‘Fatal Attractions’: The Way We Raise and Socialize Young Men Encourages Violence

When I read of the tragic events that occurred in Sunnyvale last week--the senseless murder of seven innocent bystanders by a man obsessed with a young woman--and when I thought about the rage that must have impelled him and the fear that must have haunted her, I wondered how this story would have been handled if the sexes of the attacker and victim had been reversed.

Inevitably this would have been tagged the “Fatal Attraction Murders”; columnists and commentators all around the country would have pounced on the incident eager to exploit its potential as proof that single professional women today are so lonely, so desperate for love, so twisted and deformed by their pursuit of success that they latch onto men whom they hardly know, try to bully them into relationships and actually commit murder if they don’t get their way.

Had Laura Black, an attractive electrical engineer, hounded and harassed Richard Farley for four years, burst into the electronics firm where she worked, fired off a 12-gauge repeating shotgun and injured Farley and three others while killing seven, it would have become the year’s sweepstakes story in the “What’s-Wrong-With-Modern-Women” category.

It didn’t happen that way, and to many people the thought of it happening that way is simply bizarre, surreal, unimaginable. Women--even crazy, spurned women--don’t do that sort of thing. Men do that sort of thing. Men who go crazy, and even men who don’t go crazy but who just get real mad, frequently become violent and frequently hurt people--both the women in their lives and innocent bystanders, like children.

That’s why it’s so fascinating that a film like “Fatal Attraction,” which succeeded as entertainment because it turned reality upside down and cast the woman as the violent, possessive attacker, was actually treated as some sort of broad social comment on real women in the 1980s. Yet events like the one in Sunnyvale, which occurred because a crazy man took literally our culture’s message that men can and should possess women, are never treated as part of a larger phenomenon.

It appears that when one fictional woman is violent, it’s an indication of a social problem, but when men--lots and lots of real men--are violent, it’s a series of isolated incidents.

There’s no question--in my mind, anyway--that Richard Farley is quite crazy. The question here has to do with the way in which crazy men like Farley, and men less crazy than Farley, express that craziness. It’s a question about violence, and the disturbingly high correlation that we see everywhere in this society between male anger--crazy or not--and violent behavior.

If Laura Black instead of Farley had committed this atrocity, we’d have heard a lot about how women are so socialized for love and affection that they go crazy if they don’t get it. It strikes me that this is an appropriate time to point out that men are so socialized for violence that when they go crazy, indeed when they just get angry, they often use violence to express themselves.

We can’t create a system of laws or education that will prevent all cases of mental illness until we start taking it seriously and making the connections that we must make between the images that our children see, the toys that they play with, the language that they use, the discipline that they encounter, the international relations that they learn about and the conclusions that they draw about violence and masculinity.

The Richard Farleys of the world, the deranged psychotics with a tenuous grasp of reality, will always be with us, but we can create a society that doesn’t encourage those individuals’ violent tendencies, that doesn’t provide them with countless examples on television of men being enriched and adored for violent behavior, that doesn’t regard males’ obsessive pursuit of women as a normal, even desirable part of human life.

If only the psychotics among us mistook this message as a license to pursue women and punish them if they resist that pursuit, the Sunnyvale case might not invite social comment. But on the very day that I read about that case in the newspaper I also read an article bearing the headline, “Sexual Harassment: The Problem That Won’t Go Away.” Of course it won’t go away, any more than rape or wife-beating will go away if treated--like the Sunnyvale massacre--as isolated incidents. They are all of a piece, and must be treated as such. We romanticize male pursuit, we validate the idea that physical beauty is a legitimate cue for such pursuit, we encourage men to regard women as possessions, and we tolerate men who use violence to get what they want. As long as we do that, we’re going to have male violence in general and male violence directed at women in particular. This is a social problem that is much more than a fatal attraction; it’s a lethal obsession, and it has to stop.