I wrote this post for facebook, in response to the bombing at Manchester Arena, but never posted it up. It’s raw and needs editing, but I’ll just put it here for now as a holder until I get around to that.
I don’t want to add to the platitudes or simplifications being presented about the Manchester shooting. But I do feel compelled to add a narrative that seems to be missing here, particularly in the context of an attack seemingly quite deliberately targeting women and girls, and as usual, perpetrated by a man, who committed suicide in the process.
The narratives that are missing: male suicide trends (http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/longform/a9202/britain-male-suicide-crisis/) AND toxic masculinity (http://www.salon.com/2016/06/13/overcompensation_nation_its_time_to_admit_that_toxic_masculinity_drives_gun_violence/ – not the most tempered article but still) AND violence (in all its forms) against femininity (I’m not talking about makeup here but about behaviours – gentleness, compassion, vulnerability, sensitivity, ability to see multiple points of view, listening, etc.)
Now, I should clarify that I’m talking about masculinity and femininity as traits, not as things necessarily aligned with biological sex. People all along the gender spectrum have traits of both masculinity and femininity.
I’m also not saying there isn’t potentially an overlap with religion, because religion can also exacerbate problems around masculinity and femininity, as can other cultural things (think closeted gay homophobe in American Beauty, and the Orlando shooter – different reasons for repression of their sexual orientation). These things are also not disconnected from the many other attacks on women and children, from the Ecole Polytechnique mass shooting in 1989 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre), motivated by the perceived threat of women studying, to the mass shooting in 2014 compellingly linked to appalling misogyny (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/24/elliot-rodgers-california-shooting-mental-health-misogyny), as well as domestic violence which is still overwhelmingly directed at women (and children) in the clearest expression of toxic masculinity.
I feel at pains to reiterate that this isn’t about men and women as discrete categories, it’s about masculinity and femininity and how these are understood and acted, and about how we treat and respond to different expressions of masculinity and femininity. In the case of current British politics, it is actually a woman who is representing masculinist ideas – ‘strong and stable’ is the kind of narrative that men are told they need to be. If that means violence and control, so be it. The narrative doesn’t break down what strong and stable means, but it doesn’t talk about the strength in non-violence, in negotiation, in taking responsibility, and in caring. Conversely, the current leader of the Labour party is vilified for being sympathetic, empathetic, listening, and allowing for complexity and multiple sides and angles, all things associated with femininity. There is close to an abhorrence of his lack of willingness to say ‘yes I would drop a nuclear bomb on a country’. He represents a threat to an idea of masculinity that has to be aggressive, has to be violent, has to posture and make clear its willingness towards violence.
I suggest we really need to think about how ideas of masculinity and femininity and the privileging of particular ideas of the former have such an insidious hold on our collective psyche, and that we really need to focus on healing the deep wounds caused by an essentially misogynist society. Particularly the wounds inflicted by such a society on men, which I think are evidenced by the rates of suicide, as well as domestic and other types of violence (toxic masculinity) expressed by men in particular.
Human Being Natural 