UMASS PROFESSOR SAYS LITTLETON SHOOTINGS ARE SYMPTOMATIC OF MALE IDENTITY CRISIS
He calls male violence the logical outcome of societal messages
AMHERST, Mass. -- University of Massachusetts communication professor Sut Jhally says the recent shootings in Littleton, Colo., demonstrate once again that the country has not learned the lessons of past gun-related tragedies. "When you look at the media coverage of these events, all the headlines are about 'kids killing kids' or the 'problem of youth violence.' But this isn't kids killing kids, it's boys killing other boys and girls. There's something about the way in which we're raising boys that leads to this. And until we focus on that, and realize that what we have is not a crisis of youth violence, but a crisis of masculinity, then these kinds of tragedies are inevitable."
Jhally is founder of the Media Education Foundation in Northampton, a non-profit institution which distributes videos exploring aspects of the media. At present, Jhally is working with UMass alum Jackson Katz on a video about violence and American boys. The film -- "Tough Guise: Media, Violence, and the Crisis in Masculinity" -- explores the changes in boys' and men's lives over the past several decades, especially those catalyzed by the women's movement, and gay and lesbian civil rights movements.
While it is tempting to look at the horrific massacre in Littleton as an isolated incident involving deeply disturbed boys, this is a dangerously short-sighted view, according to Katz. "Littleton is an extreme case, but if you've looked critically at the cultural environment in which we're socializing boys and training them to be men, you shouldn't be terribly surprised. There is a crisis in masculinity in our culture as we approach the millennium. These school shootings -- all by white adolescent males -- are telling us something about how we're doing as a society, much like the canaries in coal mines, whose deaths were a warning to the miners that the caves were unsafe."
According to Katz, at the same time that boys and men have been pioneering new forms of egalitarian relationships with girls and women, trying out new styles of manhood and fatherhood that are less confining than those of their fathers' and grandfathers' generations, the culture has been serving up an ever-flowing stream of images of violent, abusive men in the media, the sports culture, comedy, music, and pro wrestling. "These images serve to normalize cultural definitions of masculinity that equate characteristics like dominance, power, and control, and violence as a means of establishing or maintaining 'manhood,'" he says.
Responding to reports that the two boys were laughing as they were shooting, Jhally says he is not at all surprised. "If you look at the culture of violent masculinity that boys are immersed in, you see that that violence is treated as a joke, where people like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis deliver a joke as they blow someone away. What we need are depictions of violence with their real tragic consequences, not the 'happy violence' that is presented to us."
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