csmonitor | But there’s one topic that’s not getting enough discussion, he and
some others say: masculinity. “The elephant in the room with ... mass
shootings is that almost all of them are being done by men,” Professor
Kilmartin says. Male shooters often “project their difficulties onto
other people.... In this case, it sounds like he was blaming Christians
for his problems, but the masculinity piece is what is really missing in
the discussions about the equation.”
Men are often raised to be
stoic, to suppress emotions rather than understand them, and when they
struggle, often the only emotion that they see as sufficiently masculine
to express is anger, says Jon Davies, director of the McKenzie River
Men's Center in Eugene, Ore., and a former psychologist at the
University of Oregon. On top of that, he says, “it’s impossible to reach
the ideal of what it means to be a man.”
Fortunately, the vast
majority of men get enough support in their lives that those societal
pressures don’t turn into mass violence.
While mass shooters are
often seen as “outliers or oddballs ... we should actually think of them
as conformists,” says Tristan Bridges, a sociologist at The College at
Brockport, State University of New York, citing research on masculinity
by expert Michael Kimmel. “They’re over-conforming to masculinity,
because they perceive themselves, in some way or another, as
emasculated.... It’s a terrible statement about American masculinity, to
say that when you’re emasculated, one way to respond is to open fire.”
