not exactly warm and lambent, if you take my point.

Perhaps William Pollack could explain it all to me.

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A VIEW FROM HERE archive

The Media: A Nose Like a Vacuum Cleaner -- August 19, 1999

A Voter's Guide To The 21st Century -- August 16, 1999

A Good Town -- August 12, 1999

Singing The Praises Of Government News -- August 9, 1999

The First Couple's Chamber Pot -- August 5, 1999

Lifetime's Woman of the Year -- August 2, 1999

Thinking Over This Tax Cut Thing -- July 29, 1999

The John John Show -- July 26, 1999

America's One China, Two Alka Seltzer Policy -- July 22, 1999

The Politics of Speaking Ill of the Dead -- July 19, 1999

The Nasty Legacy -- July 15, 1999

All in a Slow News Week... -- July 12, 1999

Traps For The Young -- July 8, 1999

Remembering Michael Dukakis -- July 5, 1999

R.I.P., O.I.C. -- July 1, 1999

Mr. Clinton's Post-War Vengeance -- June 28, 1999

Guns, Cuisinarts and the Bill of Rights -- June 24, 1999

Attack of the Concerned Advocates -- June 21, 1999

FTC Nation -- June 17, 1999

The Very, Very Coincidental World of Bill and Hillary Clinton -- June 14, 1999

Water-boiling in Our Time -- June 10, 1999

Crisis and Peace -- June 7, 1999

Reinventing God -- June 3, 1999

On This Memorial Day -- May 31, 1999

The Un-McCarthy Era -- May 27, 1999

Unspeakable Spin -- May 25, 1999