by Liz Plank
“Defense is the one place where men can maintain this sense of domination over, without it being considered a problem,” she explained. But of course, if your identity is defined by protecting your partner and children, what happens when you can’t do that? “If your relationship or your sense of self is defined in any way with control over your partner, what happens when you lose control?” Stroud pointed out. “Being the gentle defender of women is the good-guy version of the same sort of ideology that positions women as less than and subservient to men.” That’s why Stroud makes the argument that we need to rethink what a “good guy” looks like. “Most men are good and most men do not perpetuate violence, but when they have that ideology in their head ready to use when needed you can go from being a good guy to being a bad guy very quickly.”
But despite the fact that men say they use guns to defend themselves or their family, the “male protector” model that the NRA has propagated for decades doesn’t reflect what men are actually doing with guns. The majority of gun deaths aren’t a result of men killing intruders; they’re a result of men killing themselves. Boys are given toy guns by parents who watch them pretend shoot at other boys, unaware that some of their sons will grow up to use a real gun to kill themselves. Stroud explains that while black males are disproportionately harmed by gun violence, two-thirds of deaths by guns in America are death by suicide and a majority of those are white males. As a demographic, they are more likely to engage in the impulsive type of suicide that takes place with more lethal means and under the influence of alcohol or drugs. It’s the most difficult one to prevent because it doesn’t have identifiable warning signs that could help curb its incidence.
Although adolescent girls are three to nine times more likely to attempt suicide, the suicide rate for adolescent boys is two to four times higher because males tend to use more violent means when choosing to end their life, the most violent of which is, of course, a firearm. Worryingly, the rate of male suicide in the United States has increased since 2000. According to the CDC, the number of men who take their own lives in their fifties has increased by 50 percent between 1999 and 2010. Although there’s a potent and ongoing debate about gun homicides, the fact that most gun deaths in America are by suicide doesn’t often come up. Oddly, the policy conversations around guns hardly ever focus on how guns are most often used to self-inflict violence, especially given that suicide is on the rise. The suicide rate in America in 2015 was the highest that it’s been in the last three decades. And this problem isn’t unique to the United States. In every single country in the world (except China), men are more likely to die by suicide than women.
And the abnormal mass availability of guns in the United States doesn’t simply impact men; it disproportionately impacts boys. Of all the youth gun deaths between 2012 and 2014, a staggering 84 percent were boys, many of whom had used guns to kill themselves. In fact, the suicide rate by firearm for children has hit an unprecedented high, with the American Academy of Pediatrics showing an increase of 60 percent in child suicide between 2007 and 2014. This is alarming, especially when we consider that young Native Americans have a suicide rate that is double the national rate and that the situation is even more dire for boys whose gender identity doesn’t conform with normative conceptions of masculinity. The suicide rate for LGBTQ boys is utterly staggering. For instance, half of transgender boys surveyed by the American Academy of Psychiatrists reported attempting suicide. One study showed that bisexual or gay young men were up to seven times more likely to die from suicide. Although different groups of boys are more vulnerable than others, there seems to be something about growing up male that makes one more likely to choose to die.
WHY ARE BOYS AND MEN KILLING THEMSELVES?
Since men are expected to be strong and self-reliant, even a perception that they cannot fulfill that role can make them averse to seeking help—many experts believe that these masculine ideals are responsible for the male suicide epidemic. Daniel Coleman, a researcher who has spent the last decade studying male suicide, argues that the link between masculinity social scripts and suicide patterns is undeniable. He has found that a need for power, success and self-reliance sets up men for failure because it generates a vicious cycle of pain. Feelings of inadequacy are fueled by unrealistic ideals about masculinity and then those very same beliefs discourage them from asking for help. The more a man identifies with traditional masculinity beliefs, the more vulnerable he is. In fact, Coleman’s research concludes that idealizing “high traditional masculinity” is a “risk factor,” especially for men who weren’t able to fulfill their masculine ideal because of illness, disability or the loss of a job. In other words, having a more flexible way of viewing themselves could protect men from the shocks of everyday life.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim’s theory of suicide stems primarily from a disconnection from institutions such as marriage, employment and social networks. The data about modern men largely supports this. For instance, the rate of suicide is highest for men without a college degree. It is also higher for single men and men who have experienced a separation or divorce. Unemployment or income anxiety is also a huge factor. Suicides are also higher in rural areas, and the suicide gap between teenagers in urban and rural areas has been expanding. Working in certain male-dominated fields like law enforcement and the military is also correlated with a higher suicide rate for men, and many of them use firearms. Access to a means for suicide in someone’s employment is also an important determining factor of vulnerability. Because we often conflate male independence and self-reliance with male isolation, the men who need the most help often look like the men who don’t. That’s because the characteristics that are associated with the highest risk of suicide for men also happen to be the ones that we put on a pedestal.
