Discussion List for campus-based and allied personnel working to end gender-based violence on campus.

["Cathy Nardo" <>]

Passing this on from Jackson Katz....

 

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Hi, friends and colleagues.

I wanted to alert you to the publication of the new edition of an important and oh-so-timely book.   The title is Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence, by Myriam Miedzian.  It is a  groundbreaking and highly accessible discussion of the connections between cultural constructs of masculinity and the pandemic of interpersonal, state and political violence that sadly characterizes our time.  The book was originally published in 1991 but has recently been reissued, with a lengthy introduction by the author that updates some of the book's key themes in light of more recent historical developments.

I hope everyone who is concerned about violence and related issues reads this book  -- immediately.   (Full disclosure: Myriam is a friend of mine.) We have no hope of dramatically reducing violence unless we ask and seek to answer some of the fundamental questions that Myriam Miedzian takes on.  For example, if violence is part of "human nature," then why is the vast majority of violence perpetrated by males?  (Females are human, too.)  How does our society's -- and other societies' -- definitions of manhood contribute to the pandemic of violence?  What role do childrearing practices play?  How do pop cultural images contribute to the problem - or to possible solutions?  What about the sports culture?  Children's toys?

I think it is important that people purchase and read this book because so few people outside of feminist academia are asking these sorts of questions today.  The conservative and antifeminist  ideological gatekeeping in the mainstream media is just incredible. The subjects in Boys Will Be Boys should be discussed all the time, on television and radio talk shows, in the major newspapers and magazines.  People should be talking about the gendered aspect of violence in so many different forums.  But no. There has been a massive averting of the eyes from the obvious: that men and boys commit the vast majority of violence, and that how we construct masculinities and socialize boys is close to the heart of the problem.  (Obviously class, race, ethnicity and other factors are critical as well - but they all interact with gender construction in profoundly consequential ways). 

One of the most interesting aspects of Boys Will Be Boys is Myriam's discussion of her experiences with media after the book was first published in the early nineties.  As a woman, she got a lot of criticism from some men who were so unnerved by her (accurate) naming of the problem that in some cases they actually verbally abused her - on the air!  But in many cases their response was to ignore the book or refuse to review it.

That's a shame, because Boys Will Be Boys (Lantern Books: New York, 2002) is such an important book.  I hope the new edition gets the attention it so richly deserves.  I have to say I personally got a lot out of it, and many of its themes echo in the narrative of my video Tough Guise.

If you scroll down, you will find some excerpts from the book if you want to get a further idea of its content.

Please forward this message to anyone you think might be interested.

Thanks for your time.

Jackson Katz




QUOTES FROM THE 2002 INTRODUCTION TO BOYS WILL BE BOYS: Breaking The Link Between Masculinity And Violence by Myriam Miedzian


WOMEN'S STUDIES, PEACE MOVEMENT

"Since the publication of  Boys Will Be Boys…[I have been] dismissed as a  'male basher' on national television and radio and as a 'well known man hating Lesbian Feminist who regularly rails against male children' on the web. Rush Limbaugh  [has referred] to me  as a  'feminazi…'

A writer [ informed me that] his review of Boys Will Be Boys had been rejected by a leading left wing intellectual magazine. The editor's comments  'made no rational sense at all,' he told me. 'He's never rejected anything I've written; I think he just couldn't deal on an emotional level with your cultural critique of masculinity…'
Colleagues whose work is also focused  on  traditional masculinity and violence  have told me that because of the instant aversion on the part of so many  progressive thinkers to any gender analysis of violence,  they have decided to  focus on the characteristics of violence prone people without  antagonizing their audiences by mentioning  the gender of  a vast majority of these people…

I have dwelled at length on the denial and rage that a gender analysis of violence leads to in some men, because it serves to prevent or at least significantly delay change. Moving away from an obsolete concept of masculinity and the violence that it entails is at least as radical  a change as the 18th century movement  away from absolute monarchy in favor of  a concept of  the rights of  "man", the  19th century abolishing of slavery, or the 20th century granting of equal rights to women. In fact it is probably more radical. In order for significant steps to be taken in this new direction, strong support from a variety of quarters will be required. To have significant segments of the nation's thinkers be in a state of denial about the problem, to have an academic world in which, with the exception of women's studies, one is  likely to be penalized for dealing with it, to have magazines, journals, and newspapers often averse to publishing articles about the problem, is an enormous handicap."


