As a young man, I studied violence.
I sat in rooms with the perpetrators. I heard their laments and rationalizations. I asked them questions, made notes and kept files. What impressed me was how overwhelmingly ordinary most of them were. Not many of them were special, not many of them could really explain why they had done what they had done, at least not so as to make it intelligible to a disinterested observer. Mainly what they claimed was victimhood.
The other thing that stood out about the dealers of violence is that they were mostly men. At least 90 percent of them.
Some people will say that is due to biological differences. They will suggest that evolution has programmed males to be warriors and to aggress against their neighbors for access to women. Others will advance a slightly more nuanced argument that allows for the influence of biological imperatives but also incorporates historical and cultural factors that made men society's economic and political leaders. Men, this theory goes, fight because they can obtain or hold on to power and money by fighting. You fight to protect what you have; you fight to take what you need.
Throughout much of our history, most women were sidelined in these contests. They were prizes and drudges; chattel flaunted, marginalized and exploited. And while the law and most corporate consciences are better now, there's still toxic murk inside a lot of people's heads. Most of us think we're owed something by the world and it doesn't help when we look around and see that other people seem to have things figured out.
You want to know why most mass shootings in this country are carried out by young white males--the least discriminated against, most privileged class in this country? Maybe it's because they're in better position to act out, because they have the means to do so, the access to money or credit to buy weapons along with the generalized presumption that they belong wherever they choose to be. In our culture, it's not difficult to acquire the means to murder--especially not if you look like Charles Whitman, Elliot Rodger, Nikolas Cruz or Dimitrios Pagourtzis.
But those who point out that semi-automatic weapons aren't a prerequisite for violence have a point. An instrument makes you more efficient and more lethal; it gives your rage potency and range and a means of expression, but it doesn't instill the rage. And while it's probably useful to have serious talks about making it harder for damaged people to get military grade weapons, the truth is most murderers have a single victim. And men can and do kill people--most often women they profess to love--with their bare hands.
I don't know why so many of us men are so aggrieved. But I've read some things about the so-called "incel movement" and embedded in all the pseudo-intellectual self-pity--Robert Bly-style humorlessness muddled by full on nerd panic--I recognize the simple whining of guys without girlfriends. A species of locker room talk that boils down to misogynistic sloganeering and observations of how girls pay more attention to handsome, well-heeled jerks than the authentic nice guys who troll them on the Internet.
Any woman who happens to come across this sort of nonsense might rightly be terrified. And might earnestly ask if male sexual frustration is really worth so much fuss.
Unfortunately, maybe so. At least if you read 20th-century American literature, you might believe so. All those writers I grew up reading (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Roth, Mailer, Updike, Cheever, Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence) posit it as the prime engine behind fortunes and empires. It is the subject of so much I've consumed that even in an age when I know that other stories about other kinds of frustration written by writers who aren't white men still seem somehow less authentic than all these different versions of "my struggle."
And the truth is, the sexual frustration of white men is dangerous. Disrespecting it can get you killed. It's something that ought to be taken seriously: Look what happens when men don't get what they want. They shoot up schools. They drive vans into crowds. You better give them (us) what they (we) want.
In 1983, a friend of mine wrote an essay that gained a little traction in the cultural moment, in which she observed that in the '70s, women "were complaining that men all feel this need to perform their macho role and think they've got to be strong and they can't cry, and now we've released them from that. We wanted to destroy sex roles, so we destroyed them, and now we're complaining."
I don't think women are to blame for a bit of it. Sure, the way men and women relate to one another has changed dramatically in the last 50 or 60 years, and there's been some leveling of economic and sexual playing fields. But there's no disadvantage that attaches to being a white male in this country. It's just that there's theoretical cover for the abdication of responsibility. A lot of us never have to grow up.
Maybe there are some people who live on a higher plane, who set a course and follow it based on theory and philosophy, but most of us are emotional animals. You don't become a monster in a vacuum. You hurt people because you've been hurt yourself. Most people don't do stuff for idealistic or abstract reasons. The reason a soldier sacrifices himself on a battlefield has nothing to do with loving freedom or country, it has to do with adrenaline and anger and not wanting to disappoint the men he fights alongside.
Timothy McVeigh may have wanted to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City to strike a blow against a federal government he thought was intent on taking away his beloved guns, but he would have been diverted by a girlfriend.
Which comes first? The lonely loser or the domestic terrorist?
Love saves lives, and ought to be encouraged. But no one owes you sex, son.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 06/05/2018