Violent Manhood. J. E. Sumerau
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by others. As such, many men will respond to such conditions by using violence, which they were taught was a sign of manhood, to compensate for the perceived slights they experience in such scenarios.
At this point, an example of the way this process plays out may be useful. If, for instance, a man has been taught that he must be sexually desirable to women, he may then make sexual comments to a woman he sees in his daily life. If, however, the woman in question does not respond positively to this action (e.g., she does not affirm the sexual desirability he is supposed to have if he is a man), then he may seek to compensate for his perceived failure to be sexually desirable to women (like men are supposed to be) by verbally, physically, or otherwise attacking the woman in question (calling her derogatory names, following her, etc.). Next, if the woman responds to this violent act in any way, then he can interpret her reaction as evidence of his control over her. The man in question has thus compensated for the slight to his manhood (i.e., he is not sexually desirable to this woman) by using violence to re-establish his belief in his own manhood (i.e., he has control over this woman’s actions).
Note that in the example above, the man in question could be of any race, class, sex, and age, or of any sexual, religious, or geographic social location. In fact, researchers have demonstrated similar patterns of interaction in settings including but not limited to boardrooms, batterer intervention programs, schools, religious organizations, online platforms, grocery stores, daycare centers, and academic conferences.[29] In all such cases and regardless of the other sociodemographic locations of the man in question, the process is similar. A man seeks to perform a manhood act by demonstrating an element of hegemonic masculinity (in this example, sexual desirability to women), fails to succeed in this performance, and responds with violence of some sort following this failure in order to demonstrate another element of the hegemonic ideal (i.e., using aggression to get fear or attention from others as in the example above). It is this pattern—how violence emerges as a compensatory strategy for people who identify as men—that I focus on throughout this book.
To this end, it is important to note just how common and widespread the pattern noted above is in the existing scientific literature and media concerning gender, violence, and the combination of these areas of study.[30] In terms of locations, for example, researchers have noted (at least implicitly) a similar pattern in settings including but not limited to arcades, construction sites, public streets, churches, schools, families, political rallies, businesses, sports arenas, and media depictions of men and women. Similarly, in terms of violence, researchers have noted similar patterns, including but not limited to domestic battery, bullying, rape and sexual assault, hate crimes, mass shootings and broader gun violence, street harassment, state-sanctioned violence, sexual harassment in the workplace, and murder and manslaughter cases. In all such cases, variations on the same pattern repeat, wherein (1) there are people who were taught they should always be in control; (2) those people, quite naturally, experience many social moments where they are not in control; and (3) many of these people respond to moments when they are not in control by utilizing violence to restore the feeling of control in their own lives and over other people.
The Study
Building on the insights and patterns noted above, this book examines processes whereby people who identify as men may utilize violence as a compensatory manhood act. Specifically, I utilize the statements of my interview respondents, alongside examples from my own life and existing men and masculinities literatures, to note the ways men learn to conceptualize violence as part of what it means to be a man and as a way to re-establish claims to manhood in the face of perceived challenges or threats to their masculinity. In so doing, I argue that an important part of combatting violence in society involves revising contemporary societal definitions of what it means to be a man and the element of violence embedded in such definitions. To this end, I utilize examples in which people who identify as men make sense of violence, manhood, and current gender issues in U.S. political debates. In so doing, I demonstrate how their own notions of violence and manhood fuel reactions to attempts by others to challenge existing gendered, racial, and sexual inequalities in the United States.
At the same time, this study furthers existing work on men, masculinities, and manhood acts by explicitly connecting such work to criminological and other research concerning violence in the United States. I do this by combining examinations of what it means to be a man with analyses of the ways people who identify as men respond to specific issues concerning violence in society at present.[31] Specifically, my work here provides an illustration of the ways people who identify as men make sense of and respond to pressing societal issues, including movements for racial, women’s, and LGBT rights; gun violence and mass shootings; domestic violence and sexual assault; and what it means to be a given type of gender in the first place. As such, this work represents a synthesis of prominent topics in gender studies, criminological studies, and current political and policy debates at the intersection of these fields. It is my hope that it will serve as a model for integrating research, advocacy, and discussion on these issues in the future. Even more so, however, I hope readers will take the opportunity to consider what my respondents’ examples say about violence and what it means to be a man in contemporary U.S. society with the goal of facilitating discussions and possibilities for change in the nation.
To this end, I utilize autoethnographic data from my own life and an original in-depth interview study, which contains interviews with 50 people who identify as white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle- or upper-class men.[32] My work here offers a rare, in-depth interview study with this population concerning aspects of violence and movements for minority rights in contemporary U.S. society and further provides one of the first occasions wherein contemporary U.S. men react to and make sense of current #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and Transgender Rights movements that challenge core aspects of their own identities. I thus utilize patterns in these data to capture a portrait of what it means to be a man by people who both identify as men and occupy other socially privileged identity groups and what role violence plays in such meanings as an element of responding to perceived threats to manhood itself.
I focus specifically on men who also occupy privileged racial, class, and sexual social locations to facilitate future discussion and consideration of three interrelated aspects of U.S. society and relationships between violence and manhood. First, I seek to direct attention to the ways that even men who would theoretically be most likely to fit the hegemonic ideal may enact compensatory manhood acts as a result of any occasion where they experience perceived marginalization in society (even if these instances are temporary). Next, I seek to outline the ways that, rather than an exception, violence is defined as an essential element for people who seek to identify as men and be seen as men by others. Finally, I offer a demonstration of the ways these patterns play out in both religious and non-religious[33] men’s interpretations of what it means to be a man and what violence has to do with manhood itself.
Organization of the Book
As noted throughout this introduction, manhood, as well as gender more broadly, may be constructed, defined, and performed in a wide variety of ways. At the same time, people hold many different beliefs about what it means to be a member of a given gender group. I thus utilize chapter 2 to contextualize the gender beliefs and attitudes of my interview subjects. Specifically, I explore their own definitions of what it means to be a man as well as what it means to be “other men” or a member of another gender group. In so doing, the chapter allows readers to understand the gender beliefs and attitudes of my subjects to provide a foundation for the chapters on specific aspects of violence and manhood to follow.
After contextualizing the gendered and other beliefs and attitudes of my respondents, chapter 3 turns to the ways they react to and explain violence in contemporary U.S. society. Specifically, I examine how they make sense of violence in their own lives and society through mobilizing excuses for such activities. In so doing, I outline how they both define violence as inevitable and, at the same time, draw a symbolic line between intentional, real violence other men do and accidents that just happen as part of life. I further note how their excuses rely upon societal and personal convictions concerning appropriate expectations and behavior for men in society. Finally, I explore how their efforts to excuse violence allow