The male in crisis: August 02, 1999 issue of New Thinking

August 02, 1999 New Thinking:
The male in crisis

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August 02, 1999

The male in crisis

By Gerry McGovern

What makes a man like Mark Barton bludgeon his wife and children to death, who he claims to love, then shoot nine people, before committing suicide? This man was a day trader on the stock market and probably had investments in Internet stocks.

How far we have come and how little the distance we have traveled. From the Stone Age where we clubbed people to death with stones, to the digital age where we shoot people to death with handguns.

Mark Barton is not unique. In Ireland, there have been at least two cases that I can remember in the last five years where men killed their families before killing themselves. We can use words like ‘evil’ to describe them, but ‘evil’ is a big word with a shallow meaning.

In the modern world, a great many males are in crisis. As my brother-in-law, who is the principle of a school, told me recently, many young males have lost their sense of purpose in the world. He has to deal with more and more who are suicidal, who can’t find strong enough reasons to live. The digital age, with its Internet and all that, is leaving them out in the cold.

Consider the following statistics:

The British suicide rate for males aged between 15-24 rose by 85 percent between 1980 and 1990. (For women the rates for all ages have fallen.)
In Ireland, since 1990 the increase in the rate of suicide of men between the ages of 15 and 34 was over 300 percent
Averaged across all age groups, Australian males kill themselves at four times the rate of women
The American suicide rate for boys jumps from two male suicides for one female suicide in the 10-14 age group to four male suicides for one female suicide in the 15-19 age group

Why? Men still dominate politics and business. Perhaps this is best illustrated by the appointment of Carly Fiorina to head Hewlett-Packard. She is the first woman to head up a leading Dow Jones industrial firm.

“Despite the technology industry's claim that it is more open to women because it recognizes and needs talent, not workers of a particular gender,” Karlin Lillington wrote in the Irish Times last Friday, “New York research group Catalyst recently found that the tech industry employs fewer women in executive positions than industry as a whole. Women hold just 7 per cent of senior positions in Fortune 500 tech companies, compared to 11.2 per cent for the Fortune 500 overall.”

I recently read an article in Fortune which described the titans of the technology industry as, “blood-thirsty killers.” The article was reviewing a book on Microsoft. It’s central theme was that, yes, Microsoft is a ruthless organization, but it is no more ruthless than any of its competitors.

And yet even though the technology industry very often moves to the beat of Neanderthal man, the world of man is in crisis. We have been warriors and providers for millions of years, but our roles are becoming fuzzy in this great age of change.

Most men are not ‘titans’ and never will be. Most of us would never even dream of killing our families or those around us. But the angst of young men in particular with regard to their role in society is very real and very often ignored. A challenge that digital age society must actively embrace is to help its men redefine and feel comfortable with new roles. Society will ignore such a challenge at its peril.

Gerry McGovern

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A challenge that digital age society must actively embrace is to help its men redefine and feel comfortable with new roles.