I couldn’t help but notice that Wyoming, the state of the lone cowboy—a lasting icon of ideal masculinity: a man who is stoic and unattached—was also the state with the most alarming amount of male suicides. A chilling 80 percent of people who die from suicide in Wyoming are men. Middle-aged white men who live in western states like Wyoming are three times more likely to die from suicide than the national average. When it comes to the number of suicide deaths by gun, no other state has dethroned Wyoming in the last fifteen years. Many factors could explain the prevalence of suicide—the reduction in employment opportunities is one of them—but perhaps the most significant is how common and expected it is for men to have guns in their home. A majority of houses in rural areas contain a gun, and Wyoming has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the country.
I’m certainly not the first to draw attention to the link between men’s gun ownership and their vulnerability to suicide. When researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health dug into the data, they found that men in rural areas were more likely to commit suicide, but when they isolated the data to only look at non-gun suicides, the contrast between men in urban areas and rural men disappeared. “It is often said that people would kill themselves anyway, even if they didn’t have access to guns,” the lead researcher, Paul Sasha Nestadt, a postdoctoral fellow in the Bloomberg School’s Psychiatric Epidemiology Training Program, said when the study was published. “[But] there is an entire body of research that tells us that is simply not true.” Although the data is clear, it’s still controversial to draw attention to the pattern we see here. Perhaps if guns and power weren’t so interlinked for men, it would be easier to label the alarming number of guns in men’s hands as one of the most urgent health crises in a generation.
While guns have an impact on the incidence of suicide, research shows that economic and social changes also hugely impact male suicide rates. While for women, the presence of mental health issues and illness is the primary determinant of suicide, men’s vulnerability to suicide seems affected more by external factors. For instance, over the course of modern history, suicide has peaked during financial crises like the Great Depression, when suicide rates skyrocketed.
In the 1990s, when Hong Kong experienced a financial crisis, male suicide deaths of men aged 30–59 almost doubled. In 2007, as various recessions took over Europe, male suicide rates also took a major hit.
But interestingly, data shows that gender equality may in fact be an unsuspecting antidote to male suicide, because women’s empowerment may protect men from economic shocks. It makes sense when you think about it. If women are educated and can work, it lessens the financial responsibility that rests on the shoulders of men. The less gender equality you have, the more you have a traditional society where men are expected to shoulder unequal responsibility. Research by academic Øystein Gullvåg Holter has studied this effect. The data he collected shows that societies with lower levels of gender equality are the ones with the highest rates of male suicide and that the gender gap in suicide is smaller in nations with higher gender equality. One study by Aaron Reeves and David Stuckler found that in countries with high levels of gender equality, like Sweden and Austria, “the relationship between rising unemployment rates and suicide in men disappeared altogether.” They concluded that the economic and political empowerment of women could create an actual buffer to mediate and lower the risk of suicidal consequences of economic downturns for men. It makes sense that in a society where the provider role is shared by both men and women, less pressure is put on men to sustain economic shocks.
It turns out that when women do well, it helps men. Who would have thought?2
Race fundamentally changes masculinity. We need to think about masculinity as a deeply racial issue.
—NICO JUAREZ
AMUSE-BOUCHE:
Nico’s Story
Nicolas is only 22 years old, but he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Growing up with a white Cajun French mother and a Tzotzil-descendant Mexican father in Louisiana, Nicolas Juarez found it impossible to disconnect his experience of masculinity from his indigenous identity. “Identity categories are not additive processes,” he explained to me at the beginning of our conversation. “People tend to think about intersectionality as adding up all their oppressions and their privileges to know where they are. In reality, when you add masculinity into Nativeness, you aren’t simply adding a privilege to an oppressed category; you are radically changing both categories.”
Nico grew up with kids in middle school who teased him about how he hopped the border when he says the truth is that “we didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.” Despite having full knowledge of his ancestors’ experience with brutal white colonialism and the anti-immigration rhetoric that followed, he often felt like he needed to co-sign his own racist bullying just to get by. Growing up he certainly knew he had male privilege, but there was always an asterisk next to it. He knew that being a man came with a long list of benefits, but he also didn’t seem to see men who looked like him achieve any of them. When he became a visiting scholar at New York University (I told you he was smart), he discovered why. In his research he found that according to DOJ data, despite Native women facing the highest amount of violence, Native men are just as likely to have experienced intimate violence as white women in the last year. He also found that the rate of control of reproductive choices was twice the rate than white women experienced. The most common way Native men say they experience reproductive violence is being forced to have children they do not want, most often with non-Native women. That heavily complicates the narrative of reproductive and domestic violence being a woman’s issue, especially since in the case of some kinds of violence against Native men, these acts are more likely to be perpetuated by women who are white. “If we think of masculinity as position, then what does it mean for Native masculinity to face more violence than white femininity?” Nico told me. “It suggests that for Native men, gender is not a category they are welcome in. Gender is a site of violence.”
