When Tears Become Bullets

In 2001, I met and soon moved in with a remarkable young woman, an art therapist, who had worked with young children at Byrd Elementary School at Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project, as well as in the Robert Taylor Homes and Cook County Hospital.  Working with inner-city boys, she was driven to thread the emotional needle, to help them move forward.  

In that studio apartment, on her bookshelf, was ”Real Boys” written by William Pollock, PhD about “the myths of boyhood,” how our society shapes boys to become men.  I tried repeatedly to crack that cover but could not.  It cut too close to my core.

I quote now the four core tenets of what Pollock called “the Boy Code”:

“The sturdy oak: Men should be stoic, stable, and independent. A man never never shows weakness…boys are not to share pain or grieve openly. 

Give ‘em hell: This is the stance of some of our sports coaches, of roles played by John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Bruce Lee, a stance based on a false self, of extreme daring, bravado, and attraction to violence. 

The “big wheel”:  This is the imperative men and boys feel to achieve status, dominance, and power. Or, understood another way, the “big wheel refers to the way in which boys and men are taught to avoid shame at all costs, to wear the mask of coolness, to act as though everything is under control….

“No sissy stuff:” Perhaps the most traumatizing and dangerous injunction thrust on boys and men is the literal gender straight jacket that prohibits boys from expressing feelings or urges seen as “feminine” – dependence, warmth, empathy.”

In short, big boys don’t cry.  When I was young, my father – who lived to seize the brass ring, to slay the dragon, to climb the mountain, then died young – he repeatedly told me, “David, you can get used to hanging if you have to.”  My football coaches always rhymed “no pain, no gain!”  I fault neither my Father nor the coaches, as they only passed on what they had been taught.  About all this, Pollock cautioned, “when boys cannot cry, their tears become bullets.”

Bullets, of course, can be metaphorical, and but one example would be the Wall Street “Masters of the Universe” among whom “might is right” with finance a zero sum game of domination, power and control.  Consider hedge funds buying up the foreclosed housing stock and then raising rents, in the midst of a housing shortage.  Or private equity buying medical practices, to maximize profits at the expense of patient care. 

The first rule of the Boy Code is that we don’t talk about the Boy Code.  I violate masculinity in writing this meditation upon raising a daughter and son in a culture where hypermasculinity is the norm.  I speak here not of the male gender but the masculine traits, as taught.  

Jackson Katz, a male pioneer in women’s studies, has written a book titled “Man Enough?” about the “Politics of Presidential Masculinity.”  Presidential campaigns are described “…as the center stage of an ongoing national debate about manhood, a kind of quadrennial referendum on what type of man—or one day, woman—embodies not only our ideological beliefs, but our very identity as a nation….how fears of appearing weak and vulnerable end up shaping candidates’ actual policy positions…”

I write here neither to praise nor denigrate any candidate. My concern is our culture of dominance.  In this time of hypermasculinity, where we demonize “other,” be they immigrants, the extreme right, the “marxist” left, Neo-nazis, ad infinitum, I am compelled to ask what if the problem is not “them” but us?  It is so easy to point and blame “them” but infinitely more challenging to say it is our system of beliefs, self-reinforcing, which perpetuate cycles of violence, a culture of dominance rather than compassion. 

Jackson Katz gave a TED Talk titled “Violence against women – it’s a men’s issue.”  He makes the subtly persuasive point that rational self interest in a patriarchal society becomes a self-reinforcing system of belief; there is no conspiracy but a self interest in maintaining the status quo rather than embracing change.  By analogy, Newton’s First Law of Motion here pertains, that a system of domination will persist until it is acted upon by an external force strong enough to bring change.  https://www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue?subtitle=en

“It takes a village” becomes my curse.  In our home we raise children to value empathy, compassion and emotional intelligence, but the world into which they go – are schooled, coached and policed – there predominates the hypermasculine.  How do we raise our children to be compassionate when their peers practice dominance?  “Gentle as a dove, wise as a serpent,” comes to mind. 

As a child, I would read the Sunday comics seated below my Father, while he devoured the business news.  Pogo, the political satire, ran in those comics, with its theme “We have met the enemy, and He is us.”  More than fifty years have passed and some demonize the “Deep State” or “them” but I ask, what if Pogo really was right?  What then, if we ourselves are the problem?

An honest awareness seems a necessary starting point in a new dialogue. 

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Here at an art farm Bacchus has arrived bearing wild seedless Champagne grapes. Jimmy Nardello Italian Frying Peppers are abundant. Tomatoes exceed our capacity to use. Pole beans flower, to attract hummingbirds. Butternut squash grow on the vine. Peaches are ripe for the picking. We bring bushels of produce to the Food Cupboard.