For the Love of Men

by Liz Plank

  2. MEN AND RISK

  The first time I realized that the glorification of men who take risks without protection had gone too far is when my friends made me sit through an episode of the MTV show Jackass. The extremely popular and controversial show, which ran for several seasons in the early 2000s, featured ten men doing life-threatening stunts, like being thrown eighty feet into the air inside a port-o-potty full of feces, snorting wasabi, and walking on a tightrope over alligators with raw chicken stuffed in their underwear. Although it was one of the most popular and long-standing shows on television, every single cast member ended up in rehab, surgery and a ton more rehab.

  One of my favorite and more recent examples of the way we worship men who take risks is Tucker Carlson calling Donald Trump staring into the solar eclipse without protective glasses “perhaps the most impressive thing any president’s ever done,” because there’s nothing more presidential than deliberately attempting to burn your retinas on national television.

  Getting bruised or physically hurt more often doesn’t just happen to grown men; we observe this phenomenon early, in the gender gap in injuries between boys and girls. Boys have twice as many fatalities from bicycle accidents, and researchers in child development have noted that a difference occurs as early as 9, where boys seem to take more risks than girls. And this effect seems to be global. UNICEF found that in OECD countries boys were 70 percent more likely to die in an accident than girls. Despite boys’ experiencing a higher level of injury, boys (and girls) as young as 6 years old believe that boys are at a lower risk of injury than girls even when engaging in the same activities, suggesting that children adopt the idea that risk-taking is suitable and free of consequences for boys (not girls) very early on. However, it’s hard to claim that risk-taking can be purely explained by biology, since teenage boys’ likelihood to engage in risk depends on how much they subscribe to … you guessed it, norms surrounding masculinity! One study that observed teenage boys’ willingness to break the rules of the road as pedestrians found that the more they associated with traditional masculinity roles, the more likely they were to engage in unlawful behavior. “Masculine stereotype conformity turns out to be a better predictor of risk-taking than biological sex,” the head researcher, Marie-Axelle Granié, wrote. “Being a boy or a girl does not predict the self-reported level of risk-taking; recognizing oneself as masculine, i.e., manifesting behaviors and personality traits that society attributes to the male sex, rather predicts risky pedestrian behaviors.” So in other words, being a man doesn’t make you take more risks; being a man who thinks men take more risks is what’s associated with higher risk-taking.

  As I read this troubling data connecting risk with masculinity performance, all I could think about was drowning. A quick look at the data shows that drowning is an almost uniquely male endeavor, and the statistics are indeed staggering. According to the CDC, young men are three times more likely to drown than young women, and 80 percent of fatalities from drowning are male. The CDC attributes this mainly to two factors that fit right into the tenets of idealized masculinity: overconfidence and excessive drinking. “It was concluded that several factors contribute to their relatively high drowning rates,” the authors of the report wrote. “Including a possible interaction between overestimation of abilities and heavy alcohol use.” One study found that more men reported knowing how to swim despite women being more likely to have taken swimming lessons. In addition, the men in the study were more likely to describe their abilities as “excellent,” even those who had never taken swimming lessons.

  I became aware of this when I started training to become a lifeguard as a teenager. When I stopped my instructor in the middle of our session after he said in passing that men are more likely to drown, I asked him why. He answered as if it was obvious or inevitable that men just engaged in more high-risk behavior. If the job of a lifeguard was 90 percent prevention as my instructors had repeated ad nauseam, why weren’t we properly addressing this high death rate, especially if it’s due to something as alterable as chosen behavior?

  But drowning is not just gendered; it’s also heavily affected by race. Another striking moment in my lifeguard training was when my instructor mentioned that black children are far more at risk. Indeed, in the United States, black children are three times more likely to drown than white children, and the rates are higher for Hispanic children as well. If we only look at children aged 11–12, black kids are ten times more likely to drown than their white counterparts. Again I interrupted him and asked why this was. He attributed this to higher body mass density, which felt like a classic uncomfortable white person answer. It was. Canada, where I grew up and took my lifeguard training, has its own history of enslaving black people and institutionalized oppression against its native people, which impacts education and swimming ability. Less access to swimming lessons means heightened risk for accidents. In America, the problem is even more pronounced and historically rooted. The exclusion of people of color from swimming pools was codified into law until the 1960s, and the segregation of black people in public swimming pools continued well beyond the Jim Crow era. So when it comes to aquatic-related deaths of men and boys of color, there’s an additional and heightened risk, but this risk was different: it wasn’t chosen behavior—it was structurally induced. Drowning is just one reminder of the way structural inequality intersects with masculinity, making some men even more vulnerable than others.

  WHITE MEN TAKE MORE RISKS BECAUSE THEY CAN; MEN OF COLOR TAKE MORE RISKS BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO

  The myth that being a man naturally compels you to take risks is disproven by any research that includes diverse subject pools.

