Messed Up Masculinity In The News
October 7, 2007
More evidence for the fragility of men’s sense of masculinity - this report says a man killed an ostrich in order to restore his “pride”.
In a nutshell, two men trespassed on an ostrich ranch with some female companions. One ostrich attacked one of the men and knocked him over, the other man received scrapes and bruises. During the attack their female companions laughed. With their pride wounded by the ostrich who humiliated them in front of the women, the two men returned later with a rifle and shot the ostrich. The man who fired the fatal shot was sentenced to five months jail. The story is of note because a man has been jailed for killing an animal. To me it’s also a notable demonstration of how messed up notions of masculinity influence behaviour, and the lengths men will go to to maintain their masculine image.
They aren’t the only men to be charged with killing animals of late. In South Australia on Friday, one man and one boy were charged with shooting 5 horses.
Everyday the news is full of the consequences of men trying to achieve, perform or up hold messed up notions of masculinity. To show they’re tough, strong, carefree, hard, in control, “a real man”. If we’re not seeing the consequences of men trying to demonstrate their manly credentials, we’re seeing the consequences of men trying to restore it.
Just in the past few hours a man was charged with reckless driving after being clocked at 180kph. He crashed the car, fortunately no one was injured.. this time. On Friday a man was found guilty of murdering his three sons. His motive - to get back at his wife for leaving him and seeing another man. Then there’s the ongoing battles between bikie gangs, with their brawls and acts of retribution to restore pride and show who’s biggest, baddest, and on top. The cops have their work cut out for them at Bathurst 1000 this year, charged with trying to keep the event safe, they’ve already arrested 30 people for firearms possession, “nail attacks”, drugs and alcohol related offenses. And then there of course there’s the never ending reports of murder and sexual assault.
We can’t just say that these are “people” or “young people” committing these offenses. They’re all men. Women do not commit these kinds of crimes at levels any where near that of men. These are behaviours and crimes that are for the most part gender specific. So we need to stop pussy footing around and talk about these issues in gender specific terms. For example, after a string of road fatalities (such as in Victoria the past few days) the cops always implore “young people” to slow down and take it easy on the roads. When you look at the sex and age of those involved in most strings of road accidents, they are overwhelmingly men aged 18-27. So why aren’t the cops being more specific with their pleas? NSW in particular has suffered a high number of fatalities at the hands of P platers, so plans to restrict the number of passengers P plate drivers are being made. But again, the offending drivers were male - so effectively this passenger restriction would unfairly effect female p-platers who do not feature prominently in road crash figures.
Let’s get real people.
Men don’t kill, rape, and act like thugs on the road and in pubs because they are men, nor because they are masculine. Masculinity itself has as many positive attributes as it does negative ones. But there are many negative ones that have destructive consequences. We need to do a bit of cultural fine tunning and revise our ideal image of masculinity if we want to see a reduction of the kinds of things reported above. These things happen in the numbers they do, by one gender way more than the other, because they are intertwined with the performance of or maintenance of messed up notions of masculinity.
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