An 8th grade boy took a gun to his middle school with the apparent intent to harm & was shot by law enforcement officers before he could physically hurt anyone.
And all over the internet, women are comparing men unfavorably to bears, saying they’d rather encounter a bear in the words than a man.
Although the two situations may seem unrelated, at least at the surface level, both are intertwined. Both feature males in the Bad Guy role. And both are exactly the kind of thing I’ve been working to prevent for the past 20 years.
It’s right there in the first two sentences of my book, Building Boys:
You know what kind of boys you don’t want to raise. You don’t want to raise a sexual predator or mass shooter.
Yet here we are.
It’s been 25 years since the Columbine school shooting, but young males continue to shoot up our schools and communities with startling frequency. And a big proportion of the female population says they’d rather encounter a bear than a male human in the woods.
Let’s unpack this.
Shooting at a school in Mt. Horeb
The school shooting event happened in my state, in a small community about 2 hours away from my home. According to news reports so far, the boy was spotted outside his middle school with a rifle. When officers arrived, they told him to drop his weapon. He did not; he pointed it at them instead. Police shot and killed him outside the school.
It is likely that their actions saved lives. And yet. One child is dead and hundreds of others are traumatized.
I’m glad a massacre was averted. And, we must identify, intervene, and act MUCH sooner. We need to spot and scoop up and collectively CARE for our vulnerable boys before they get to this point.
Allegedly, the would-be shooter in Mt. Horeb had a fascination with Columbine. He, like many teenage boys, felt left out & lonely. And he appears to have found & spent time in some pretty dark corners of the Internet, consuming and adding racist & sexist thoughts.
In her soon-to-be-widely-released book BoyMom, author (& #boymom) Ruth Whippman explores some of the dark corners of the Internet. She spends time with young guys who’ve essentially retreated into the Internet. With incels, even. What she discovers are profoundly lonely, disconnected, hopeless boys and men. She doesn’t excuse their misogyny or racism, but she is struck by the fact that, at heart, these are not terrible, evil people. These are, instead, hurting humans.
If we want to prevent school shootings and shootings of young would-be shooters (& all kinds of other crimes), we must care for our boys and men.
What bears & sharks have in common
The movie Jaws came out in 1975, just a few years after I was born. Although the mechanical shark that “starred” in the movie is laughable to anyone who sees it now, the terror — and devastation — it inspired is not.
In large part because Jaws portrayed sharks as horrible predators and dangerous to humans, shark populations plummeted. As noted in this Smithsonian article, “the number of large sharks in the waters east of North America declined by about 50 percent” in the years after the movie’s release. Both Stephen Spielberg, the director of the film, and Peter Benchley, the author of the book upon which the movie was based, have expressed their regret for contributing to the public perception that sharks are dangerous. Benchley spent the rest of his life campaigning for the protection of sharks.
It is true, of course, that sharks have sharp teeth. And they are predators. But for the most part, sharks want nothing to do with humans. We are far more of a threat to them than they are to us. That’s why, over the last few decades, scientists and others have been working to correct sharks’ negative image.
Today, it is widely accepted that demonizing sharks had negative consequences. Research has also shown that teaching people about sharks in linked to increasing awareness of the need to protect sharks.
Let’s go to the woods.
Most people now know that bears, like sharks, are not innately vicious creatures. Most know that a bear generally will not attack a human without provocation. Most people know that the most dangerous bear to encounter is a female with her cubs, as she’s driven to protect them at all costs. And most people know that, if you encounter a bear, you should either slip quietly away or, if that’s not possible, make noise to scare the bear away. We know bears can be dangerous, but we’re not deathly afraid of them. We’re not reflexively afraid of them.
As a woman, I understand why some women pick “bear” over “man.” Many, many women have been harmed by men; their fear of encountering a man in the woods is rooted in experience.
And yet. Just as most sharks will never harm a human, most males will never harm a woman. Is it fair — or helpful? — to demonize half the population? Are we doing to males what we did to sharks? Have we created such a terrifying, one-sided image of them that demonizing and avoiding them seems like the only sane thing to do?
