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Do I have to hurt you to call myself a man?
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Is violence hard-wired into males? Recent school shootings in this country again raise the same questions about violence in the media, ostracism of outsiders and the decline of
the American family’s social
cohesion.
We men in civilization live in a confusing time; the transition from boyhood to manhood is not marked in an iron-clad way. When I was in junior high, my classmate Victor made it “all the way” with a girl he met at the mall, and the guys in my class agreed, “You da’ man!”
From a feminist perspective, however, this is a chauvinist practice that exploits the female as an object, which doesn’t constitute a rite of passage, so much as a rite of power.
Or are they the same? Most of our masculine role models in the media are depicted as powerful men who can achieve their will, wherever they choose to apply it. The American iconography has changed with the times. Instead of Dirty Harry, Burt Reynolds and John Wayne, men who carried physical power with them, we now have a more sensitive breed of American icons – such as Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.
In the music sphere, the hard edge in the 80s was personified by groups like Motley Crue, whose antics on and offstage deservedly created its own mythology – drugs, sex and rock-n-roll.
Our modern hard-edged music is much less a celebration of rampant hedonism than it is a showcase of whiny men with feelings – hence, we have “emo.”
Is it your first paycheck or your first car? Is it your first confused grope session in the backseat of your first car? To be honest, I consider myself a man, but I can’t say what one event crystallized my status as a man.
I could rely on other people calling me a man, but then you fall victim to allowing other people to confer status on you – my idea of a man is someone who rejects easy labeling, and makes his life the way he wants it to be.
A child with a gun is a scary thought. What drives a child to kill? Is it just the ostracism, the unhappy family life and the violent images in the media, or is it something more basic?
What if it’s biology? Looking at various tribal groups around the world, you see official rites of passage that include several aspects of violence.
In one ceremony, the forehead is cut in close, parallel lines that later form scars, telling marks of a man.
Most rites of passage differ, but many of these rites involve killing an animal, thereby displaying prowess in food gathering. In another, more gruesome ritual, circumcision is performed.
These days, the hospitals perform this rite on young infants, so that our penises won’t be so ugly. But why complain? We have pretty penises.
Maybe we lose one avenue of finding manhood in that moment of circumcision, but I’m glad I didn’t have to go through that when I could remember it.
Despite genital mutilation as standard American hospital practice, men seem to have a basic urge to express themselves physically, violently.
Whether it was knocked into us by our parents – sometimes literally – or by the media, is unclear.
What is clear is that there is no stable definition of what makes a man a man, at least here in the United States.
Maybe it’s honesty and commitment, but something sarcastic in me says that’s what the women want to hear.
What do I think a man is? It is a human being with male gonads who has grown to the age of eighteen.
He can smoke, vote and join the military. What a horrible definition.
Yeah, but that’s what “the man” says “a man” is, and he’s the one in charge. So what makes the man?
MICHAEL J. MCLASKEY
Opinion Writer
