Male Violence Is Bred in the Boyhood Nurturing of Male Vanity

Women do a much better job of it. Life, that is. They handle it so much better than we do.

We men are a violent people. The facts are indisputable. Suicide and homicide: We kill ourselves and others three times as often as women do. Fatal car accidents: three times as much. Cirrhosis deaths: twice those of women. Arrests for felony crimes: five times greater.

The net result is that we men live seven years less than women. The terrible question is: Could our vulnerable planet absorb the dire consequences of men living an additional seven years?

Why is it like this? Why are men so much more violent?

Perhaps because we train our children with two different sets of rules. One, the one for girls, makes sense; the other is off the proverbial wall, and we males have long held the full sovereignty rights to the wall.

The young boy is too often nurtured on the overwhelming significance of “ego,” which is only a dangerous euphemism for vanity. The unfortunate result of such nurturing is to produce a self-centered human being who believes all too fervently in his own self-worth. When the real world, with its hordes of similarly convicted vanitarians, challenges a youth’s lofty expectations, conflict ensues. Nurturally enough, the male sees conflict as an opportunity to stand up for, to fight like hell for, his vain rights. Homicides, suicides, car fatalities, alcoholism, drugs, emotional breakdowns--so many of our self-inflicted wounds can be traced to male vanity.

We do so much better with our girls. We don’t counsel them to hit back when they are hit. We tell them that hitting is wrong, two wrongs don’t make a right--and little girls shouldn’t fight. When they are hurt, we rise above our instincts and channel our own anger into a positive, mutually therapeutic outpouring of comfort and love. We never castigate them for “losing.” We never tell them to “go back out there and hit her back.” We say and do all the right things . . . for half our children.

We share with our girls the subtle wisdom of the ages: Life takes on its truest, noblest meaning when we try to live for others, not ourselves. As children and as adults, our women come far closer than we to living this eternal truth.

But we’ve legitimized a double standard of expected behavior, and because of it women must pay a needlessly high price for a humility forced to coexist with vanity. Job discrimination, family violence, infidelity, alcohol and drug abuse are some of the heavy burdens borne by women as they struggle to survive in the vanitarian sea that constantly threatens them. Somehow, most of them do it. Most cling to the truer values. They are the thankless role models for our struggling humanity.

I have two sons who hover on the dreaded cusp of teen-age madness. Their mother and I think that they’re good children. We think, in spite of their fondness for the anomaly called rap, that they’re sensitive and sensible. Still, they’re a challenge.

A few years ago I said to Danny, who was 9 at the time, “What would you think if I got you a doll for Christmas?”

“Whaddaya, nuts?”

“Uhh . . . it’s just an idea.”

“Some idea.”

I smiled cavalierly. “Well, it just might help you to be a better father someday.”

Danny stared both at and through me. “Your father--he ever get you a doll?”

“Uhh . . . actually . . . probably not.”

“See what I mean?”

I was beginning to sense some heavy forensic potential in the lad. “Yeah, but . . . .”

“Forget it. Anybody ever found out, it’d be all over.”

Certainly no father wants his child to be burdened in such an unequivocal way. I nodded.

“What makes you think of these things?” Danny shook his head as though it was all over for his old man.

It will be all uphill for Danny and John and their mother and me. Still, we see progress. Danny recently told us he liked his woman baseball coach better than the others because “she doesn’t, like, yell at ya like those other jerks.”

As a former, hopefully reformed, high-intensity jerk who roamed the basketball sidelines in search of surrogate vanity, I felt good for both of us.