According to Bureau of Justice statistics, an average of three women a day are murdered by a man who ‘loves them’. It doesn’t feel like a stretch, if one is venturing to make a suggestion on behavior, to maintain the overarching principle that men should aim to be more like women, not the other way around. In other words, acts of compassion and support build character.
A common concern about the idea of raising boys differently is that it will make our boys soft. I think boys are already being raised too gently. Boys are not given the same amount of chores, their mess is more likely to be cleaned up by friends, siblings, parents and teachers, their misbehavior excused, their aggression tolerated, and the connection between their emotional lives and their behavior, not explained to them. They are simply conditioned to cry less and shove down any emotion that is not anger. Whereas girls are expected to control themselves and be helpful from an early age. Daughters are often treated like a third parent vs. sons, who are protected and never given the same amount of responsibilities at any point in childhood and then all the way through parental elder care, where daughters give the majority of the support.
Women withstand violence, abuse, harassment, hate speech, stereotype threat, erasure, and a campaign of objectification. Constantly. And we manage to temper our emotions and not kill. If boys were raised more like girls perhaps there would be less gun violence and murder. Because you know who kills people? The half of the population who were told they were better than. Which is poison.
When you’re told you are better than somebody else for no reason, you were just ‘born better,’ you turn out like our current president. Like rotten fruit on the vine.
Nobody is inherently better than anyone else. Men are misled into thinking that they are owed something in life. This is a false promise. I feel lost and confused, but at least I am not a stupid weak little girl. I feel poor and disenfranchised, but at least I am better at my core than a black person. The perpetrators of mass violence in this country are men and most often white men.
Being told you are better than two giant segments of the population for doing nothing is damaging. You are at once stalled from thinking ‘What’s the point in trying, I’m already naturally fantastic’ and then paralyzed because ‘Uh-oh I am entitled to it all so if I don’t get it, there is something wrong with me because the whole system was set up for me to rule with my inherently better-than self’. The pressure to be the one in charge, the one who provides, the one who knows best when you don’t know anything sounds like a waking nightmare and that expectation/promise is what our culture signals to boys as the only path to manhood.
It is no mistake that black women are the most highly educated and sensible voting block in the United States. This is clearly connected to the fact that in our white supremacy patriarchy culture, black women aren’t told they are better than anyone. Being told you are better than erodes and destroys, takes hold at the root.
Men are divided and broken as a result of patriarchy. Often they need someone, usually a woman or queer person, as a feelings conduit, who will draw out their experience because women and queer people and a number of men of color, have a PhD in emotional understanding and intelligence and cis hetero white men are often stuck back in early childhood when they were first told to man up and had to sacrifice their wholeness.
When men abuse and then kill the wife or girlfriend who threatens to leave them or has already left them, they are feeling like a part of themselves is leaving and they will have to be divided again. It is only through her that this man can have access to a whole complicated understanding of his own emotions, so losing that feels like a threat to his life. This conveniently complements the campaign to dehumanize women, so all she is seen as is what she gives him, no value or even recognition that she has her own life, perceptions, thoughts, needs, selfhood, worth preserving.
Can we agree that this is bad? Men need to have their own access to the very human experience of feeling. Men need to believe that their manhood status is not conditional, is not tied to providing or successfully pushing down their emotions. Hint – anyone who identifies as a man is manly. Unlike what our culture tells us, no one is more or less manly and you can’t have your man-status taken away for being poor, small, emotional, or lacking athletic prowess.
I am invested in men becoming whole. Demanding the same level of hard work, kindness and consideration from our sons as we do our daughters will enrich and save countless lives.
Photo: Bryon Lippincott