In the wake of more mass shootings this last few weeks, as our hearts are broken, we are again asking “Why?”  The most popular answer over the last few decades has been some form of “since it’s almost always a boy or man who is violent, it must be that masculine norms train them to be violent.”  The term “toxic masculinity” houses this idea.  Similarly, when we see that boys lag behind girls in schools and elsewhere our most popular academic and media response is some form of “boys and men won’t give up their masculine privilege, this makes them dysfunctional in today’s world.”

Toxic masculinity and masculine privilege have some merit, but very little to do with male mass shootings or other major social problems.  In this blog I would like to make the argument that they serve as distractions from the biological realities of male mental illness, male trauma-response, male attachment loss, male depression, and male ennui.  To solve our most pressing social problems, including male violence, we must look scientifically at our troubled boys and men as males.  As a culture, are we willing to do?

 

Here are two previous blogs that specifically look at our boys’ and men’s issues as male issues.  Before you read them, I hope you will also find the following analysis and inspiration useful, especially in the wake of the new mass shootings.

 

Our Boys Are in Violent Crisis: Our Nation Must Invest in Saving Our Sons

The Depressed American Boy: Diagnosing and Treating Male-Type Depression

 

Taking good care of our males is difficult to do in a culture that is trying to erase sex in favor of gender, yet if we don’t recognize that males and females are not culture constructs, we will continue to leave male neurobiological needs unfulfilled in our culture.  The Covid moment might be the right moment to look at these needs from a scientific perspective.  After more than a year of Covid, the public knows much more than it did before about biological science; we know that males around the world constitute 2/3s of the deaths from Covid; that male biology is fragile in the face of this virus and nearly every other health hazard.  We know, as well, that females around the world suffer, too.  There is no competition of sufferings.

But because we are curious about the biological sciences now, and because we have built for ourselves a well-developed scientific mind in the face of Covid, perhaps we can notice that our males, like our females, are biological assets who exist, inextricably, in their environments.  Perhaps now we can study male biological fragility.  

 

Isn’t All Science About Males Anyway?

 

One of the smokescreens our culture uses a lot these days is “Why study males when everything around us exists to serve them anyway.” This concept justifies our nearly religious belief that flawed “masculinity” and grotesque “masculine privilege” need our full cultural attention.   It is a distraction based in some truth and a lot of fiction.  While some research in the medical sciences has focused on males for reasons of ease, protectiveness of women, functionality and, in some cases, bias, most research and progress in health care involves females.  There are thousands of federal, state, and local agencies funded to study and help girls and women but few or none to help boys and men.  Similarly, hospitals and clinics fund and specialize in women’s medicine and women’s services.  Managed care companies worry about political disaster if they put “Men and Boys Clinic” on the side of a building.

Our national attention to female development is welcome, but we should be honest about our lack of attention to what males need.  Perhaps “men have it all” and “everything around us serves men” might be smokescreens men, to some extent, create themselves as they make up the lion’s share of our visible leaders in business and governments.  But by now everyone of us should know  or study the fact that tens of millions of men in the U.S. are not those visible, successful men; instead, these men are unemployed, underemployed, listless, purposeless, addicted, suicidal, under-educated, mentally ill, lost, broken, and unable to get help.   My own Saving Our Sons captures this data, as do many other resources and websites including our meta-study at https://whitehouseboysmen.org/PROPOSAL-EXECUTIVE-SUMMARY-White_House_Council_Boys_Men.html, and others on the Global Initiative for Boys and Men website, www.gibm.us, and the research in the two blog-links above (and below).

 

What Will We Do with Our “Enemy”?

 

What will we do with “the enemy?”  Males became the enemy five decades ago and we constructed ideologies to fit. We’ve thought this was the righteous way to support girls, women, racial and ethnic minorities, gender minorities, and others, but we have had 50 years of this demonization and distraction and our parallel social problems increase daily.  Male biology untempered unless we temper it, and dangerously lonely unless we give it purpose, will burn down our houses with its hot anger on the one hand, and paralyze our social functioning with its cold pursuit of isolation on the other.

The shootings we experience, the gang activity, crime, male failure in schools, preschool-to-prison-pipelines, racial inequities, gender inequities, bullying, homophobia, transphobia will continue, not abate, until we make “male neurobiological development” one of the most important discussions of our age.   Doing this will mean putting aside “toxic masculinity” and “male privilege” and “gender stereotypes” at least for a while and studying these biological issues far more deeply than we have:

 

*Effects of biological neurotoxins on male testosterone levels and on the male brain, and their cellular link to violence

*Mismatch of the male brain with educational and social services institutions, and the loss of males in most of our social systems.

