{"id":374082,"date":"2018-08-20T02:53:11","date_gmt":"2018-08-20T01:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/toxic-masculinity-is-killing-us\/"},"modified":"2018-08-20T02:53:11","modified_gmt":"2018-08-20T01:53:11","slug":"toxic-masculinity-is-killing-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/toxic-masculinity-is-killing-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us"},"content":{"rendered":"
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They are two violent incidents that happened more than 1,000 miles apart, with seemingly little in common other than the senseless bloodshed.<\/p>\n

One happened right here in Philadelphia <\/a>Friday morning, when four gunshots shattered the breakfast-hour calm on Meridian Street in the Holmesburg section. When police finally entered a second-floor bedroom inside the brick twin, they found a longtime, beloved Philadelphia City Council staffer, Linda Rios-Neuby, dead on the floor with three bullet wounds. With the fourth shot, her assailant \u2014 her recently estranged husband \u2014 had taken his own life.<\/p>\n

The other happened last November in a small rural church in a place called Sutherland Springs, Texas. It was packed with Sunday worshippers when a man clad in all black <\/a>and brandishing an assault-style weapon opened fire on the helpless sanctuary \u2014 killing 26 people, including a pregnant woman, a 5-year-old child, and the pastor\u2019s teenage daughter, as first responders found many of the dead huddled under pews, some still clutching their Bibles.<\/p>\n

But both incidents shared another bond that is far too common in a nation where more than 17,000 people are murdered<\/a> in a year, at a rate that far exceeds any other developed nation. In each case, the killing was preceded by reports of domestic violence or unrest.<\/p>\n

The mass killing in the Texas church by a 26-year-old gunman had followed years of horrific abuse and assaults on women, children and even a dog that didn\u2019t stop after the Air Force had court-martialed<\/a> the man for repeatedly kicking, punching and choking his first wife and even fracturing the skull of his 2-year-old stepson.<\/p>\n

Friday\u2019s murder-suicide in Philadelphia is still under investigation, but it\u2019s already been reported that police had been summoned to the home because of an argument in June \u2014 no one was arrested \u2014 before Rios-Neuby\u2019s disturbed husband returned last week, his twin daughters and their nanny in the home around the time the gunfire erupted.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia City Council President Darrell Clarke had tweeted her picture in happier times, nearly five years ago.<\/p>\n

News of her death spread shock through City Hall, where Rios-Neuby had risen from an internship to become the City Council\u2019s HR director. \u201cDomestic violence is like a pressure cooker of life,\u201d Councilman Curtis Jones Jr. told my Inquirer and Daily News colleagues on Friday. \u201cAll of a sudden it boils over.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the thing: We\u2019ve heard this sad story line so many times that it almost becomes routine, or at least not a surprise, when, in Jones\u2019 words, it \u201cboils over.\u201d The underlying problem is that the underlying cause of these killings \u2014 toxic masculinity<\/a>, a poisonous mix of a craving for male supremacy, an inability to properly channel emotions and an inevitable turn toward violence when things are not working out \u2014 is so deeply rooted it almost becomes background noise.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s wrong. The crisis of toxic masculinity needs to be on the front burner of the American conversation \u2014 not only because it\u2019s so bad, but because it\u2019s getting worse.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s getting worse across the United States, where 50 women<\/a> are shot and killed by an intimate partner every single month and a number of recent high-profile mass killings \u2014 not just Sutherland Springs but the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting<\/a> that claimed 49 lives, or the gunman who shot up a congressional softball practice<\/a> in 2017 and who seriously wounded Rep. Steve Scalise \u2014 were preceded by persistent complaints of violence against women.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s definitely getting worse in Philadelphia, where domestic murders of women such as the killing of Rios-Neuby have spiked by a whopping 50 percent in 2018 \u2014 some 21 so far, compared to 14 at this point last year.<\/p>\n

The problem has certainly been with us for a long time. Well over a decade ago, a Philadelphia task force<\/a> found intimate-partner killings comprised a disproportionate share of murders here.<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t know if we do it currently but there was this thing called the Philadelphia Women\u2019s Death Review Team. Here is the report from 2004-06. <\/p>\n