  Although white men are often used as the norm in scientific studies (and in society at large), it turns out that when it comes to risk behavior, they are the exception rather than the rule. Research has uncovered that while we paint all men as taking lots of risks, the effect is much stronger among white men than nonwhite men. While men tend to assess less risk than women for the same situation, white people also assess far less risk than people of color, which means that white men are actually skewing these statistics disproportionately, inflating their entire gender’s relationship to risk. The researchers call this hubristic tendency for risk the white male effect. It was first coined by James Flynn, Paul Slovic and C. K. Mertz in 1994, who wrote:

  [T]hese race and gender differences in risk perception in the United States were primarily due to 30 percent of the white male population who judge risks to be extremely low. The specificity of this finding suggests an explanation in terms of sociopolitical factors rather than biological factors … what we often have branded as the “male effect” of propensity for risk would be more accurate if it was called the “white male effect.”

  The reason why white men take more risks can be summed up in three words: because they can. Flynn, Slovic and Mertz hypothesized that white men take more risks because they have less to lose. In addition to whiteness and maleness, those who tolerate the most amount of risk also tend to have a strong identification with individualistic and conservative beliefs and demonstrate greater faith in institutions. Trusting institutions to protect you is a luxury that women, people of color and other marginalized folks don’t always have. After all, should women trust politicians to make laws that are in their best interest when many have chosen to defund their health programs and clinics because of their personal moral proclivities about birth control? Should African-Americans trust police officers when so many are responsible for killing innocent and unarmed members of their community and the criminal justice system when it has wrongly accused and locked up their loved ones? When the world is not an equal-level playing field, neither is our relation to risk. Flynn and his colleagues wrote in their paper titled “Gender, Race, and Perceptions of Environmental Health Risks”:

  Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control, and benefit from so much of it. Perhaps women and non-white m
en see the world as more dangerous because in multiple ways they are more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control.

  In addition, the data shows that men overall aren’t necessarily more comfortable with more risk; they just perceive it less. One of the failures of the academic studies on risk is that they fail to capture how subjective it is. According to Cordelia Fine, the author of Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds, we’ve been reading the data all wrong. Fine argues that men aren’t necessarily more daring—they just perceive fewer consequences. After all, risk is a subjective assessment and it varies across genders. Since white men tend to interpret risk differently, it creates a difference in the behavior, but Fine argues it’s not because they are more brave. After all, not all behaviors are created equal. She points out that the same risky behavior, such as drinking or unprotected sex, can have greater objective risk and more dangerous consequences for women than for men, so in a way, women, by engaging in these activities, show more courage in the face of higher objective risk. Finally, women are also judged more harshly when their risks don’t work out. We don’t say “girls will be girls” when a grown woman screws up. No one says that when a young woman accidentally gets pregnant, and yet we say it about boys who get a girl pregnant. As masculinity scholar Jackson Katz often notes, we always say “she got pregnant” instead of “he impregnated her,” or “she was raped” instead of “he raped her.” Especially if she is not white. In fact, data shows black girls face harsher discipline as early as preschool. Indigenous girls are more than three times more likely to be suspended than white girls and black girls are 5.5 times more likely to be suspended. Researchers at Georgetown called this phenomenon the “adultification“of girls of color, where they are perceived to be older, more independent and less deserving of as much protection. This unconscious and conscious bias impacts boys, too. The Department of Education finds that black children are nearly four times more likely to be suspended than their white peers. One in five black boys will get suspended while they’re in school while only 5 percent of white boys will. No wonder white boys perceive risk differently than boys of color when the consequences they face are so vastly different.

  In other words, we often hear people say women are more risk-averse, when perhaps it would be accurate to call them risk-appropriate. That’s what Dan M. Kahan, professor of law at Yale Law School (and noted white man), concluded after he conducted his own research. His data shows that white men, especially those who score high on individualism and a belief in hierarchy (as opposed to egalitarianism), are the most risk ignorant. To figure this out, Kahan decided to test something that’s objectively perceived as a pretty big risk: the impending threat that climate change poses to our livelihood. When he tested this large-stake policy question, he found no big variance based on gender or race, except for white men who scored high on hierarchy and individualism, who, you guessed it, were a lot more comfortable with the risk of a warming planet. So it’s the intersection of whiteness, maleness and a penchant for individualism that creates what we often mislabel as stereotypical “male” behavior when it comes to our perception of who is more risk-taking, but that’s largely because most risky things pose less of a threat to white male subjects. Kahan proved this theory by purposely testing male subjects, asking them to weigh the risk of policies that would make white men more susceptible than other populations: he asked subjects how much they would be willing to risk the prosperity of the economy by increasing taxes on corporations. Interestingly, in that scenario where white men have more to lose, women were much less risk-averse than men! Kahan concluded: “[I]t confirms that men are more risk tolerant than women only if some unexamined premise about what counts as a ‘risk’ excludes from assessment the sorts of things that scare the pants off of white men (or at least hierarchical, individualistic ones).” So white men are a lot less comfortable with risk than women and people of color when the tables are turned and they are suddenly the ones who have more on the line.

