Male Arrogance
(Taught or Inbred??) - Page 1

BOYS AND GUNS:

Recent months have seen a series of incidents in which children have opened fire on other children, killing or wounding them. Although academic specialists who study youth violence have noted this, the press in this country generally has paid little attention to the fact that all these violent children have been boys. None has been a girl.

"Historically, boys have always had an interest in soldiering, guns, bombs, fires," says Delbert Elliott, who teaches at the University of Colorado. "That fascination, along with a tendency toward more aggressive behavior, often results in violence." According to Elliott, the only new element is the severity of injury that gets inflicted. "The end used to come after fists caused bloody noses and bruises -- now it's not the end until someone is shot dead," he says. Boys' fascination with weapons and violence is part of the male's genetic inheritance from their prehistoric ancestors. During the Upper Paleolithic, man was the hunter and warrior, and it is this genetic endowment that boys have today. Males are well adapted to the demands of life in a technologically primitive tribe, but they are not so well adapted to the complexities of modern society.

This is why violence is mainly a guy thing. Psychologist David T. Lykken, in his 1995 book The Antisocial Personalities, writes that the most effective way to reduce crime would be to put all able-bodied males between the ages of 12 and 28 into cryogenic sleep.

All societies have to deal , one way or another, with male violence. This is what anthropologist Margaret Mead, in her book Male and Female, called "the recurrent problem of civilization."

And now it is young boys who are picking up the gun. "We need ongoing prevention strategies," observes Larry Cohen of The Prevention Institute in Berkeley, California, "but people only get worked up after a crisis."

That crisis is with us now. Everyone should now be able to see that male violence has gone too far. But what to do?

Myriam Miedzian, author of Boys Will Be Boys, concludes: "If there is a biological predisposition that boys are drawn to guns and aggressive behavior -- and there is evidence that there is -- then we need to deal with the fact that boys are at risk already and design a society that discourages boys from becoming violent. It's like keeping sugar away from a diabetic."

What is the sugar of violence which must be kept away from the male diabetic? It is masculinity. The masculine virtues are the military virtues. They are the virtues of the prehistoric warrior who fought for his tribe. Today, however, when we no longer live in small tribes and when our weaponry is such that it can destroy civilization, there is no longer any place for the warrior.

Males grow up alienated from their genetic essence: They are progammed to be warriors, but our society tells them that they cannot find fulfillment that way because it is too dangerous. The problem is that our society fails to give males an alternative model, an alternative to the old masculine ideal.

There is an alternative model for males. It is one which already exists and needs no social philosopher to invent it. It is femininity.

On the one hand, our male supremacist society tells boys that they must not be feminine, but on the other it condemns them for following the old masculine ideal. This condemnation is unavoidable; masculinity is too dangerous to be tolerated any longer. But the male supremacists who control our society have nothing to put in its place.

There is an interesting essay on the internet that touches on this dilemma. It is "My Son the Cross-Dresser" by Lisen Stromberg. Stromberg's son is only three-and-a-half-years old, and he likes to dress in girls' clothes and play with dolls. She has gotten a lot of criticism from other adults for letting him dress as he likes, but she has a relevant point:

It's not just in my house that the days of 'boys will be boys' are over. A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article that claimed prescriptions for Ritalin were at an all-time high and increasingly, boys are expected to be less rambunctious and more docile (that is, more girl-like). And a guest commentator on an NPR program about youth violence expressed concern that the rise in the births of boys would result in a coming "deluge of testosterone-laden young men" creating havoc in our society.

My mind reels: Is the conclusion that a 3-and-a-half-year-old should be more like a boy but a 12-year-old should be more like a girl?

Stromberg has put her finger on the dilemma of the male supremacist: The continued maintenance of male supremacy requires that boys not be feminized, but it is too dangerous for them not to be.

Dr. Lykken's admittedly humorous proposal to put all young males from 12 to 28 in cryogenic sleep was not meant to be a practical proposal. But the feminization of young males is eminently practical. We must act before it is too late.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT CRIME:

For every 20 criminals in our society, 19 are men while only one is a woman. There are some female criminals, but they are few and far between. Crime is overwhelmingly a male activity. This is the theme of an important new book, Men Are Not Cost-Effective, by June Stephenson.

