BOYS WILL BE BOYS (P)

9780385422543

0385422547

Introducticon In recent years we have grown more and more aware of, and concerned with, violence in our streets and in our homes. The women's movement has focused our attention on wife-battering, child-battering, sexual abuse of children, and rape. In some urban centers the evening news begins with a tally of the dead and wounded in local "war zones." The young Brooklyn boy set on fire by a thirteen-year-old and the Central Parkjogger raped and beaten by a group of boys out "wilding" have become symbols of nightmarish urban violence. Our suburbs and small towns, too, are often settings for outbursts of rageful, gruesome acts. The late 1980s brought us machine-gunnings of schoolchildren and coworkers, massacres of parents by their sons, endless vengeful killings of ex-wives, and increases in racist and anti-Semitic acts of violence. We hear increasingly about crimes committed "for fun" or out of curiosity--like the boys in a small Missouri town who wanted to see what it would feel like to kill someone, so they bludgeoned one of their schoolmates to death. Homicide rates have gone up by 100 percent between 1960 and 1990.' It is a major thesis of this book that many of the values of the masculine mystique, such as toughness, dominance, repression of empathy, extreme competitiveness, play a major role in criminal and domestic violence and underlie the thinking and policy decisions of many of our political leaders. The masculine mystique manifests itself differently in different environments but the end result is the same. For a poor ghetto youth, proving that he is a man might involve a willingness to rob, assault, or kill someone. (Homicide is the major cause of death among young African-American males.) For a group of middle- or upper-class boys, it might mean participating in a gang rape, or going on a hundred-mile-an-hour joy ride. (Automobile accidents are the major cause of death among young white males.) For the men in our National Security Council, proving manhood might mean showing how tough they are by going along with a military intervention that is not really necessary for our national security. (In the case of Vietnam this led to the death of at least fifty-eight thousand Americans and well over one million Vietnamese.) For the men in our nuclear think tanks, it might mean making sure we have at least as many nuclear warheads as "they" do, regardless of whether we need them or not. (We have enough of them now to destroy the Soviet Union hundreds of times over.) Men are still the most frequent victims of violence. From 1980 to 1987 about three times as many men as women were murdered per year. More men than women continue to be killed in wars. It is far beyond the scope of this book to analyze how the masculine mystique manifests itself in other cultures. Suffice it to say that it will tend to take somewhat different forms and different degrees of intensity in different societies. For example, in England and Italy some young men prove their toughness, express their desire for dominance, through "soccer hooliganism." In the United States gang warfare is more common. In the United States adherence to the values of the masculine mystique makes intimate, self-revealing, deep friendships between men unusual. In the Soviet Union such friendships seem to be quite common, although Soviet men's preoccupation with dominance and toughness is apparent in other areas. The role that obsolete male modes of thought and behavior have played and continue to play in perpetuating the nuclear arms race has been recognized by an increasing number of people of differing ethical, political, and religious views. Such disparate figures as retired Vice Admiral John Lee, a forty-two-year veteran of the U.S. Navy, and Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan tell us that our nation can no longer relate to foreign powers the way boys rel