Sunday, April 29, 2007
News

America’s man crisis

Was violence at Virginia Tech a symptom?

Virginia Tech students, alumni and others attend a memorial service on campus.
CREDIT: Scott Olson/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

t’s important to understand that Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech and then committed suicide, was mentally ill, having suffered bouts of depression so debilitating that a general district court judge in Virginia issued an order in 2005 saying he was a danger to himself.

This is important because the mental health care system in the United States is so under-resourced, so thoroughly stigmatized and so generally ignored that it has become as hole-riddled as a sieve. For at least the past 20 years, the system’s lapses have left a tragic legacy of mothers who drown their children, employees who off their co-workers, homeless people who jump from interstate overpasses in a deadly bid for attention, and countless other violent crimes and suicides. But to dismiss these horrors as merely the fault of “crazies” is to ignore the other factors that might have exacerbated the individuals’ circumstances.

Cho’s sad and terrible trajectory is emblematic of many of our social problems like immigrant integration and adolescent isolation. His is a story that aptly encompasses recent cultural developments, but, for social critic Camille Paglia, it is especially emblematic of a crisis of masculinity in America.

“Young men have enormous energy,” Paglia told the London Times’ Sarah Baxter on April 22. “There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”

The Times article continued:

Cho is a classic example of “someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race,” Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.

Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again.

The sex, Paglia argues, “is everywhere but it is not erotic,” as can be seen by the sad spectacle of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears flashing their lack of underwear during a night on the town. “It’s not even titillating. It’s banal and debasing.”

The issue of female ascendance and the emasculation—as well as “the seething resentment and alienation”—it allegedly breeds in education and culture has been a recurring theme since Eve allegedly duped Adam into the apple-for-knowledge scam.

In 1972, Auren Uris penned “The Frustrated Titan: The Emasculated Executive,” just two years after Myra K. Wolfgang, vice president of a hotel worker’s union, told a U.S. Senate panel reviewing the Equal Rights Amendment that “Working women, like the mothers of young children, are too busy to be liberated.”

In the 1980s, journalists wrote about a backlash against feminism that coincided with the rise of the conservative Christian right and a growing number of educated women staying home with their children.

Nor is the issue solely American.

The French sociologist Alain Touraine has recently argued that the emergence of the veil among the daughters of Muslim immigrants in Europe, who were not themselves practicing Muslims, may be seen as a response to the aggressive persona of women in Europe’s academic and business communities.

Touraine, who wrote “The World of Women,” has also claimed that the rise of gay fashion—the sort of thing Americans might see on shows like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”—is one symptom of the feminization of the West.

Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of 2004’s “Why We Love,” describes a schism between reality and cultural perceptions. To begin with, she doesn’t think that Lindsay and Britney’s lack of undies represents a big change in social mores. Fisher was in college during the 1960s, an era she describes as a “sexual heyday.”

“We had no sexual diseases to worry about, and there was lots of sleeping around, lots of alcohol and lots of drugs,” says Fisher. “Women were carrying their underwear around in their hats to show how liberated they were.”

She believes Paglia and others are overlooking the obvious: Cho was mentally ill.

“He had a psychological problem, this was not a societal problem,” she says. The problem of feeling romantically or sexually rejected is an old one, people tend to get very, very angry, she says, but access to handguns at those times can determine what happens.

To a certain extent, Paglia, a defender of the constitutionally-protected right to bear arms, apparently agrees with Fisher. She told the London Times, “The problem is not hunting guns but these semi-automatic weapons. He could not have cut down that many people so quickly or with such brutal efficiency without them. They have no use except for commandos, SWAT teams and paramilitary organizations.”

As for cultural feminization’s role in Cho’s actions, Fisher dismisses it.

“Ninety percent of those who serve on boards of directors are males,” she says. “Ninety percent of CEOs are male. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that more women stay in college and graduate. Study requires reading, writing, listening and sitting still—women’s language skills are better, they tend to be more patient and to be better listeners.”

Fisher’s colleague, anthropologist Lionel Tiger, agrees that an emasculating, sexually confusing culture is not to blame for Cho’s rampage (“He was nuts,” he says), but he does think Paglia is onto something.

“To say, as Camille does, that this young man felt emasculated—well, he also felt poor and he wasn’t. He also felt that he had been betrayed, and yet he was at a fine school and had some advantages,” says Tiger. “Is there a kind of socio-emasculation? Considering that most colleges are approaching a 60 percent female enrollment and there is a real feminization of the educational system, I think it is a real issue.”

Tiger, who wrote “The Decline of Males,” published in 2000, points to women’s studies programs as the source of a female power structure not available to males, something that not only edges males out of college—some drop out—but can also give women a boost in a job market that is already influenced to reserve jobs for them under the aegis of equal opportunity.

“Then the women go into law, or they go to work for a congressman and they pass laws like the Violence Against Women Act,” says Tiger, who adds, “I’m not about to sob for the ‘poor guys,’ considering what the past has been like for women, but each generation has its own lifetime.”

And this particular lifetime, he says, can be one that makes males feel uneasy on campus. He relates the story of how one of his male students admitted in a class discussion that he wanted the kind of life his father had, including a wife who stayed home and took care of the children. The women in the class, says Tiger, eviscerated the male student.

“The women feel empowered on campuses,” says Tiger. “The males leave, especially those from working-class families.”

“Society is not being feminized, it’s being equalized”

However, what is seen as a new social issue, says Emory University anthropologist George Armelagos, is really perhaps something more incremental and far less new than it appears.

“As women do better for themselves, some men might take it as emasculation,” says Armelagos. “Actually, women have always had an important role in academics, long before it became fashionable. There was Margaret Mead, for example, and others who defined anthropology.”

Evergreen State University social historian Stephanie Coontz concurs that the evolution of gender roles may present a problem for some men, but not for well-adjusted men. “Society is not being feminized, it’s being equalized,” says Coontz, the author of 2005’s “Marriage, a History.” “The people who are most likely to have problems with that are those, particularly males, who are clinging to these outdated ideals. Those men who do housework without feeling that it diminishes them as males—those who ask women out on dates instead of stalking them, those who are candid about sex instead of trying to manipulate women into it—these males are doing perfectly fine.”

As for the imbalance on campuses, Coontz explains that women—who still earn only 75 cents on every dollar earned by men—often have to, or feel they have to, acquire more education than their male counterparts just to be competitive in the job market. Besides, when’s the last time the average male objected to having a female majority on campus?

“Most of them would think, ‘Ooh! More choices!’” says Coontz.
Just as enthusiasm for a variety of sexual partners hasn’t changed, neither, says Coontz, has the sort of age-old thinking that prompted Lindsay and Britney to display their not-so-private privates.

“Obviously, they still see the root of their fame and appeal in flaunting their sexuality and that is certainly not a feature of an egalitarian society,” she says.

It is distressing, says Coontz, that, once more, there is focus on emasculation when, in fact, the masculine ideal is itself a fantasy that many men cannot live up to.

“Wherever there has been progress toward equality,” says Coontz, “the problems that emerge are caused by the fact that we haven’t changed enough, not by changing too much.” SP