PEACE MOVEMENT, POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL PUBLIC

"In the first edition of  Boys Will Be Boys, I wrote that the values of the masculine mystique and  the equation of  militarism with  patriotism obscure the fact that  many  national defense decisions have more to do with the economic interests of the military-industrial-complex than with defense needs. Nowhere is this more clear than in our government's failure… to focus on the single most serious threat that has confronted us in  recent years--terrorism. Already in the mid to late nineties, experts… warned that  much of the enormous  Pentagon budget was being misdirected … Instead of  putting money into  building the best possible intelligence capabilities, we  continued to  spend  tens of billion every  year on unecessary nuclear warheads, a highly controversial missile defense system,  B2 bombers and other weapons designed for Cold War missions…Providing the FBI and CIA with the best up to date computers, and ensuring that agencies communicate properly and quickly,   that counterintelligence aimed at terrorists be of the highest order, that  large numbers of agents and future agents  learn Arabic  and become experts at understanding the mindset of  terrorists, that airport security be significantly upgraded, does  not win the support of weapons manufacturers who donate  millions every  year  to  politicians. There is no moneyed lobby whose goal is to ensure the safety of Americans..."

"In the fall of 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft  placed the gun lobby above national security by refusing  the FBI's request to use records of gun background checks to investigate suspected terrorists… Yet Ashcroft was not then,  nor is he now,  stigmatized as an unpatriotic weak wimp endangering our national security. But opposing  weapons or wars, however unnecessary they may be leads to just that kind of  labeling." 

"When [conservative political scientist]  Frances Fukuyama  states that  "masculine policies" are necessary in order to deal with the likes of  Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, he overlooks the  fact that it is  these short sighted  "masculine policies" that help to arm and support these kinds of  leaders  in the first place;  and in  the case of  bin Laden to tolerate him even after he instigated terrorist attacks against American embassies and military personnel.

Our national security depends not on continuing "masculine policies" that have proven to be disastrous in the past, but on moving away from them.  The simplistic reliance on military build up and military actions to defend our nation has been equated with  manhood and patriotism . But it only serves  to hide  the fact that our defense policy is often driven not by a careful thinking through of the long range consequences of our actions, but  rather by a  macho mentality combined with  corporate interests. "


PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, WOMEN'S STUDIES

"While I welcome the recent focus on the cruel behavior that some girls exhibit towards other girls-when my older daughter transferred to a new school in 5th grade some of the girls where so nasty to her that I  went  secretly to see her teacher to ask for her help in stopping them -- I  also fear that  it  will be used to further facilitate denial and bad faith about male violence.  The on going sloppy use of the term 'aggression' [for example in Phyllis Chesler's  recent book , Woman's Inhumanity To Woman ] facilitates this…

I  have more than once heard women say 'but women can be so much more vicious than men,' by which they are referring to malicious gossip, slandering, out casting, and other forms of psychological cruelty. Surely these women do not really think that psychological cruelty is on a  par with machine gunning schoolmates,   kidnapping, raping and murdering little girls, or jealousy driven killings of  ex- wives or girlfriends. My hunch is that they are motivated by a fear--that may well be unconscious-- of  being dismissed as  a male bashers or man hating bitches. Women will have to overcome these fears if  we are to move forward towards a form of masculinity appropriate to the 21st century."


SOCIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, MEN'S STUDIES

"Because the masculine mystique still dominates our culture, many boys with no particularly strong  proclivity to violence  find that  part of  themselves so strongly reinforced that they are led to acts of violence for which they and their victims often pay a high price.