I worry that we have. And I hope that, just as scientists have been able to open our eyes to the beauty and value of sharks, resulting in global efforts to protect and conserve these magnificent animals, we’ll eventually see the beauty & value of our boys and men and work together to create environments in which they can thrive.
Here’s to building boys!
Jennifer
IN THE NEWS
The Case for Helping Boys & Men in Education
Highlights:
“Many of the gaps in educational outcomes…justify policies with the explicit intent of improving outcomes for male students… Gender neutrality won't cut it when gender gaps are this wide”
‘Boys develop, on average, a little later than girls. The gap is mostly in the development of non-cognitive skills, which are important for school success especially in adolescence. This fact should influence education policy.”
Help Boys, But First Do No Harm
Highlight:
“Note that improving boys’ school performance does not imply harming girls’ performance. Skill development is not zero-sum, and when students learn more, they go on to add more to our shared economy.”
“Smashing the Patriarchy” Would Help Men as Much as Women. Why is No One Telling Boys?
Highlights:
“Rigid masculinity norms police boys behavior, tell them to ‘man up’ and squash their emotions and that vulnerability and intimacy are for girls.”
“The same system that tells girls that they need to be hot and thin and submissive and to center men’s needs, also tells boys they need to be emotionally rigid and that to display vulnerability or intimacy towards another man makes them a pussy.”
Why Are Well-To-Do Parents Fundraising to Send Their Kids on Vacation to Cooperstown?
Highlights:
“While fundraising has become the norm of modern-day parenthood for a certain subset of moms and dads — often suburban and involved in the PTA — travel-baseball parents seem to have overwhelmingly transferred that mind-set to their child’s expensive and wholly optional sports teams.”
“Experience trips have become the expectation. Very few people want to play on a team that doesn’t go to Ripken or Cooperstown.”
Do Schools Really Need to Give Parents Live Updates on Students’ Performance?
Highlights:
"If I have to hear one more time from my wife about how our son isn't going to college because he forgot to hand in a single homework assignment or did bad on ONE test…All it does is annoy the shit out of him, annoy the shit out of me, and damage his relationship with her.”
“The ever-present portals can create a feedback loop. The parents worry that if they aren't on top of things, their child might not be successful. So they're always checking the portal, which makes the child worry that any bad grade means the end.”
"Three weeks into my son's kindergarten year, I'm already dreading any notification…The only thing I hear are private messages about what he's done wrong…I feel so defeated about school already. I can only imagine what my son's feeling."
‘The set-up is even making teachers anxious. One told me she accidentally gave a student a low grade on a quiz because of a typo. Within two minutes, the visibly upset student was asking about the quiz and had already been grounded by their mother.”
New Ways to Think About Parenting & Technology
Highlights:
“Parents’ hyper-focus on screen time, gaming, or phones can have more negative effects than the technologies on their own.”“If blinded by their laser focus on the ills of technology, parents don’t see how the quality of their relationship may be influencing their child’s behavior more than time on the phone.”
“I propose we stop blanket blaming technology for our children’s mental health problems and look more closely at what’s happening in our child’s life on a personal level. We might see that technology use is a symptom of what we really need to pay attention to.”
“ I wonder what would happen if we widen the focus on all parts of our children’s lives but the tech? Many parents are already highly vigilant about their children’s technology use, but what if we redistributed this vigilance to other areas so tech didn’t get so much heat?”
Highlights:
“Countries truly committed to gender equality are waking up the fact that, now, this means paying some attention to the inequalities impacting boys and men.”
“Working on behalf of boys and men does not dilute the ideals of gender equality, it applies them.”
ON BOYS Podcast
COMING SOON
Building Boys Book Club - Chap. 2: Emphasize Emotional Intelligence
We'll meet on May 23 & discuss:
Why emotional intelligence matters
Obstacles to emotional intelligence (including shifting gender norms & dismissal of traditional male responses)
5 strategies you can use to build boys' emotional intelligence
How rough-and-tumble play strengthens emotional intelligence
The link between your emotions & your boy's emotions