There's a (Male) Elephant in the Room

What is the connection between masculinity and mass shootings?

*Readers have informed me that the data I use here from Statista conflicts with that of other datasets on mass shootings which show much higher numbers. I’ve left the Statista numbers, but want to note the inconsistencies in our collective assessment and grokking of this issue.

I wrote the first draft of this piece in 2021 in response to the mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado. After the recent shooting in Lewiston, I went back to rework it. Now that a month has passed, and we settle back into “normal,” I’d like to share it here. And for those who will never find “normal” again, who are still reeling from the shock and pain, may you find and receive deepest support in your feeling and healing and know in your every atom that you are not alone.

Every time an American man shoots up a church or a grocery store or a bowling alley (the list goes tragically on), he puts a demand on the rest of us to examine the society which produced him. What is it in the soil of our culture that grows such lethal apples?

The causal threads of a mass shooting tangle together in an intersectional rat’s nest. We can’t know why a man would do such a thing without considering his family of origin, his ancestral and developmental trauma, his society’s racism, his mental health, his nation’s gun control laws, capitalism, and so much more.

Masculinity, or what masculinity has become in our culture, is another factor to consider. According to the website Statista (which defines a mass shooting as any single attack in a public place with 3 or more fatalities), male shooters have enacted 142 mass shootings in the United States since 1982, as compared to 4 by female shooters (and 2 shootings by both male and female shooters). That’s a pretty big elephant in the room of this conversation about why these shootings occur and how to prevent them. Could there be a more glaring statistic? 142 to 4. This data suggests that a profound reckoning with American masculinity is a matter of national security.

What’s the problem with men, we have to wonder, if we are willing to reject the notion that this is just the way men are. And if indeed this is not just the way men are, if it is not natural and inevitable that a man would behave this way, then what’s the problem with the masculinities that are shaping his behavior?

Masculinity is the story we tell ourselves about what it means to be a man, a story made up of beliefs about who men are and who we aren’t, what we do and don’t do. This story is being written every day, every moment, in the countless ways we relate to men and as men.

Currently, the predominating story of American masculinity says that emotional intelligence is a deviation from the desirable standard. We all know the old lie that boys don’t cry. How many lives has that lie shaped? How many generations? Boys do cry, which is to say, boys feel. Because humans feel, or at least we are physiologically and psychologically hardwired to feel. But what does a man’s feelings have to do with mass shootings? Why should we care about a man’s feelings?

Consider what happens when a boy encounters a story, a masculinity, which asks him to become something he is not, something that does not feel or understand feeling. What does he do when he realizes his feelings are taboo but he continues to have them anyway? He begins to hide. He begins to numb and pretend and repress. He begins the grisly work of contorting his humanity to fit the shape he thinks he’s supposed to be, cutting himself off from the sensitive capacities and emotional consciousness that are a part of what make him human. Consider now what he then becomes capable of in his dehumanized state. Who commits dehumanizing acts if not someone who has themselves been dehumanized? Violence is a learned language. One learns it by being violated.

bell hooks puts it all quite plainly in her important book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love:

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

So. When a feeling boy, which is to say a human boy, becomes aware that it’s not safe for him to feel; when he looks around and sees no men who can reflect his emotional nature, affirm him in this nature and help him to mature it; when he observes the rituals of power and how effective they are in humiliating and dominating those boys who are less successful in their self-mutilations; what happens is that he feels a cocktail of emotions about his dilemma that he’s apparently not supposed to feel: alone, confused, sad, lonely, angry, frustrated, scared. But because he wants to belong, wants to be that thing he knows he’s supposed to be, a man, a boy forfeits his basic human right to feel these things. He sacrifices his humanity to satisfy the demands of the predominating masculinity.

This is the catch-22 boys face in our dominant culture: dilute your masculinity in order to be wholly human, or ax your humanity to be a so-called man, and God knows we so want to be a man, want to be respected, want to be needed, want, at the bottom of it all, to be loved. If self-mutilation is what it takes, well then so be it. A boy thus learns how to not-feel the truth, his truth, learns to live in a kind of unreality that is insulated from the feeling realities of his own body, his own heart, and therefore disconnected from the emotional realities of others.

Again, what might he become capable of in such a disconnected state? When he cannot feel his own pain, when he cannot feel the pain of others, what’s to stop him from devastating the delicate web of relationships that he’s a part of, that we are all, for better and for worse, a part of.

If we don’t have a better understanding of this particular thread in the causality rat’s nest of mass shootings, the struggle of men to feel and to be wholly human will continue to define all of us, not just men.

“People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances,” James Baldwin wrote, “or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.)”

Men in our culture aren’t encouraged and rewarded for learning the language of emotional intelligence that would allow us to emerge, to process our pain in ways that don’t cause more pain to others. That language is a forbidden tongue. To speak this tongue would be to break the taboos, and we are loath to break the taboos that broke us, because then what was it all for? Was our humanity a sunk cost in a bad investment? Surely this investment’s gonna pay off, right? We can’t bear to consider the possibility that what happened in our childhood and adolescence wasn’t that we did the right thing to become what we were supposed to become, but that, in fact, we were deeply wounded, again and again, as bell hooks describes.

What would change for us as a society if boys were supported in cultivating their sensitive, self-reflective, and communicative capacities? What if it was primarily men, not women, who were teaching them this, not by lecturing about it but by living it? What would transform, if a man’s vulnerability, his emotional honesty, was understood to be an expression of his courage and power?

There’s a long list of things that need to change in order to stop these shootings. Included on that list is the story we tell ourselves about what it means to be a man.