What role does 'toxic masculinity' play in mass shootings?
Why? One reason may well be "triple privilege," as it is called in a 2014 paper that has attracted new interest after the recent mass attacks. Published by Eric Madfis of the University of Washington at Tacoma in the journal "Men and Masculinities," Madfis concluded that mass killers tend to share elements of white entitlement and heterosexual masculinity pressured by anxieties about middle-class instability and downward economic mobility.
"Women tend to internalize blame and frustration, while men tend to externalize it through acts of aggression," Madfis, who is an associate professor at the university's criminal justice department, told Politico last year.
Madfis describes symptoms that feminists have labeled "toxic masculinity." Testosterone often catches the blame, but researchers have found that high testosterone might be more of a symptom than a cause of violent behavior.
Societal influences probably play a larger role, including messages from media, sports, the military, the workplace and our educational system that may link masculinity to expressions of aggression by men. One often-cited example is a macho-heavy ad for Remington's Bushmaster Rifle. It portrays the military assault-style rifle with the bold headline: "Consider Your Man Card Reissued."
Remington hardly invented the linkage between manhood and sexy-looking military-style weapons. It's baked into our culture and, many would say, hard-wired into our male brains.
But research and everyday experience also suggests that societal influences play a larger role than biology; otherwise, there would be many more of us shooting up innocent people.
In that sense, we can view the racial disparity in mass shooters as a function of environment. For example, we tend to view the horrendously and disproportionately high rate of black deaths and injuries in some Chicago neighborhoods as a consequence of higher poverty rates in those neighborhoods. It makes sense for us to take a similarly closer look at the higher rate of mass shootings, mostly by young males, in predominately white neighborhoods.
In the end, contrary to President Trump's observation, whether it is hatred, mental illness or confused lessons about the meaning of manhood, we need to find ways to prevent that trigger from being pulled.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