Dr. Stephenson, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, marshals the evidence that shows how criminally destructive men can get. Of course, most men are not criminals, but crime costs some $300 billion per year, while women are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.

Most of Dr. Stephenson's 469-page book is taken up with the basic facts about male crime. She documents the rapid growth of male criminal activity and makes it clear that this growth has itself made the threat of prison a less effective deterrent because prison overcrowding has led to shorter sentences and early releases. Then these early releases lead to more crime, which exacerbates the problem of overcrowding.

Dr. Stephenson devotes her last chapter to a discussion of proposals for reducing male crime. Some of her proposals are for various reforms which have been suggested many times before, but she also has a few new twists based on her analysis of crime as a predominantly male phenomenon. One is a proposal designed to educate men about the male nature of the problem; she calls this "gender equity in taxation".

"Many women pay for male crime with their lives," she writes, "but all women taxpayers pay for male crime with their tax dollars." Her proposal is that there be a substantial income tax deduction for being female; in this way women would not have to foot the tax bill for male crime. Such a policy would certainly be more fair than the present system, and just proposing gender tax equity would serve to educate men about the fundamentally male character of the crime problem. Of course, a lot of men are not going to like it, but bringing up the topic of tax equity for women should help men to come to see that women tend to be more emotionally mature and self-disciplined than they are and that it was time to start doing something about male immaturity.

The best thing to do about male immaturity is for men to accept the moral guidance of women in their lives. But Dr. Stephenson doesn't propose that they do this. This is because she prefers to believe that there are no innate differences between men and women. If that were the case, then the only differences between the sexes would be due to differences in social conditioning.

A lot of feminists believe that there are no innate gender differences. In fact, this view is so widespread that it deserves to be called "the official party line." These feminists have a reason for taking this position: they are afraid that if they admit that there are any innate differences between men and women, then the male supremacists will twist the facts around to try to prove that women should be kept in their traditional subordinate role. So these feminists just ignore the evidence for innate differences between the sexes.

The problem with this tactic is that most people are very much aware that there are such innate differences. So when feminists deny their existence, they end up looking more than a little silly. Well intentioned as it is, the tactic of pretending that all gender differences are merely cultural is not going to work in the long run.

On the other hand, writers like Dr. Stephenson are perfectly right when they say that a lot of the differences in behavior between men and women are due to cultural conditioning. Boys and girls are raised differently; they are given different role models, and this explains much of why men commit so many more crimes than women. So what does she propose to do about it?

Here her basic concept is androgyny. This means that every person has both a masculine side and a feminine side to their personality. Dr. Stephenson's proposal is that we help boys to develop their feminine side: "We're talking here about helping boys value and develop the feminine side of their personalities." Since girls seldom grow up to engage in the destructive behavior that so many boys do, teaching boys to act like girls should cut down on the amount of crime. To the extent that male crime is due to social conditioning and does not derive from innate factors, the best thing we could do for boys would be to help them develop their potential for femininity.

Of course there will be resistance to such a proposal. As long as our society continues to view women as inferior to men, any effort to teach boys to be feminine will be condemned as degrading boys to the level of girls. Such efforts will be criticized as making "sissies" out of the boys. But here Dr. Stephenson asks: "aren't 'sissies' better than murderers?"

The fact is that many parents tolerate a great deal in the way of potentially antisocial character traits in their sons because they believe that girls are inferior to boys and that therefore it is better to run the risk of the boys growing up to be criminals than to give them lessons in femininity. The results of these parents' attitudes are reflected in the shocking crime statistics in Dr. Stephenson's book.

June Stephenson has written an important and timely book. Our prisons are overcrowded, and the cost of law enforcement in this country continues to skyrocket. As the back cover of Dr. Stephenson's book observes, "Men Are Bankrupting Our Country!"

Men Are Not Cost-Effective: Male Crime In America -- by June Stephenson, Ph.D. Diemer, Smith Publishing Company, Inc., 3377 Solano Avenue, Napa, California 94558. $18.00.

Continued on Net Page With:

WHY GIRLS ARE YUCKY

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