Scott Sonnon - The Boy I Was, The Man it Makes Me

This article is from Scott Sonnon on the Good Men Project - it's an interesting discussion of how the way we are treated by others is shaped by how others see us, whether or not that is valid.

As a child he was overweight, but in his teens he lost weight and built muscle. Following a suicide attempt after yet another humiliating beating, he went from being invisible to being invited to play sports, receiving smiles from girls, and being invited to parties.

After defending another overweight kid from bullies, he was given a wake-up call that changed his perspective . . . and made him an advocate for the overweight, as well as a coach who could help them change their shape.

It's sad that any child has to get to a suicide attempt because of shaming, humiliation, and beatings. Nothing deserves that kind of abuse, certainly not being overweight.

The Boy I Was, The Man it Makes Me

February 2, 2014 by Scott Sonnon

Scott Sonnon has a mission to speak out for all of what he has seen.

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I was invisible; and the only times I had been seen were the uncomfortable moments of public shaming and violent abuse. Is it any wonder that I began to prefer my invisibility over recognition?

I had been fat. And the differences between how I am treated today with how I had been treated in my youth, I still find extremely uncomfortable.

Please don’t misunderstand. I am healthy now, and rarely ill, like I was as a boy. My joints no longer constantly ache from the condition which had once plagued them. And with a family history of diabetes and heart disease, my path was being carved for the same, had I not departed from carrying so much excess fat, into the fitness I am now blessed to have for the time it remains.

I remember precisely the day when I had returned home from yet another humiliating beating that I had decided I couldn’t become any more invisible unless I committed suicide. So, I tried. Calling a friend, I divulged what I had done. She called the police, and I had been saved, thanks to her and God.

The next morning, I realized that invisibility couldn’t serve me if I were to remain alive, and more importantly, LIVING. That day, the changes in my nutrition and fitness began.

The path that I had adopted wasn’t the best, as I didn’t know anything about how to diet and exercise at the time, but it achieved external results. Within a year, my physique made obvious changes. Within two years, most people no longer recognized me when we passed each other.

As my fat melted, so did people’s demeanor toward me. The fights virtually disappeared within months. Many more people began to smile at me, start conversations and even make gestures toward friendships like inviting me to parties and events. Girls began to flirt with me, an artform that today I still remain incompetently unaware of.

I had thought, “Was this some new type of invisibility? Do they not realize I’m the same person?”

♦◊♦

Guys would slap me on the shoulder and ask me about my exercise routine and ask me to join their team for a game of… anything. Girls would linger their eyes upon me, something that had never happened before. I had felt enamored with the lavish attention, the sudden rush of validation; an extreme contrast with the prior horrifying periods of unwanted visibility.

As a fat kid, I had grown familiar with being picked last and begrudgingly, “Okay, we have to take Sonnon.” I had been acquainted to sitting alone at the school dances watching everyone snicker at my exclusion. I had learned to not be heard or seen. And I had learned to be thankful for that invisibility for fear of the repercussions its opposite held: public shaming and physical violence.

I had come to understand those behaviors were “normal.” So, when I had begun to be treated like someone whose presence was not only acknowledged but DESIRED, I was completely overwhelmed, unprepared and socially uneducated.

At first, I held my guard expecting that it would again be one of the jokes pulled on me of pretending to be my friend or girlfriend in order to humiliate me, but it didn’t have a punch line. They just continued being friendly and affectionate. Of course, I basked in that warmth. And the more I had changed my physique, the more the affection grew. I had become a very willing captive of social conditioning.

But then, I saw the injustice committed against other fat people, and my new “friends” began to invite me into their “humorous” atrocities against them. I became livid with anger. I was ONE of those fat people, even with my bodily changes. Didn’t these people understand the terror and depression they were creating?

No, they did not. Every time I spoke out against their mistreatment, they’d turn in surprise, like I had taken off some sort of mask; they realized again that I was one of “those ugly people.” Whenever I had removed my mask by standing up against those unjust remarks and behaviors, I was excommunicated out of the “cool” clique.

The fights began again as I let my anger take control of me. But by that time, I had become a champion fighter, and I found myself a vigilante to the bullyism once committed against me.

I came to my senses one day in college. I had pulled two thuggish students off an overweight boy they had been pushing back and forth like a pinball; his carefully prepared papers flying in the wind, presumably lost in those years before memory sticks. Throwing one of the bullies against the wall, I took the other down to the ground, hovering a fist above his face, cocked to unleash my vengeance. The bully flinched his hands over his face, squinting his eyes to avoid watching the impact, quickly muttering, “Dude stop! We were just having some fun!”

