Violence and Masculinity Threat

By: Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe

Originally posted at Girl W/ Pen

Just under two weeks ago, in Milford, Connecticut, Chris Plaskon asked Maren Sanchez to attend prom with him at the end of the year at Jonathan Law High School.  They’d known each other since 6^th grade.  Maren said no.  Witnesses told authorities she declined and told Chris she would be attending the dance with her boyfriend (here). Chris knew Maren had a boyfriend and, likely, that she’d be attending with him. After being turned down, Chris threw his hands around Maren’s throat, pushed her down a set of stairs, and cut and stabbed her with a kitchen knife he’d brought to school that day.  It was April 25, 2014.  Maren got to school just a bit after 7:00 that day and before 8:00, she was dead.

This tragic, almost unfathomable violence reminds us of so many stories of adolescent male violence over the past couple decades. Jackson Katz discusses a seeming epidemic of violence among young, white men in his new film, Tough Guise 2.  In analyzing the tragedies of school shootings, Katz tells us that we need to think about these tragedies as contemporary forms of masculinity. When young men have their masculinity sullied, threatened or denied, they respond by reclaiming masculinity through a highly recognizable masculine practice: violence. When events like this happen, it’s easy to paint the young men who perpetuate these crimes as psychologically disturbed, as—importantly—unlike the rest of us.  But, stories like Chris Plaskon follow what has become a predictable pattern.

Sociologists investigating similar phenomena address this as a form of “social identity threat.”  The general idea is that when you threaten someone’s social identity, and they care, they respond by over-demonstrating qualities that illustrate membership in that identity.  Michael Kimmel writes about a classic example:

I have a standing bet with a friend that I can walk onto any playground in America where 6 year-old boys are happily playing and by asking one question, I can provoke a fight.  That question is simple: “Who’s a sissy around here?” (here: 131)

While you might think Kimmel’s offering easy money here, he’s making a larger point.  By asking the question, Kimmel is inviting someone’s masculinity to be threatened and assuming that this will require someone to demonstrate their masculinity in dramatic fashion.  Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon: masculinity threat. New research relying on experimental designs suggests there’s a lot more to these claims than we might have thought.

Gender and Geography in Mass Shootings

The recent mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012 at the Century movie theater during a showing of the new Batman film–“The Dark Knight Rises”–highlights a number of sociological issues to do with gender and violence (David Brooks’ comments notwithstanding). Sociologists look for patterns in behaviors like this and some of the striking patterns in recent history have to do with the gender, race, class, and lives of the shooters. Hugo Schwyzer draws a number of these connections in his post, “Why Most Mass Murderers Are Privileged White Men.” Michael Kimmel and Matthew Mahler’s (2003) article on random school shootings in recent U.S. history (1982-2001) draws a number of similar conclusions regarding a particularly pathological concoction of masculinity, homophobia, bullying, and entitlement that lie behind a great deal of these and similar incidents.

One issue that is less addressed is the cultural fascination with the geography of these horrific events. I remember seeing the issue of Newsweek that reported on the shootings at Columbine High School. What I remember most was the architectural image that depicted the school, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s paths through the school, and where various attacks occurred (just 15 miles west of Aurora, CO).