This year, some frightening things were circulating the Internet.
Kelly Wallace, a digital correspondent and editor-at-large for CNN, published her column last Friday “Is the ‘be a man’ stereotype hurting boys?”
The column examined the connections between America’s obsession with perceptions of masculinity in young boys and the school shootings of the last century. Wallace used Jaylen Fryberg, the young shooter in Washington state who killed three girls and injured three others, as an example of a subverted ?stereotype.
Though we ordinarily expect students who commit horrific crimes of large-scale violence at schools to be dejected outcasts, Fryberg was purportedly a golden boy. He was well-liked. He played football and had plans to try out for wrestling. He had recently been named the school’s freshman ?homecoming prince.
Reports said Fryberg’s girlfriend recently broke up with him. He published a stream of heartbroken tweets in the days following the breakup and leading up to the shooting. This leads the observer to assume he brought a gun to school to express some of the pain he was experiencing.
American boys are raised to be so “masculine” that they cannot acknowledge or handle any emotional extremes without violence as a means of expression.
I believe we are doing severe damage to our children. Michael Thompson, a clinical psychologist and co-author of the book “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys,” has written that the cultural idea of masculinity is causing many boys and young men to have trouble ?bearing difficult emotions.
“Teenage boys still have the myths,” Thompson wrote in his book. “They still believe in the myths of total strength and independence, and when your girlfriend drops you and you are flooded with feelings of loss, shame and abandonment, then you think you can’t manage these feelings.”
The numbers are startling. According to the Center for Disease Control, while girls attempt suicide twice as often, 81 percent of completed suicides among people between the ages of 10 and 24 are committed by boys.
This discrepancy could be because of boys’ violent nature: they resort to more violent means from which they cannot be revived, such as firearms or jumping from bridges.
American society’s wholehearted subscription to this single-dimensional, damaging stereotype of how masculinity should be is beginning to cause ?measurable harm.
Boys are taught that they cannot feel if they want to be “real men.” When their emotions reach the kinds of extremes that are natural and common in all of us, they act out against those around them in a desperate attempt to express their emotional weakness through a display of strength.
We have to reverse this disturbing mentality to save young boys and girls alike from the violence that results when America perpetuates flawed, unrealistic models of ?perfection.
sbkissel@indiana.edu
