There’s something wrong with men. I am one, I feel it. Something is broken. The last two mass shootings — two massage spas and a grocery store — might be old news by the time you read this, but it feels like an open wound.
How are you doing?
We say we’re becoming numb and I don’t believe it. I have never hurt so much in my life. No matter how loud you turn up the radio or how many devices you bury your head in, it still hurts.
Does it need to be said that the shooters were male? They almost always are. If we’ve got one thing going for us, it’s consistency. I don’t want to determine here on this page why men indiscriminately kill, but I want to recognize that this is a thing being done by men. Women have their own brand of rage I’ve found, but that is not my business to solve. It does not leave so many bodies on the ground. Women are murderers, there’s no doubt. I taught a writing workshop several years ago in a women’s prison in Anchorage, Alaska, and sat in a circle of women, some of whom had killed. Good writers, I have to say, enthusiastic about the craft. They had their demons, and maybe they weren’t so different from any of ours, but I’m not talking about theirs. I imagine they had reason to kill. I didn’t ask.
I didn’t grow up fighting, but I grew up male. My dad was a brawler. We were playing pool and a guy stacked quarters on our table. My dad didn’t like his look and swiped his coins to the floor, saying, “Go play with yourself.” As in, don’t interrupt me and my son, but in a less polite way. I talked the guy down. I’m better at that than fighting, maybe it’s growing up with a single mother.
Comedian Louie C.K., outed and shamed, asked how lucky he is to be a white male, saying he can have and do anything. “That is a huge leg up, are you kidding me?” he said, at least until he was publicly disgraced. It was comedy because it was true enough to hit home. Having everything can’t be healthy. No wonder we’re fighting territorial boundaries with one another, why we drag chains of atrocities behind us, with so many others caught up in them. You have to be good to be a man. The alternative is unacceptable.
I have a dear friend who believes men no longer need to exist. I don’t agree. I think we are two halves of a whole, and though we are way off kilter, struggling through a patriarchal sea that feels like it’s drying up, we can come together to create more than the sum of our parts. She figures sperm can be banked or organically constructed. She says that the human race needs to jettison us like the stage of a rocket that tumbles back to Earth on fire and spinning. Maybe that’s why Elon Musk puts extra rockets on his stages, lowering them to the ground. We want to come back home.
I was a student in the Women’s Studies department at CU Boulder when I was in college, and I’d shop at the King Soopers grocery store where four decades later a young man would kill ten people with a legally available weapon designed to rapidly lay waste to living things. In the program I took classes in feminist theory, women’s literature, and women and the law, because something seemed wrong, something needed to be understood. If all the rest of the university from literature to physics was thought of as Men’s Studies, I sought the other side of the coin. Some of the women in the program were firebrands who wanted men out of the picture, and I appreciated their leading the charge, while most were trying to fix something between us, asking if I could help mend what has come apart, a taller order than I thought back then.
One of my professors had a saying on her office wall: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Maybe so. But here we are, and many are enraged, lost, afraid, and broken, and many are armed.
I told my 14-year-old that it’s best not to throw the first punch. Even if the other guy goes down and you walk away a hero, you will be haunted by the harm you’ve caused. Do not glorify it. Do not think by breaking someone else you’ve solved anything. You will have taken an invisible wrong inside yourself and given it shape in the world, something we all need to be careful of. I didn’t use those words, he’s 14 and there’s only so much I want spilling out of my mouth onto him.
When November 19th rolled around last year, he came downstairs and said, “Happy International Men’s Day.” He then said he saw a post that read something like, before you celebrate this day remember the terrible men in history and the patriarchy and how men are awful, followed by pictures of Hitler, Pol Pot, etc. He shrugged it off, but not entirely. I could see the splinter left in him, joining the ranks of people who are despised for one identifier or another. How do I help him find his way and be a good man, a definition I don’t have down pat myself? When I told him it can be a tough spot to be in, he said so is everywhere else.
Art with permission from my friend Jeremy Collins, illustrated after the Sandy Hook shooting
Oh, Craig, you expressed so well how frighteningly off kilter manhood has become. It’s not new, but now toxic masculinity goes about waving banners, killing, brutalizing. Having spent my professional career working with women–and men–abused, disbelieved, gravely harmed by fathers, strangers, clergy, college athletes, even doctors, I am grateful to you for your call to men. Thank you. I hope your words will reach opinion pages in newspapers, networks, educators, and the community of men. Sadly, there is a growing trend of truth-denying, fact-distorting, and alarming indifference. At a seminar on the environment facilitated by Upaya of Santa Fe and in which all presenters were women, the glaring conclusion of the teachings is that the primary cause of the crisis is white male privilege.
I have found it difficult to be around women. Even as a child, I preferred the company of boys, climbing up to that treehouse as the only girl who could. Yeah, a few boys were mean, but a boy was my best friend, walking to school and solving the problems of our pre-teen world together. Now, at 71, I look back on all the male mentors whose support I’ve enjoyed. My world is so much larger because of them. I can count the women mentors on one hand and have fingers left over. Yeah, the boys can be mean, but women destroy; they eat their young, and stomp on other women to get what and where they want to be. During “Women’s Month,” as we celebrate Maya Anjelou, Mother Teresa, Michelle Obama and others, let’s not forget Lady MacBeth, Ellen Degeneres, Leona Helmsley, Eva Braun, and so many others who left a trail of wreckage or goaded others to do so. My grandson will be born in June. It is my goal to celebrate his white maleness and not allow anyone to shame him because he is white and male. He has a lot to give to this world and will hopefully mentor many, including females, in how to get the most out of life without harming others along the way.
