By: Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe<\/p>\n
Just under two weeks ago, in Milford, Connecticut, Chris Plaskon asked Maren Sanchez to attend prom with him at the end of the year at Jonathan Law High School.\u00a0 They\u2019d known each other since 6th<\/sup> grade.\u00a0 Maren said no.\u00a0 Witnesses told authorities she declined and told Chris she would be attending the dance with her boyfriend (here<\/a>). Chris knew Maren had a boyfriend and, likely, that she\u2019d be attending with him. After being turned down, Chris threw his hands around Maren\u2019s throat, pushed her down a set of stairs, and cut and stabbed her with a kitchen knife he\u2019d brought to school that day.\u00a0 It was April 25, 2014.\u00a0 Maren got to school just a bit after 7:00 that day and before 8:00, she was dead.<\/p>\n This tragic, almost unfathomable violence reminds us of so many stories of adolescent male violence over the past couple decades. Jackson Katz<\/a> discusses a seeming epidemic of violence among young, white men in his new film, Tough Guise 2<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 In analyzing the tragedies of school shootings, Katz tells us that we need to think about these tragedies as contemporary forms of masculinity. When young men have their masculinity sullied, threatened or denied, they respond by reclaiming masculinity through a highly recognizable masculine practice: violence. When events like this happen, it\u2019s easy to paint the young men who perpetuate these crimes as psychologically disturbed, as\u2014importantly\u2014unlike the rest of us.\u00a0 But, stories like Chris Plaskon follow what has become a predictable pattern<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sociologists investigating similar phenomena address this as a form of “social identity threat.”\u00a0 The general idea is that when you threaten someone\u2019s social identity, and they care, they respond by over-demonstrating qualities that illustrate membership in that identity.\u00a0 Michael Kimmel<\/a> writes about a classic example:<\/p>\n I have a standing bet with a friend that I can walk onto any playground in America where 6 year-old boys are happily playing and by asking one question, I can provoke a fight.\u00a0 That question is simple: \u201cWho\u2019s a sissy around here?\u201d (here<\/a>: 131)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n While you might think Kimmel\u2019s offering easy money here, he’s making a larger point.\u00a0 By asking the question, Kimmel is inviting someone\u2019s masculinity to be threatened and assuming that this will require someone to demonstrate their masculinity in dramatic fashion.\u00a0 Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon: masculinity threat<\/i><\/strong>. New research relying on experimental designs suggests there’s a lot more to these claims than we might have thought.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For instance, Christin Munsch<\/a> and Robb Willer<\/a> conducted an experiment to see whether gender identity threats might affect perceptions of sexual coercion (here<\/a>). College-age respondents took a survey assessing how \u201cmasculine\u201d or \u201cfeminine\u201d they are.\u00a0 They received feedback quickly, but the feedback wasn\u2019t honest: students were randomly assigned to receive scores that that either confirmed or challenged their gender identity.\u00a0 This is where the real<\/i> study began.\u00a0 Students were told to next fill out a \u201ccampus climate\u201d survey regarding their opinions about different cases that had been brought before a campus disciplinary review board. One of the cases dealt with sexual coercion.\u00a0 Their study clearly showed that when college-aged men\u2019s masculinity is threatened, they are much more likely to espouse attitudes supportive of sexual assault or coercion.\u00a0 In a nutshell, men who might feel they have to demonstrate their masculinity are less likely to see sexual coercion as sexually coercive and much more likely to blame the victim (a woman) in the scenario.<\/p>\n In a separate article, Robb Willer<\/a>, Bridget Conlon<\/a>, Christabel Rogalin<\/a> and Michael Wojnowicz<\/a> test what they refer to as the \u201cmasculine overcompensation thesis<\/a>.\u201d The research illustrates the validity of Kimmel\u2019s playground bet and proves that the effects are farther reaching than we may have expected.\u00a0 Men whose masculinity was threatened in this study reacted by o”overdoing\u201d gender in a variety of ways.\u00a0 Threatened men were more supportive of the Iraq War, expressed more sexual prejudice toward homosexuals, and were even more likely to say they wanted to buy an SUV! These men were also much more likely to believe in the inherent superiority of males.\u00a0 Perhaps interestingly, for sociologists, men in this study with the highest testosterone levels in this study showed the strongest effects.<\/p>\n Catherine Taylor<\/a>\u2019s recent research builds on their interesting finding about hormones by considering men\u2019s physiological responses to masculinity threats<\/a>.\u00a0 Taylor brought men and women into a lab and had them work in small groups to solve small problems together.\u00a0 Taylor was interested in the physiological responses of having some social influence (or lacking it) and varied the sex composition of the groups.\u00a0 Men were much more likely to exhibit anxiety and stress if they failed to achieve high social status in a group with other men, but not with women.\u00a0 Taylor\u2019s work is a powerful demonstration of how gender ideologies not only affect our social experiences and opportunities; they quite literally get inside of us. \u00a0Taylor\u2019s research also suggests that the men with higher levels of testosterone in the previous study might actually be illustrating the way in which these responses to masculinity threats have become a permanent part of their physiology. In other words, testosterone isn\u2019t so much the cause of violence<\/a> as it is produced by gender inequality.<\/p>\n This is an important body of research that helps us think about the relationship between masculinity and violence.\u00a0 When we hear about cases in the news like the savage murder of Maren Sanchez, the easy way of dealing with this is to look for all of the signs that Chris Plaskon is not \u201cone of us.\u201d\u00a0 But, Katz and Kimmel suggest that we ought to think about these men not as failing at masculinity, but as \u201cover-conforming,\u201d and this research supports those claims.<\/p>\n