Taking a Societal Hammer to Male Aggression

Some week, eh?

In Westwood, UCLA researchers have concocted a vaccine that tests show has the potential to stop HIV infection before it begins, and to treat it when it has already taken hold.

And up at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they’ve found evidence of water on Mars. Mars. One day the labels on the five-gallon bottles will read, “Sparkletts--water from Eagle Rock and the Newton Crater.”

In the laboratories of Southern California, it’s the leading edge of the 21st century.

In the streets of Southern California, it’s the back end of the 10th century. Give or take a few centuries and the louts lighting fires and playing smash-and-grab could be burning oxcarts or stoning lepers, just for the lively hell of it.

The looting galoots stole more than food and souvenirs; they kidnapped the moment from the city, took unalloyed images of celebration and replaced them with more video-licious pictures of mayhem.

What, one has to wonder, would they have done if the Lakers had lost?

*

What is the critical mass of young men? How many of them does it take to unleash their shared restraints, to do what one or two of them alone would not?

In Belgium last week, how many English soccer hoodlums had to combine to pick fights with North African immigrants, shatter shop windows, trash cars, even break up a couple of bars?

And in New York’s Central Park, how many young men did it take to gang up for a mindless strip-and-destroy mission, surrounding women, trapping them, yanking off their clothes and groping them?

You wouldn’t know it to see them in pack action, but these are not the “fledgling psychopaths” who have the makings of schoolroom shooters and fast-food snipers. They are young men, in the main, who don’t look in the mirror and see alienated loners--just guys hanging out and looking for a good time, and OK, so we got carried away, big deal.

The culture’s crackling crossed wires send messages that befuddle and depress young women and put young men of any age at cross-purposes with themselves. Six hours a day of “play nicely” classroom admonitions and lessons in social amity, and then the bell rings, releasing them to a world of macho masquerading as manliness and of violence as entertainment, video games and TV.

Even the playoffs inside the Staples arena, the one they were celebrating with such merry mayhem, reward aggression and strength--coupled with skill and strategy and rules, the part that’s often overlooked. For every Shaquille O’Neal quoting Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” there are two or three other pro athletes beating up their girlfriends or starting bar fights and still getting the big money.

In more rigid and conforming cultures than this one, the energies of a man’s younger years were sometimes channeled into the military. It earned him medals, not admonitions. In Cuba, I hear tell, young men are sent out with machetes to whack sugar cane at just about the age they’d otherwise be inclined to whack at each other.

Should we consider planting a civic sugar cane patch in Griffith Park?

*

A few years back, at the same time I was suggesting with some levity that testosterone be added to the Proposition 65 list of toxic substances, a Stanford psychologist was seriously floating the idea of a man-tax of $100 a year. The billions collected would be like bail for society’s costs of men skipping out on their kiddies, filling up prisons, looting S&Ls;, driving oil tankers onto rocks.

This week it’s water on Mars and perhaps an HIV vaccine in a test tube. Next year, next decade, next century, it will be another breakthrough. Already science is looking for the biological keystone to violence and aggression, and it isn’t looking for it in TV Guide or Hustler or Staples Center.

Last year, a study of elementary schoolboys from the inner city to the countryside found that little boys with disruptive behavior bordering on bullying had low levels of the stress-inhibiting hormone cortisol. Other studies have zeroed in on serotonin, the brain chemical that calms, and why men have less of it than women. Once they find the formula and the dosage, it won’t be long before it’s on the market. There’s more than a Nobel Prize at stake--there’s an IPO and the cover of Time magazine.

Man taxes and testosterone control aside, if society doesn’t come up with some reasonable options for its aggressive young men now, it will have only unreasonable options later: prison, or a pill.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com