Nico also pointed out that Native Americans have died at the hands of police more than any other group. Although there are far fewer indigenous Americans than African-Americans or Latinos living in the United States, they face even greater rates of violence from the police. And research shows that Native Americans’ stories rarely make it to the news cycle. Nico talked about the radically different way that black or brown men are treated compared to white men when they are arrested.
He recounted the 2017 killing of Jason Pero, a 14-year-old Native boy who was home sick with the flu and left his house holding a butcher knife and was fatally shot by police. “Why is his running perceived as an illogical response to a weapon being drawn on you?” Nico said. “The understanding is that he must therefore be criminal. He’s a criminal who deserves to die.” Nico contrasted that with the way white men are arrested for far greater crimes than running away. “White men who shoot up theaters are taken alive,” he said. “What does it mean for white men to commit these violences and not be marked as people who deserve to die? But indigenous boys who walk home sick deserve to die. There is something about masculinity once it becomes racialized that justifies that violence.”
The justification of violence against Native men is nothing new. Nico traces it back to the very first colonial writing in American literature. “One of the first things that Christopher Columbus wrote about is the nudity of Native people and what that must have suggested about them.” This exoticization of Native people served as a form of dehumanization that justified their mass murder.
This portrayal of the indigenous man as the savage doesn’t just frame how Native men are perceived; it affects how they view themselves. If you’re perceived as sub-human, animalistic and uncontrolled, it creates an exaggerated sense of responsibility to control emotions and display stoicism. “Our social order encourages this warrior narrative,” he said. “Your job is to die, to be the first one to take the bullet, to put yourself in danger so that other people don’t get harmed. You get this romanticized image of the Native man who is standing strong and sovereign, ready to take on the colonizer. This means you should be mentally and physically strong because you need to be a person fighting in the ongoing battle of colonialism.”
This intense pressure on indigenous men to be both an emotional and physical warrior is one of the reasons Nico views gender as a site of harm for women but also for men. “Gender itself is a violence,” he said. “We all suffer from gender; the only difference is that men are rewarded for that violence.”
Idealized definitions of masculinity may be oppressive for men, but Nico says they are still alluring for indigenous men. He noted that men overall get rewarded either financially, socially or politically. In fact, being a man is traditionally associated with higher status, higher economic power and more political influence than women possess. But what often gets lost is that these rewards are not spread equally among all men. Marginalized men may engage in the same kind of masculinity codes but not accrue the privileges that non-Native men get from their engagement. “The idea for men is that if I perform misogynistic violence, I’ll be rewarded socially, economically, even if that’s the cost of my emotional well-being,” he explained. “Masculinity can become a site of oppression if you are Native, but it also becomes an incentive. That you, as a Native man, want to access the things that masculinity tells you are yours, you might perform misogynistic violence because it’s the thing that gets you the privileges of masculinity. But it doesn’t seem to do that very well. So masculinity becomes this lure, without the social reward.” The way Nico described it, performing idealized masculinity seemed like a trap that marginalized men would fall into because of its promise to offer them the mobility they were so desperate to find.
At the end of our conversation, Nico echoed one of the most important points I hope I’ve been successful in making in this book: that the doctrine of gender dictated by patriarchy doesn’t just hurt women; it hurts men, too. To express this, Nico quoted Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, where he wrote in the context of racial justice that white people needed to see how racism hurts them, too. �
�I don’t need your help,” he writes. “I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly.” Nico explained how this applied to gender just as much as it did to race. “To say we’ll fix the problem together is not the same as saying you’re wounded and I’m not, because the reality is that there needs to be a recognition that it’s killing you, too. Patriarchy is killing men, too.”
To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being.
—bell hooks
12 The Making of Men
When I arrived in Zambia, I was struck by the beauty of the landscape, the generosity of the people and the largest selection of peanut butter I’d ever seen in my life. Edgar had become our driver after he helped us cross the border into Zimbabwe one night so we could bask in the mist and grandiosity of Victoria Falls, the largest waterfall in the world. The original name for the magical curtain of water was Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means “The Smoke That Thunders” in the Kololo dialect. The Kololo tribe had occupied the land around the falls during the 1800s prior to the British colonists who, true to their brand, renamed the falls after a white lady, Queen Victoria. The majestic endless curtain of water sits on the Zambezi River, creating mist for as far as the eye can see. In fact, the neighboring areas receive constant rain all day every day all year round because the spray from the waterfall is incessant. Often I would be walking through town and look up to stare at what I thought were clouds only to realize it was mist from the falls.
