Emasculation Proclamation

I blogged some time ago about the first time I was given official responsibility to serve and protect as a street crossing monitor in fifth grade. As I grew up, I was cast in subsequent positions of authority which went no better. 

One was in what we'll call an urban school where I served a hair-raising year as a substitute teacher. Because it was so difficult to attract sub teachers to this particular school, it was routine to get as much mileage out of the ones who did show up as possible. This meant that if a sub teacher had a (ho-ho) free period scheduled, the vice principal would hunt you down and make you fill in for a class where they couldn't get a sub. It took me two instances of being shanghaied like that for me to to make other plans for myself, which meant becoming a moving target so the vice principal could never find me. On one such escapade, I came upon two students fighting on a stairwell landing. One had the other pinned down and was slapping him about the face. What I most wanted to do at that moment was turn around and head back where I came from as if I didn't see anything, but I knew the path back would take me right into the vice principal. So I ended up taking the Spike Lee approach and attempted to do the right thing. I asked the kids to break it up. They ignored me. I demanded that they break it up, and they ignored me still. Finally I reached over and grabbed the one on top and pulled him off the other kid. As I attempted to get between top dog and underdog...the victim (!) jumped me from behind, pulled me down on the stairs, and the two of them ran off together.
A few years later in a semi rural school (and for those unfamiliar with the code, the first school was overwhelmingly black; this one white), two students of mine strolled into the faculty lounge as if they owned the place and tried to use the vending machine. Another teacher in the room with me turned and said, "They don't belong in here." Accepting the undeniable truth of that, I said, "Guys, you don't belong in here." They fairly well whined that they had just finished playing basketball and needed sodas. I insisted that they were out of bounds. As one continued to plead, the other dropped change in the machine for a soda. I moved toward them, and they started to play keep-away with the can. I intercepted it, slammed it on a table, grabbed them both by the arms and escorted them out. I put them up against the wall in the hall and got up in their faces, and warned them never to embarrass me like that again. Embarrass was the word and embarrassment was the feeling. 
During the height of the angry reaction over the cop shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, this past summer an article appeared in The Washington Post that generated a great deal of Internet discussion. It was titled, "I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me." It was written by an ex-cop and he had one sentence in particular that raised eyebrows in circles where, it should be noted, eyebrows are easily raised.  The sentence read as follows:


Working the street, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.

Many people, especially among my comrades on the left, were quite put off by that sentence because in the context of the events in Ferguson it seemed that the ex-cop who wrote it was making an excuse for the shooting. The concept of “an outright challenge to authority” can seem incomprehensible to people who have rarely if ever had to exercise authority. That can easily happen because it is quite possible to get through life and avoid being put in any positions of authority. I could not avoid that position, starting as a grade schooler, but continuing as a teacher and a parent and for a while as an office department manager. But about 15 years ago I found myself happily out of any circumstance in which I had to exercise authority. So I haven’t had to suffer the distinct displeasure of having my authority challenged in a comfortably long time. Yet I can still relate to what this ex-cop is saying…and I’d like to take a crack at helping others understand the sentence by placing it in a broader context with a few edits, as such:
Working the hospital ward, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.
Working at the DMV, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.
Working an NFL game, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.
Working a classroom, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.
A “challenge to my authority” is not the small matter that folks who don’t ever need to exercise authority in their daily lives think it is. Delinking the notion of “an outright challenge to my authority” from a cop with a gun, I think, makes the sentence more reasonable and thus comprehensible. But it does not take the cop with the gun off the hook…quite the opposite. The fact that there are many people in other walks of life who commonly have to confront challenges to their authority and do so unarmed underscores how outrageous it is that cops all across America resort to guns as often as they do. It is one thing to accept that cops very often need to assert authority; it is quite another to claim that a challenge to that authority is a crime punishable by death.
It is no more reasonable to assert that a cop can use a gun against a kid who refuses his order to get out of the street than it would be reasonable to assert that a teacher can use a gun against a kid who tries to use the faculty vending machine. Yet there are borderline morons in this country who would like to arm teachers so that absurd scenario becomes inevitable. It’s the gun that’s the problem because the gun is no mere tool of the job when it becomes an extension of one’s manhood. The cop’s identity is so tied to his gun that when his authority is challenged, his manhood is challenged…and he’s no longer serving and protecting the public, he’s serving and protecting his masculinity.
I think I can reliably speak for most men when I say the hottest button we own is the one connected to our masculinity (one might go so far as to call it an insidious curse of maleness without fear of provoking the sisterhood). But I don't think we as a gender, nor we as a society, fully appreciate how much the threat of emasculation contributes to a broad swath of social problems from spousal abuse to excessive police force; from campus rape to workplace sexual inequality…and on to foreign military adventurism. Led by the examples of law enforcement and our military, the gun has become our first line of defense against emasculation.
Gun control advocates are sometimes inclined to mock or demean gun advocates by suggesting that their fetish for such weaponry grows out of feelings of sexual inadequacy. Whether it's a sense of inadequacy or prowess, I'd say, is a matter for each individual's therapist to help decide. But let's give Dr. Freud his due for articulating the link between the penis and what he would identify as phallic symbols. I don't believe there can be much argument that weaponry down through the ages...from spears and swords to arrows, six-shooters, rifles, bazookas and rocket launchers are all modeled on and symbolic of the male sex organ. If our manly parts had been orb shaped, no doubt, we would be marching off to war wielding frying pans and bowling balls. But guns it is...and it's guns, alas, by which we primarily assert our manhood...at home and abroad. And it's guns that we frequently turn to as the remedy of first resort when our manhood is threatened and emasculation looms.
The historical evidence suggests that in the wake of the turmoil that roiled Missouri (and now, no doubt, to be repeated in Ohio), we'll see a make-good effort in various municipalities to introduce sensitivity training for their police forces. Community leaders will be invited to speak to cops. Cops will be encouraged to go on charm offenses by walking the streets and chatting it up with folks in the neighborhood. A great deal of emphasis will be placed on understanding and appreciating American diversity. It will then all pass--some of it leaving incremental good behind, but most of it to little effect. That will be so because it will be handled as a racial matter...or an economic matter...or a cultural matter. The root cause: How a man with authority over people exercises that authority without allowing defiance of it to be so emasculating as to justify assertion of his manhood through the barrel of a gun. That's a primal issue...trans-racial and trans-class. 
To address it properly, we should probably start early in training and should make the training universal for all males regardless of ethnicity. As an old educator, I'd suggest we start in junior high when the testosterone is just beginning to go out of control...and we help young boys answer questions about what's happening to their bodies...and how to meet the challenges of the changes to come. We introduce them to the meaning of emasculation, and connect it to their experience with bullies…or as bullies. We talk openly and frankly about the concept of manhood through history and throughout the globe…and by frankly I do mean we include the all-important penis in the conversation. We teach them that although in primitive societies it was...and still is in some places...traditional for boys to prove their manhood by spilling blood, in more civilized cultures, we aspire to demonstrate our manhood in more evolved ways. And we help them explore those ways...we instruct them in conflict resolution, strategic retreat, jujitsu politics, professionalism, building alliances and coalitions, negotiation, isolation, contemplation. Charm and humor. We educate and advocate for every kind of tool imaginable for making your way in the world....save one: the gun. We put the gun in a lock box and we don't introduce it until the very end of their education. And then we tell them, "Here it is--this is your last resort...this is what you turn to when you've failed at everything else."