Intimate partner homicides accounted for 40% of all homicides between 1997 and 2006. <\/p>\n

40 fucking percent.https:\/\/t.co\/bJp0hZ9bkP<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 jennifer kates (@jenniferkates) August 18, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

But one thing that has changed more recently is that the internet has encouraged a bizarre strain of toxic masculinity \u2014 the so-called \u201cincel\u201d movement<\/a> of entitled young men whose anger over their failures in attracting women is bonded in chat rooms and, to use that phrase again, \u201cboils over\u201d in occasional acts of horrific violence.<\/p>\n

One of them \u2014 a murderer who gunned down six people at the University of California-Santa Barbara in 2014 and who, like the others in this column, I won\u2019t glorify by naming \u2014 filmed a sick manifesto<\/a> that I\u2019m quoting here because it provides a glimpse into the absolute worst of the toxic male mindset.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI don\u2019t know why you girls aren\u2019t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it. It\u2019s an injustice, a crime because I don\u2019t know what you don\u2019t see in me, I\u2019m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman. I will punish all of you for it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s time to have a close look at our culture and what is going on in terms of how masculinity is defined and characterized, which is often as something that is performed or \u2018proven\u2019 through acts of aggression and even violence,\u201d Eric Madfis, an associate professor at the criminal justice department at University of Washington-Tacoma, who has researched the links between domestic violence and murder, told<\/a> Politico<\/em> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

The points made by Madfis and other experts in a growing body of literature and news reports about \u201ctoxic masculinity\u201d are almost always the same. Women tend to internalize stress, depression or failures, while too many men turn instead toward aggression. We live in a culture that both celebrates aggression as a sign of manliness \u2014 from the football field to the combat zone to the firing range \u2014 and also implies that it\u2019s feminine weakness for a man to admit his struggles or seek help. It\u2019s telling that the idea that these behaviors are embedded along with the Y chromosome comes through in the way we refer to this as \u201ccaveman culture\u201d \u2014 that men are just like this.<\/p>\n

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If you want to hurt a man, the first thing you do is attack his masculinity. Men don\u2019t have the language to understand masculinity as anything other than some version of a caveman because no language exists.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) February 15, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

A couple of things. Not all men are like this \u2014 most men aren\u2019t, I\u2019d like to believe, although like any toxin there\u2019s always a matter of degree. But the minority of men who are pure poison is big enough that it\u2019s sending shock waves through modern American society, and so the other depressing thing about so much of the recent coverage is that while we\u2019re numbly familiar with the symptoms, we seem to be at a total loss for any serious cure.<\/p>\n

One of those symptoms is the insane availability of firearms<\/a> in America \u2014 a problem with no parallel in other developed nations. It\u2019s telling that Second Amendment zealots tend to also reject<\/a> any talk of toxic masculinity. On the flip side of that, people inclined to say that, look, it\u2019s bad human behavior that kills people and not guns are also missing a key point. A nation with no real grip on men\u2019s violent tendencies should not be making it so damn easy to go out and buy a weapon. To the contrary, rising toxic masculinity makes common sense gun controls like better background checks<\/a> and waiting periods a moral imperative. But those things won\u2019t make the disease go away.<\/p>\n

There is good reason to believe that male violence is less the result of bad genetics and more the result of the backward ways we can continue to socialize our children. Parents can play the biggest role in preaching nonviolence and in teaching boys that it\u2019s OK to cry and to reach out for help when things don\u2019t work out, as they inevitably do. And America\u2019s schools can find innovative ways to teach and encourage a different path for boys. And once we figure out some best practices, governments and philanthropies can support these efforts with dollars \u2014 especially since we seem to have so much money to throw away<\/a> on weapons of destruction.<\/p>\n

But the real bottom line is that a problem that starts with men can end with men. I hope other men will join me and the others of our gender who see the realities of unchecked male aggression \u2014 and are calling it out. That\u2019s a very small first step, but a necessary one. The best way to kill \u201ccaveman behavior\u201d is to take it out of the cave and expose it to withering sunlight.<\/p>\n

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Even talking about this topic invites ridicule because it\u2019s so scary for most men (and women). Men are adrift and nobody is talking about it and nobody\u2019s doing anything about it and it\u2019s killing us.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) February 15, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n