You aren’t wrong about violent men. There are too many. I am angry about it and I understand why women are frightened and furious. However, your woman friend who wants to solve the problem by eliminating all men reminds me of the “final solution” hatched by Hitler and other violent men. Elimination of nearly half of the human race would be the ultimate example of genocide. There must be another way. Parents raising their children by example to be patient, kind, loving and reasoning individuals could help.
Not all (fill-in-the-blank) are the same.
You have said what many of us think, Craig. The world feels very broken.
I think your friend has a point. Humanity would continue, and thrive, in a world absent raging mass killers. We men, and especially we unconsciously privileged white men, are responsible in large part for the rage women feel.
Craig has a point and I acknowledge that discomfort. However, I am not responsible for the atrocities of others. While I am not completely unbiased my bias is not because of my “whiteness” it is the result of my humanity. We are all biased against one another; male, female and colors. I refuse to bear the mantle of toxic masculinity whether based on color or culture and do my best to listen, to feel and act with forethought encouraged by my children, the inheritors and molders of the future.
There are a lot of very good men of all ethnicities in the world. Only a small number are sociopaths or mentally damaged from bad parenting or abuse. If only there were a way to prevent them from having access to weapons.
I have raised a gentle, aware, creative white man who has more capacity to forgive than I, his mother, could ever hope to have. The horrific actions of violent men do not define him; nor should he and the many others like him be “eliminated” due to his gender. For heaven’s sake— even if that is hyperbolic rhetoric, step back and consider what is being said. It is as wrong as the actions of a killer with his AR15.
“If all the rest of the university from literature to physics was thought of as Men’s Studies, I sought the other side of the coin.”
It’s a truth that many recognize by now, but I’ve not seen it expressed so well.
I think some of the comments above are a perfect microcosm of what prevents positive change in how male humans are socialized in our culture: apologia, women-trashing, i’m not responsible for others, etc. Then there are the thoughtful: I hear you, let me reflect on that, let me take responsibility for my part of this. Plus que ca change, yadda yadda. my hope is diminishing that I’ll ever see significant improvement in my lifetime. Regardless, thank you for your heartfelt take on the situation.
Craig, thank you for articulating the profound sorrow and struggle of this time. Of late, when I read of someone’s “zest for life,” I feel my own burdened by the weight of so many and such massive challenges, divides, trends, threats, and indeed violence — which make my heart heavy and sometimes my mind scatters in search of answers that elude. To your son’s final comment in your piece, some years ago I started saying, “The front line is everywhere.” Then I added, “All the time.”
Still I seek the beauty and joy that exists, seemingly for its own sake, and that helps to sustain me. And this particular writing of yours gives me a sense of relief of sorts, a sense that it is actually more sane to be so deeply riven and profoundly sad about the state of everywhere. So still, I work to counter those forces in the ways I can and to keep my spirit alive for all it can do and be and share. Many thanks for the ways that your words and stories help with that.
Thank you for the heartfelt column. Not by a long shot do I agree with your friend who wants all men to go away. I count many of them as my dear friends and family. But there’s something seriously wrong in this country if I, a 50-something female, cannot drive the 5 min to my local grocery store and not be stalked and threatened by an aggressive young male. My crime? Taking my right of way at a 4-way stop. Apparently, to him, my other “crime” was being female. This was day before yesterday.
This has to stop.
Your dear friend stated: “I have a dear friend who believes men no longer need to exist.”
In part, I have to agree. Many men such as they are right now, are indeed compromising peace and happiness for the sake of their insanity. And this is the part of men that needs to no longer exist. The ability for any man to cause pain and suffering by their repetitious choices to be harmful or worse. I grew up in the house where my dad was my mothers abuser. So much so that when she finally divorced him, she never let a man near her again.
This part of male expression needs to STOP.
It is easy to see that the male half of our society is directly responsible for so much pain and suffering, because of a severe shortage of heart. Because of a massive amount of mental & emotional burden that many men have no skillset to manage. And that lack of heart where many men just follow along with an individual(s) who is severely sick.
As a human being my first responsibility to humanity is the care of my mental & emotional well being. This has helped me develop a relationship with my loving human heart. My human heart is the antidote to so much of the male propensity to live like children walking around in man pants.
Too many times I have felt responsible for the horrors that other men have brought to my mom, a fiance, and to all women and children.
I choose Honor and Nobility as a way of life. I may falter but I can get back onto that horse when I see my miss step.
Your commentary makes me think of Chuck Palahniuk’s book Fight Club. A lot of people probably think that that story is just cheap genre fiction, but I think it runs far deeper than that. It’s not just entertainment. I think Palahniuk had his finger on the pulse of a certain cross section of American males when he wrote that book. There is something there. There is something remarkably similar in the profound sense of alienation underlying the violence of men in our society that you reference and the male characters and their violent behavior in that book. In that book the characters beat each other and disrupt and break things in society rather than perpetrate mass murders, but as told there is something in their motivations for that violence that seems relevant to the issue at hand here.
From the book:
“ We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war … our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.“
And when your write the following you could be speaking to the characters in that book.
“Do not glorify it. Do not think by breaking someone else you’ve solved anything. You will have taken an invisible wrong inside yourself and given it shape in the world, something we all need to be careful of.”