*Individual male trauma, brain injury, and the effects of traumatic poverty on the male brain

*Effects of under-attachment to mothers as well as father-loss, lack of father figures, and lack of shared custody on male development

*Male mental illness, the male depression spectrum, covert male depression, prevalence of brain disorders in males, and how to prevent them

*Lack of resilience development in males over the last two generations, including lack of male purpose-development, which is partially causal of dangerous male anhedonia.

 

A powerful exercise for discussion is to change the sex in this list to “female”.  Once you do that, you will likely see that there will be no cultural objection to saying, “We need to study female depression, mother loss, female trauma, female issues in schools.”  Females and parents of daughters like myself have joined together to advance the cause of female empowerment through the plethora of means available, including understanding female biology (The Wonder of Girls, The Minds of Girls).  The growth and empowerment of our girls and women continues, including discussions throughout the decades, and increasingly interesting now, on expanded definitions of “girl,” “woman,” and “female.”

Meanwhile, males are our lovers, parents, children, friends, coworkers, students, teachers, soulmates, and leaders, too.  They were never our enemy, despite what some bad men did and do.   Nor are our males stupid–they know that their healthy male aggression, fewer words in their heads than females have for emotive content, different resilience needs, male-specific empathic responses…have all been demonized.   While males know maleness is not our social enemy, they also know we regard males–and him–as everything bad.  Can we use the Covid moment to put the  “male as enemy” smokescreen to rest so that we can study social development from the viewpoint of male brain biology?

 

The Testosterone Test

 

When I speak in communities, a “testosterone” example often surprises audiences.  I ask the group if testosterone causes violence,  and nearly everyone who answers says, “if not testosterone, then high testosterone, causes violence.”  I ask if the group would say that testosterone levels are too high in our males today.  Most people who respond say “Yes” because they see so much male violence in the news, in video games, movies, etc.

Surprise comes when I note two things:

1) Male testosterone levels are around 30% lower than they were in the 1980s.  Low testosterone is more dangerous than high testosterone because it is co-morbid with lower sperm motility, under-motivation, anxiety, irritability, rage, and many other psychological and physiologic etiologies.

2) Low testosterone can lead to more violence than high because the lowered brain chemistry and compromised cellular function contributes to male depression, which is almost always co-morbid with male violence.

As we explore these points together, the surprise quickly changes to “Oh, wait, that makes sense.”  Many people in the audience can think of a male who is depressed.  Male depression, they notice instinctively now, has ramifications beyond the disease of violence–on attachment, parenting, mentoring, work, physical health, interest and talent, schooling, opportunity, relationships, resilience, and empathy.

As discussion continues, people often say, “Why aren’t we taught this stuff?”  If the audience is education or psychology professionals, they will say, “Why aren’t we taught this in our teacher (or psychology) training?”  Often a dialogue continues now in which people recognize the smokescreens and “enemy” that stops our academic culture from training its professionals and parents in what is actually happening inside our males.

Many of my speaking and training engagements are in schools and I think the education sector (pre-K – 12) has perhaps made the most inroads in righting the ship.  More and more schools and districts are investing in science-based teacher and counselor training on male/female brain.   To get to know some of them, check out my books and www.gurianinstitute.com where you’ll see success the schools have had in enacting equity, gender, achievement, and behavioral initiatives.  When these social systems–administrators, faculty, parents, community members–are trained in science and strategies, they tend to find test scores and grades go up, discipline referrals go down, bullying rates go down, and student behavior improves.  Since most of the issues our schools face, both anecdotally and at a data level, surround boys’ performance and behavior, the staff discovers that altering the system to include the male also alters the system positively for everyone else.

More than a century ago the philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us about soft science.  “Modern ideology,” she said, “has become the knowledgeable dismissal of the visible.”   Concepts like “toxic masculinity” and “masculine privilege” have some academic and public worth, but they cannot ultimately help us because they dismiss the visible male, the one we can all see with our own eyes.  That male is suffering, but we spend our collective time putting up walls and smokescreens that keep us blind to him.  Once we accept that males are real and need specific things from our society, we will begin to solve deep issues in our homes, schools, and neighborhoods, not the least of which is male violence.

It was in this spirit I absorbed the recent massacres in Colorado, California, and Georgia; I felt the gut-wrenching tragedy unfolding like it did decades ago when school shootings took over the news, and last year, and the year before, in Sandy Hook and Parkland.   These two blogs were published in previous iterations at those dates of tragedy.  I hope they will help you look closely at the male who lives, works, and suffers right in front of us, so that we can join together to stop the carnage, finally, with the use of good, hard science.

https://gurianinstitute.com/our-boys-are-in-violent-crisis-our-nation-must-invest-in-saving-our-sons/

https://gurianinstitute.com/depressed-american-boy-diagnosing-treating-male-type-depression/

For more on these themes and for more strategies, please join our Summer Institute.  See www.gurianinstitute.com for more details and to register.

 

–Michael Gurian, April 2021