As I read, and wrote, all of the above, I kept going back to an essay by Michael Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia.” So I wasn’t surprised to see Kimmel quoted in an old Washington Blade article, “‘Boy Code’ a factor in fatal school shootings?”. Kimmel’s focus is perhaps too specific, as masculinity is just one of many factors in these stories, but his remarks resonate with every story above.
The perpetrators of random school shootings since 1982, all boys, were “overconformists” to the popular notion that being a “real man” means aggressively defending your manhood when it is challenged, such as through prolonged bullying, said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
And no weapon is more emasculating, or brandished more frequently on schoolyards across the country, than the homophobic rhetoric used to describe anything that makes a young man different from his male peers, Kimmel wrote in a June 2003 article for the journal American Behavioral Scientist.
“We found a striking pattern [while analyzing news] stories about the boys who committed the violence: nearly all had stories of being constantly bullied, beat up, and ‘gay-baited,’” Kimmel wrote.
“And most strikingly, it was not because they were gay — at least there is no evidence to suggest that any of them were gay — but because they were different from the other boys: shy, bookish, honor students, artistic, musical, theatrical, non-athletic, ‘geekish,’ or weird,” he continued.
Instead of the standard review of “what went wrong” with individual school shooters, the media, government researchers and society at-large must understand the roles standards of masculinity play in facilitating violent outbreaks by young men, Kimmel said in an interview for this article.
Of course, the stories of boys like Harris, Klebold, and Woodham, get a lot more attention than a story like what happened to Josh Belluardo.
(more…)
Posts
