“Shootings, Love, & The Gunman Myth”
“The story is that a girl rejected him. And, so, he killed her, and killed himself. This might show many things. People will write for years about the things it shows, and they’ll be right, but we have known them all already, known them all: We know about male entitlement to women’s bodies, we know that women too often pay the price. But, what I want to talk about is the slit that’s opened in our definitions of men. I want to talk about how badly we’re failing the boys who can’t see their way out of a totally lethal, totally toxic distortion of masculinity — the kind that says that if boys aren’t manly, or gentlemanly, they can be gunmanly.”
This idea of “gunmanly” — that’s so horrifying but also something I can so easily understand, it’s in so many parts of popular culture if not every single part of popular culture, the manliness of gun violence
It is so important that there be a national conversation about masculinity (!!). I see this unexamined violent and possessive masculinity in the casual stares I get every day from men who probably don’t even realize that they are staring because it’s just so coded into how they are meant to express their masculinity in public. I really think that there are people who knowingly irritate me because it makes them feel more validated in their gender identity.
And then I can’t imagine how damaging it must be to be unable to be vulnerable — to only be able to express vulnerability through violence.