  RISK IS ASSOCIATED WITH STATUS AND RITUALIZED MASCULINITY ACROSS ALL GROUPS

  But regardless of whether a man wants or has to take a risk, he’s still expected to have one attitude: fearlessness in the face of it. And when men don’t measure up or when they need a hand, they’re given a punch, or maybe a smoke or a drink instead.

  It’s no wonder that American men have always smoked more than women (although the trend is starting to reverse in younger generations, where young women and men are smoking in roughly equal numbers). Prior to WWI, women were culturally sanctioned for smoking, especially in public, and Marlboro famously appealed to men, associating cigarettes with the classic lone cowboy image. Smoking signified freedom, independence, ruggedness, a proof of being a tough man. Given this focus on cigarettes symbolizing ultimate autonomy, it’s unsurprising one of their first advertisements to women used feminist coded language and framed it as “a torch of freedom,” messaging overtly to the modern woman that she could access her own independence through smoking.

  Race also played into their marketing strategy. Starting in the 1960s, Newport explicitly targeted black and brown communities with menthol cigarettes. It’s worth noting that the FDA deems menthols more dangerous because they are harder to quit and increase the depth of inhalation because the menthol effect hides the harshness of tobacco. Newport paid black athletes for endorsements, advertised mentholated products in magazines such as Ebony and Essence, and even went so far as to offer money to black institutions, schools and civil rights organizations. Due to this overt and sustained racialized advertising approach, African-Americans are twice as likely to smoke mentholated cigarettes as white people. In fact, nearly nine out of ten black smokers prefer mentholated cigarettes to this day. Make no mistake: this is a manufactured preference. Although the FDA has banned other flavor additives on the grounds that they can increase addiction in younger smokers, menthol wasn’t included in the ban, despite its undeniable harm to the black community.

  It’s not just smoking that has roots in idealized notions of masculinity; drinking has also been presented to men as a ritual and sign of maleness. And there’s no clearer example that drinking is corroding male health than Russia: the capital of vodka and not coincidentally the capital of early male death. Men die so prematurely from drinking in Russia that it has the largest gender expectancy gaps in the world. The World Health Organization has certainly noticed and warns that patriarchal cultures encourage behavior that puts men’s lives at risk, and heavy drinking is high on their list.

  We often associate Russians with vodka, but the link between alcohol and male mortality is one that health care professionals in Russia are all too familiar with. In fact, the excessive consumption of alcohol by men is so bad that men’s life expectancy has actually started declining, a rare phenomenon for an industrialized country. According to the World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer, one in four men in Russia won’t make it past their fifty-fifth birthday, and they found that the majority of those deaths are alcohol related: liver disease, alcohol poisoning and getting into fights while drunk are at the top of that list. Binge drinking makes men twice as likely to become victims of violence.

  Russia is well known for its vodka consumption, but what gets less attention is just how rooted it is in the formation of Russian men’s identity.

  Although drinking and alcohol-related deaths have been common in Russia since at least the nineteenth century, it was only after the industrial revolution that drinking went from being a communal activity to an exclusively male one. Taverns started popping up near factories and drinking became a way for men to identify as a group. Researchers from Middle Tennessee State University who studied the history of alcoholism in Russia profusely note that “rank-and-file laboring men closely identified with the consumption of alcohol, but this is not to say that women did not drink. Rather, men’s drinking was an ess
ential element of worker identity [and] became a way to delineate themselves from ‘others’ like women and non-workers.”

  Drinking became such a masculine ritualized performance that working-class Russian men couldn’t even drink wine or beer, as those beverages were seen as too effeminate. In other words, vodka became the only option for men. Sobriety also became associated with femininity, as men who didn’t drink or didn’t drink enough would be called mokraia kuritsa (“wet hens”), which is especially relevant because of the super not-sexist Russian proverb “A chicken is not a bird, and a woman is not a person.” We even see a pattern of male consumption follow their changing position in society. For instance, government intervention eventually and steadily brought consumption down, but the creation of the Soviet Union made it spike again because the head of the household was no longer the father figure; it was the state. For many men, this pivot in their role was dramatic, and many dealt with this by reinstating their masculinity through the act of heavy drinking. Because men’s role inside the home was being replaced by the state, fatherhood become less central. This led men to reassert their masculine dominance in other ways, and drinking was one of them. So when we raise men to have to prove their manhood by taking risks, they can resort to hazardous means to fulfil those expectations.