Teen Culture

Kudos to Mike Males (Opinion, May 9) for his penetrating analysis of the current plethora of opinions of “adolescent rage.” He’s right to raise the question of the middle-aged man who ran down children in a schoolyard (May 4) or the disgruntled male employee who, after being fired, goes back to his workplace and shoots the place up. Males is onto something but drops the ball in naming it.

What Males fails to accurately name is our cultural bias toward male violence. We encourage boys to use violence to prove their manhood all the time. In fact, male violence is so common in our culture we call it sport. Witness the popularity of football, baseball, soccer, boxing, professional wrestling and the killing of animals (hunting). Notice, too, America’s love affair with guns, and you have a volatile mix ripe for the highest murder rate in the universe.

I believe Males should read Warren Farrell’s “The Myth of Male Power” and learn “why men are the disposable sex.” We are a culture enamored of men who are violent but because it is so deeply embedded in normative culture we hardly notice it. It’s time we did.

ROBERT B. HARRIS

Lancaster