I wish that I could write that I had had some moral epiphany at that moment, that I had stayed my hand and realized I had become the thing I had hated. But I didn’t. That word “fun” undid me. His nose exploded in a pool of blood, and I stood to check on my fellow fat kid; my fist uncurling from its wrath.

When I saw him, he was terrified. And his words rattled my brain, “What the hell, man!? Do you know what they’re going to do to me the next time they see me and you’re not around to pull your Captain America routine? Thanks for nothing!” He stormed away running after his still flying papers.

What had I done? I had become the monster; only one of a different breed – one with pointed, skilled malice, camouflaged as one of “them.”

The affection of girls at my changed physique began to lose its luster, as did the members-only guys club of athletics I had willingly joined.

I couldn’t hold them accountable for the social quicksand into which even I, with my fat aware perspective, had fallen. There was a very distinct social stratification: fit was SOMETHING and fat was NOTHING.

I was only physically different but mentally and emotionally the same. I had been something before I was fit. I had had dreams, ideas, goals, loves and fantasies. They were dismissed by others because they had learned to define fat as nothing, but once fit – my ideas had gained aknowledgement.

♦◊♦

Today, when I write, I find a few students of mine sending messages. They ask me why I talk about past hardships, philosophies, and advocacies for issues not regarding elite fitness. They plead with me to “just be the coach that once” helped them change their “shape” and they ask me to stop wasting my time advocating for severe cases when a coach of my “level” should dedicate himself to “the best athletes.” I recognize that they are teetering where I had once stood: inside the door to the cool kids club.

Our culture lionizes fit and castigates fat. But fit or fat is not who we are. It is only how we appear. Myamoto Musashi once wrote, “You can see the shape by which I am victorious but you cannot see the form by which I guarantee triumph.” Our form, who we essentially are, cannot be defined by our shape. Who we are is shapeless, beyond any transient state of our bodies, beyond our illnesses or our vitality, beyond our disease or our health, beyond our fitness or fatness.

Make no mistake, as I walk down the beach here in Costa Rica vacationing with my family, I see the reaction men and women have toward my athletic, tattooed shape. But they don’t see my form.

This shape WILL pass, but my form will remain.

My walk in life may be more visible on the surface now but my thoughts, hopes and dreams for a better future together remain invisible if I allow my current appearance to mask my true form.

I may be a fit adult man now but I will always have my awareness of the world from a young fat boy. I will take this shape I currently have while others will choose to make it visible, and bring light to the invisible world we are missing by its distraction.

Sharing that awareness might help others realize that they can choose to change their shape, improve their health and enhance their physical capacity, but acknowledge that they are already perfect in form, beautiful and wondrous in nature. And sharing that awareness might also break down the gated prejudice of the cool kids club so that we can improve our insight into the transient nature of our physical bodies, that the world is rich in shapes and sizes, beautiful and wondrous in each…

Very Respectfully,
Scott Sonnon
www.facebook.com/ScottSonnon

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Photo by author

More writing by Scott Sonnon

• 45 Ways to a Kick Ass Life
• Rules of Engagement for Becoming a Man
• The Undiscovered Genius Hidden Within Challenge

Masculinity and "Suicide by Mass Murder"

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine), Cho Seung-Hui (Virginia Tech), Steven Kazmierczak (Northern Illinois University), Jared Loughner (Tucson), James Holmes (Aurora, CO), and Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook Elementary School).

Do all of these "rampage" killers share common traits? Which of these is not like the others?

Second answer first - Loughner and Holmes did not kill themselves after killing many other people. All of the other shooters seemingly planned to kill themselves before they could taken alive.

First answer -  Rachel Kalis and Michael Kimmel, with the Department of Sociology and SUNY Stony Brook, studied the first three murders in their paper, Suicide by mass murder: Masculinity, aggrieved entitlement, and rampage school shootings [Health Sociology Review (2010) 19(4): 451–464], and identified some common elements.

All the perpetrators were males, all were students in the rural or suburban schools they terrorised, and all evinced a self-justifying sense of righteousness to their actions. These characteristics conform to the pattern established by the other cases.

Interestingly, these three killings were perpetrated by young men significantly older than the average school shooters:

Harris was 18 and Klebold was 17, both high school seniors; Cho was 23 and Kazmierczak was 27. The average age of the perpetrators in the other cases was 14.7, and the modal age was 15. (Of the more recent American cases, for example, consider 16-year old Evan Ramsay, from Bethel, Alaska; 16-year old Luke Woodham, from Pearl, Mississippi; 14-year old Michael Carneal, from Paducah, Kentucky; 11-year old Andrew Golden and 13-year old Mitchell Johnson, from Jonesboro, Arkansas; and 15-year old Kip Kinkel, from Springfield, Oregon).

