Strong Silent Types - Understanding Boys’: Thinking Through Boys, Masculinity And Suicide

Another interesting post from Strong Silent Types - Stuff About Men. This is a pretty short post, so I hope he'll forgive me for borrowing the whole thing. It's sad to know that these kids feel like there is no one they can talk to about their pain . . .

Further, I agree with ultimo167 about the usefulness of Connell's model of hegemonic masculinity (Masculinities, 2005) to explain why boys do these things - it's not a mystery, and moving "beyond gender" will never happen as long as we are embodied beings (i.e., if we have genitals, we will have gender roles).

Boys Who Suicide and Masculinity Mutations…

By ultimo167

Mac an Ghaill, M., & Haywood, C. (2010). Understanding Boys’: Thinking Through Boys, Masculinity And Suicide. Social Science & Medicine DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.07.036

In this accepted, unedited manuscript, Mac an Ghaill and Haywood (2010) reflect on a peculiar brand of ‘state-led anxiety’ (n.pag.) in the United Kingdom. This anxiety has resulted in hyperbolic concerns that boys no longer have appropriate role models, that they are failing badly at school and that they are tending toward mindless acts of reckless violence. Moreover, ‘media reports [in the UK] suggest that suicide behaviour in boys (between the ages of 7 and 12 years of age) is becoming increasingly problematic’ (2010). At the core of this wave of moral panic, I believe, comes the dubious, crisis-ridden paradigm that boys, like men, have had their textbook version of masculinity threatened and as such, they no longer know who they really are, or how they should think, act, or react.

What the authors (2010) suggest here is that we need to step outside the delimiting framework of masculinity, a framework which they claim classifies behaviours and attitudes as either ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ and thus, which presumably affords little scope to really understand the complexity behind, just say, why any boy might contemplate or complete suicide. By studying the relationships that a group of children in a North East England middle school have with each other and their teachers, Mac an Ghaill and Haywood (2010) critically evaluate current approaches to masculinity as they also seek ‘to develop new ways of conceptualising how we gender [italics in original] bodies’ (2010). I myself would question whether current approaches to masculinity do not already provide a sufficiently robust explanatory tool…

That said, the notable findings of this study (2010) include…

1. That the institutional practices of the school produced emotional distress in boys and frustrated the disclosure of that emotional distress. For example, teachers could at once treat their male pupils as childish but also as needing to act like ‘real men’ (2010).
2. That how boys dealt with their ‘confusions and fears’ (2010) did not necessarily coalesce with masculine ideals, although I would rebut that finding, since it seems that only ‘safe’ topics like ‘computer games, films or television programmes’ (2010) were ever freely discussed.
3. That friendships amongst boys were constructed and practiced as a ‘complex interplay of rigidity and fluidity’ (2010), leading the authors to beg us to reconsider the ‘meanings that [we usually] ascribe to intimacy’ (2010). The institutional practices of the school heavily influenced the formation and maintenance of such friendships…

*Pupils ‘were not allowed’ (2010) to enter the school buildings or ‘leave the premises at break or lunch times’ (2010);

-and-

*Pupils spent most of their free time in winter confined within a ‘crowded playground’ (2010), where everyone was effectively always on show.

Ultimately, I could not find much that was ‘new’ about the evidence gathered by Mac an Ghaill and Haywood (2010) in this study, nor could I accept their plea that we need to move beyond masculinity to embrace ‘a different configuration of gendered identity’ (2010). As I alluded to above, current approaches to masculinity, or should I emphasise, hegemonic masculinity, allow for considerable scope when critically evaluating the lived experiences of men, and boys, in any culturally bound setting. The reductionist binaries that the authors (2010) correctly fear are certainly not emblematic of the theory and practice of hegemonic masculinity that is espoused by Connell (2005), et al. While I found the conversations had with the boys in this study to be quite interesting, they only confirmed to me that hegemonic masculinity continues to be a sophisticated explanatory tool for interpreting why and how men, and boys, behave the way that we do.

In that regard, if we seriously want to address suicidal ideation and actions by boys (and men) of any age, we must first desist from the folly of trying to identify individual pathology. Instead, we should concentrate on creating safe spaces that are neither causative of nor hostile to the experience of distressing emotions within the male subject. For example, when Chris Haywood asked one of the boys in this study if he could talk to anyone about his troubling emotions, that boy replied…

‘Don’t think so…you just have to sort it out‘ (2010)…

Tags: Boys Who Suicide and Masculinity Mutations, ultimo167, Strong Silent Types, Stuff About Men, Mac an Ghaill, Haywood, Understanding Boys, Thinking Through Boys, Masculinity, Suicide, Social Science & Medicine, hegemonic masculinity, Connell, boys, masculinity, culture, psychology, emotions