| This is required to maintain hierarchies of domination which
are characterized by a high degree of institutionalized or socially
accepted violence, ranging from wife and child beating within
the family to aggressive warfare on the larger tribal or national
level. (Eisler 1987)
A sane society, a society seeking to
follow the partnership model that democracy aims at, would
not expose its young boys to the thousands of TV murders,
violent video games and ‘entertainment’ such as
the WWE.
(TV Wrestling)
Young boys fed a diet of hyper-masculine or ‘macho’
male images through the media combined with the absurd availability
of guns is a recipe for disaster; witness the upsurge in school
shootings in the USA. But it is not just the extreme forms
of violence that are damaging. Boys socialized to be emotionally
illiterate in the home and society tend to have disastrous
relationships with the people they love.
In short, the problem in dominator societies is not men.
It is rather the way male identity must be defined in male-dominant
societies where, by definition, "masculinity"
is equated with domination and conquest-- be it of women,
other men, or nature. (Eisler 1987)
Not only that, in these societies sex becomes an act of
male conquest and domination, as in the common description
of men's affairs with women as "scoring." In addition,
the family structure of these societies has to be one where
men rule, women serve, and children learn early on that
it is very dangerous to challenge orders, no matter how
unjust. (Eisler 1987)
Sex, violence and dominance are interwoven into the images
that young boys and men routinely witness on the modern media.
The common taunts to promote more toughness and macho are
surprisingly effective. Boys are routinely called sissy, girl,
gay, faggot and other names which imply that they are embodying
feminine or nurturant traits rather than the necessary male
traits of toughness, dominance, insensitivity and studliness.
When you add all this together we might literally say, “It
takes a whole culture to make a young man violent.”
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