What’s up with angry young men?
We need to distance ourselves from a classical view of masculinity
In January 2017, a young man opened fire in the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City, killing six men. Last month, another young man was arrested after a rental van drove onto a sidewalk in Toronto, killing 10 people. Last week, a Montreal Gazette investigation revealed that a prominent alt-right figure was based in Montreal and recruiting young white men to join the movement.
In recent months, young men have been at the centre of stories involving violence and/ or ideological extremism. Of course, it’s not a new phenomenon, nor a uniquely Canadian one: In the United States, men have accounted for 94 of the 96 mass shooters since 1982. That statistic led some to argue that we shouldn’t blame mental illness, as many people are tempted to do, but instead blame men.
It’s true, as Maxime Fiset, who works with the Centre de prevention de la radicalization menant à la violence, told me, that “young men don’t have the monopoly on radicalization”; nor do they have one on violence.
It’s also true, though, that young men are disproportionately the ones engaging in acts of mass violence and adopting radical ideologies like white supremacy.
So what makes young men so angry?
Perhaps we shouldn’t blame men, but instead how men are raised and socialized. In Fiset’s view, the socialization of young men places undue emphasis on violence and militancy, and many who have studied the issue agree with him. Men are encouraged to assert their presence and become involved in politics, while they’re discouraged from succumbing to emotions and stress. In short, young men are raised within a culture of toxic masculinity.
Toxic masculinity is not an excuse for anybody’s actions, but perhaps it offers an explanation: This perverted ideal of masculinity helps propagate a sense of entitlement that can push men toward violence and ideological extremism.
Young men are told that they are providers and thus feel entitled to have both someone — or multiple people — to provide for, and gainful employment that allows them to fulfil that duty. They are also led to believe they are entitled to success, access to sex and myriad other things that masculinity supposedly entails.
Life being what it is, many people fail to realize their ambitions.
And, if there’s something that entitled young men don’t like, it’s failure and rejection.
“To become radicalized requires a perception of injustice,” Fiset told me, “and when you feel entitled to something, be it sex or success, or being manly or owning stuff, but don’t receive it, you feel injustice.”
That’s where the slippery slope starts — these young men become marginalized and alienated, upset that reality hasn’t delivered on their expectations. They seek an ideology or sociological analysis that explains why that discrepancy isn’t their fault, often finding it in online chatrooms and forums. There, radical groups exploit this desire for answers by presenting abrasive ideas with memes or a sense of togetherness opposite “normies” or “Chads and Stacys.”
Instead of talking about their frustrations, young men too often internalize the frustration, which leads to what Fiset calls “explosive displays of violence,” whether physical or psychologi- cal, by which they try to assert themselves and re-establish what they perceive as the “correct” social order.
The failures and rejections need not be interpersonal, financial or dramatic. Consider the study I referenced last week that pointed to alarmingly high dropout rates among young boys in Quebec public high schools. Something as seemingly innocuous as difficulty adapting to high school can alienate individuals and eventually push them toward a path of marginalization and radicalization.
We need to do a better job with how we treat young men. Now, don’t take that as a masculinist argument, but rather as a call to action to change the collective perception of what masculinity entails.
Young men need to be taught that masculinity does not depend on being physically strong, emotionally unflappable, successful and sexually active. We are all bound to fail, and that’s OK. We are all bound to question why society isn’t what we thought it would be, and that’s OK.
We need to distance ourselves from a classical view of masculinity that portrays men as emotionally strong and assertive; a view which gave us tropes like “boys don’t cry” and pushes men to internalize frustration until it boils over.
For as much as we like to think that we’re breaking down gender roles, we seem to be falling short with regard to young men.