There are two other differences between these mass killers and the younger boys who have killed their peers. (1) These killers took more people with them, killing and injuring dozens of people. (2) These three killers took their own lives as or before police arrived.

[T]he school shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Northern Illinois all seem to be cases of what we can call suicide by mass murder.

Adam Lanza fits the model of these three other cases.

* * * * *

Granting that all of these young men were in some way mentally ill, can we say something intelligent about the situation that acknowledges this fact and also expands the conversation into more fruitful territory? Mental illness is a given when someone commits violent acts on a massive scale and then kills themselves, and the majority of people who are labeled "mentally ill" are not violent and will never hurt anyone (other than possibly themselves).

Again, one of the common traits shared by these young men is that they were male. There are qualities in the unhealthy male archetypes in this country that contributes to rage or rampage killings.

These perpetrators were not just misguided ‘kids’, or ‘youth’ or ‘troubled teens’ – they’re boys. They are a group of boys, deeply aggrieved by a system that they may feel is cruel or demeaning. Feeling aggrieved, wronged by the world – these are typical adolescent feelings, common to many boys and girls. What transforms the aggrieved into mass murders is also a sense of entitlement, a sense of using violence against others, making others hurt as you, yourself, might hurt. 

And there's more:

• Aggrieved entitlement inspires revenge against those who have wronged you; it is the compensation for humiliation.
• Humiliation is emasculation: humiliate someone and you take away his manhood. For many men, humiliation must be avenged, or you cease to be a man. 
• Aggrieved entitlement is a gendered emotion, a fusion of that humiliating loss of manhood and the moral obligation and entitlement to get it back. And its gender is masculine.

In order to take a wider perspective on these killers, Kalis and Kimmel looked at three major weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report) and three of the largest daily newspapers (USA Today, Ne York Times, Los Angeles Times) to identify any related patterns to their explanation.

In conducting our analysis, we found a striking pattern from the stories about the boys who committed the violence: Nearly all had stories of being constantly bullied, beaten up, and, most significantly for this analysis, ‘gay baited’. Nearly all had stories of being mercilessly and constantly teased, picked on, and threatened. And, most strikingly, it was not because they were gay (at least there is no evidence to suggest that any of them were gay), but because they were different from the other boys – shy, bookish, honour students, artistic, musical, theatrical, non-athletic, ‘geekish’ or weird. Theirs are stories of ‘cultural marginalisation’ based on criteria for adequate gender performance – specifically the enactment of codes of masculinity. We can learn from queer studies that gay youth have higher rates of suicide then their straight counterparts (Remafedi et al. 1998). The shooters here display evidence of such marginalisation, but they choose a decidedly heteronormative way to combat it: violence.

Again, as is true with mental illness, millions of kids have been teased, bullied, picked on, threatened, and "gay baited," including me. But only a minuscule number of them take their own lives or the lives of others. This makes it challenging to pinpoint alienation and marginalization as explicit "causes."

However, it is males who tend to be most successful in suicide attempts, even though girls make more attempts (they choose less lethal means than boys).


There is another commonality among these killers that, to me, may be one of the best explanations for why these boys choose this route to their own death.

School shootings take place in front of others, a public display of violence. In fact, the public nature of school shootings are an example of their instrumental nature; they are done to get a point across, to send a message that the shooter wants to convey to the localised culture that has marginalised him, as well as the larger society. The detailed plans laid out by school shooters, as well as their methodical reasoning for their actions that impose blame on their peers demonstrate how they view their actions as public, as well as the entitlement the feel in their actions. The note left behind by Columbine shooter Eric Harris explicitly places the blame for his actions on his surrounding community (Klein and Chancer 2000).

Rampage murder/suicides are public performances, they are enacted to make a point, to assert power over those who have hurt them, and to do so as publicly as possible, and they have no doubt that their actions will be the talk of the nation for days or weeks after they have killed themselves - they have grown up in this culture and they know that mass killings will be covered 24/7 for weeks.

Still, this is not sufficient.

Kalis and Kimmel make a point on which they do not have space to follow-up, namely that we must also consider the schools where these killings happen, as well as the communities - and possibly (as in Adam Lanza) the families.

[It does not] diminish the specificity of that tragedy to also note that all the schools in which random school shooters also exhibited certain similarities. The schools themselves share characteristics that make random school shootings more likely in some places than in others. We believe that profiling the school shooters must be accompanied by a profile of the shooters’ schools.

We are never looking simply at the acts of a single person (or pair of persons) - these acts occur within a system, so if we hope to understand them, we need to look at the whole system, from the individual biology and psychology of the killer(s), to their families, their schools, their communities, and their society - all of these are systems interacting as a metasystem - we need that wide of a perspective.

This is an interesting and provocative paper - definitely worth your time to go read the whole thing.