Last year I received  a  letter from Paul, a Vietnam  veteran,  in which he described this process. It reads: 'As a child, I trained as a warrior-it was a boy thing. We had little toy soldiers with guns and flame throwers, tanks, war ships, and fighter planes…Warrior play was reinforced by movies I went to almost every Saturday afternoon...Two weeks after graduating from high school, I was in the Marine Corps. The four years I spent in the Marine Corps had a major influence on who I am. Since then I have gradually rebuilt my value system…'"


EDUCATION, PSYCHOLOGY
"In the Chapter entitled  'When Boys and Babies Meet," I describe school programs that teach child-rearing and recommend that such classes become mandatory in all our schools  to encourage empathic, responsible, non-violent  future fathering in boys (and mothering in  girls). This chapter led directly  to the creation of The Parenting Project, a non-profit  organization dedicated to making child-rearing classes a standard part of  school curriculum in the U.S. A lecture I gave in Toronto, led  to the creation of  the Roots of  Empathy  school program. Currently in 191 classrooms in seven Canadian provinces, the program is in the midst of major expansion…The Canadians chose in naming the program to emphasize the role that these classes play in encouraging empathy  (which is inversely related to violence…)"


SPORTS

"A high school teacher who had  for many years served as football coach called to tell me how much  he liked my sports chapter. He had stopped coaching , he explained, because he could no longer bear to see the damage  that the boys were doing to their bodies… "

"A young man … wrote to tell me : "I am 17 years old, but I don't go to school…When I was 15  I quit high school because of the harassment from ultra violent 'jocks…'"

"In the area of  youth sports, violence on the part of adults has  continued to escalate.  In 2002, Massachusetts jurors  found Thomas Junta guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the  2000 beating death of Michael Costin at a hockey practice attended by both men's sons. The men had gotten into two fights over rough play during the hockey drills."

" On the positive side, by the year 2000, some steps were taken  to move away from the "winning at any cost." mentality.  The Positive Coaching Alliance ( PCA) was formed at Stanford University.  It's founder Jim Thompson wants to move youth sports away from its role as entertainment for adults.  His goal is to create  a grassroots campaign to refocus youth sports  as a character building activity. …
The Mendelson Center for Sport, Character, and Culture was established by the University of Notre Dame  with a similar goal."


COMMUNICATIONS, PARENTS, PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY

"Besides denial, the entertainment industry's major public response to the culture of violence that it has created is that   'it's up to the parents to monitor what their children play with or watch on the screen.' Whenever I hear this response, I  think  of  the   parents who have  told me  over and over again-'We  won't let our son  watch violent movies or  TV shows, or play with violent toys or videogames, or buy CD's with rapist violent lyrics,  but the boys at school and on the block won't play with him; they call him a geek and a nerd. He comes home so upset. We are in such a quandary. Should we go against all our beliefs and  succumb, or do we let him continue to be ostracized by the other boys?'  I will never forget the two professors I sat next to at a luncheon following a presentation at their university… They were particularly concerned  at that time about  the  videogame Doom, one of the earliest "first person shooter" games, which permits boys to directly pull the trigger and kill rather than cause characters in the games to kill. (The game … was a favorite of the Columbine killers.)  All the other boys had the game  and their sons had for months been on a campaign to get them to buy it. When we got up from the table, one of the professors sheepishly admitted to me that he and his wife had broken down only a few days earlier and gotten their son Doom.
In light of the fact that the industry promotes and  thrives on  this "pestering power"  of young children, its self-righteous "it's up to the parents," borders on the sadistic."


COMMUNICATIONS

"German television has already created exactly the kind of  exciting  danger filled adventure show for boys that I  suggested could  replace violence filled adventure films on  CPBS [Children's Public Broadcasting System.] One of the most popular  action shows on  German television is a program called  "Medicopter 117" . It is  centered on helicopter rescue crews which get people out of  very dangerous situations--. planes which have spun out of control, mountain climbers in life threatening situations, people trapped in a depot for explosives etc. The program has been running since 1998 and Peter Jännert, its  editor-in-charge  explains 'we predominantly get the younger audience, particularly little boys. They like the dangerous rescue missions, they like the helicopter and the technical feats involved. The presentation of positive heroes works.' "

 

Cathy Nardo -

Information Specialist

National Sexual Violence Resource Center

123 N. Enola Dr.

Enola, PA 17025

Toll Free 877-739-3895 extension 103

www.nsvrc.org

 

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