Unless you’ve been living in a cave in Siberia for the past week or so, you are aware of the Aurora shooting. First, condolences to those personally affected. I’ve lost people I cared about to similarly random violence, and it’s a hard thing to go through.
In the inevitable post-event media avalanche of opination I noted two items that particularly struck chords with me. Here’s the first.
This piece, by Jessica Wakeman in the Frisky (one also enjoys the irony in a professional journalist’s public profile) contains a few ideas that are harmful.
From the piece:
“I can respect and be touched by these men’s sacrifices. But I’m also wary of some byproducts of the heroism myth, the idea that a few good men will have courage under fire and put “women and children first.” ThePost crowed over these men’s “old-fashioned chivalry,” which are funny words to use, when you get right down to it. Why does masculinity have to have anything to do with heroic behavior? Their sacrifice was noble, sure. But in every telling of the “boyfriends risked their lives” story — and every boyfriend who then tells his girlfriend, “Sweetie, I would have done the same for you!” — there’s an implication that heroism is a gendered concept.
Heroism has never had a gender: just tell that to Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, or any of the female soldiers who risk their lives daily in our military…
[…]
I’ve been thinking a lot in recent days, too, about Jamie Rohrs, who left his child and girlfriend behind in the theater, got into his car, and drove away. He’s been getting a lot of flack for not behaving in the most noble of ways. Who knows how any of us would have reacted in that scenario? I would like to think that I would not have behaved as he did. And yet I feel bad for him too — he did, in my opinion, the wrong thing by leaving his loved ones behind in the theater and driving off. But there shouldn’t have to be this added burden of scorn on him because he acted “like a pussy,” as I’ve heard him called. He’s a human. He freaked out. That’s real life — not the perpetuation of a myth.
Matt McQuinn, Jonathan Blunk, and Alex Teves may well be true heroes who flung themselves in front of their girlfriends’ to save their lives. That’s beyond noble; it is the greatest sacrifice. But when we congratulate these individuals for their sacrifice, let’s congratulate them for being heroic people — not just heroic men.”
To take these one at a time:
Q) Why does masculinity have anything to do with heroic behavior?
A) Briefly, testosterone. Men take more risks than women because they are biologically less valuable than women, from a purely reproductive standpoint. It’s simple math. More men can die than women before the family (or humanity, if you want to go that far) dies out. Thus testosterone, sexual dimorphism, aggression, etc, which all feed into the cultural dynamic of masculinity which encourages male heroism as channeling of male characteristics into a socially beneficial outlet. That’s why you end up with things like this–not only the fact that men do things like this all the time but the fact that they are expected to do it and society encourages it through recognition and norms.
This is not to say women cannot be heroic (quick definition) but that physical courageousness, i.e. heroism is almost exclusively the province of men, and with good reason. Ms. Wakeman is confusing courage with heroism.
Why does this matter? Ms. Wakeman is operating on the assumption that gendered concepts are bad, that any sort of gender-specific behavior or characteristics are bad. This assumption is incorrect and harmful, not to mention also ironic on a web page that speaks specifically to “women’s issues” written by someone who majored in gender studies. She really ought to lay out the reasoning justifying her assumption before arguing for its implementation.
If you work to eradicate gender roles in an attempt to achieve a post-gendered society (whatever that means) then you are ignoring basic biological facts that strongly influence the way people behave. That these differences exist is a fact. That they are bad is opinion, and before arguing that they are bad and need correction, Ms. Wakeman should figure out what purpose they fill, which would take a book or two (or a lot of links) to walk through the evolutionary reasons why we are as we are. Her column is very nice and PC on a blog, but when you remove most of the luxury of security that we have as a safe law-abiding society (which we saw in Aurora), men need to be the heroic ones for their families.
So back to the case at hand: Don’t try to take from men the role that they are supposed to fill. If you do that, then the variables that drive male behavior don’t have appropriate outlets, and you end up with things like that pussy driving away from his family. Relieving that ass-hat of his obligation to his family–as a male and as a man–kinda sorta encourages behavior like being “deadbeat dad” pump-n-dump males, which is how men are programmed to act in the absence of things like social institutions. Which women then decry as a lack of commitment. So it’s a very regressive point of view to relieve men of their roles and responsibilities…
even in the face of not wanting to exclude women. Women can be and have certainly been physically heroic, but doing so is less their role than men’s. For instance, flipping Ms. Wakeman’s logic on its head, she ought to support (since heroism is not a purely male sport, and genders shouldn’t have exclusive roles so women can participate equally…) more women getting shot up in theaters in defense of their boyfriends, an idea that feels inherently wrong to most people. She ought to support full integration of women into combat arms in the military. She ought to support dismantling of any gender preference in family courts.
Further, she ought to logically stop complaining about regimes that oppress women, such as islamic states and various places in Africa. Since women are fully capable of being heroic people on the same level as men, they are fully capable of fending for themselves, right? We ought to relieve men of their responsibility to fix that whole situation, right? Except not, as shown by those less-civilized places where women need men to defend them and in some cases get rid of the a-holes who are doing bad things to them. Yet she will likely happily join a protest for women’s rights, oblivious of the fact that protesting is politics, politics is warfare by other means, and any sort of “peaceful” demonstration has to be backed with some sort of coercive force to be effective. When you find the source of that coercive force, it’s men with guns once you get through the structure of laws and etc that enable peaceful actions to exist and be effective. The only reason Ms. Wakeman can argue for non-gendered roles is because she’s living in a society built on male-based force applied through socially acceptable means.
If you take those socially acceptable means–i.e. roles–away, then you don’t have society. You could also address this by studying parenting, which is primarily but not exclusively the province of women, and how it complements men’s role of applying force.
Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints 