parents whose young kids like computer war games, what can you tell me?

[Teresa]

I've been offering my 5-year-old son his choice of video games on the computer for maybe six or seven months. His favorites are war games and killing games (his descriptions). For a while, he drew himself lines, for example, at not killing animals, or at no blood. But recently, his boundaries have changed, and I'm not sure I was ready. It took me by surprise.

Just to give you some background on the ways his interest manifests outside of video games:

• He likes to play "drawing war" with his dad. They each take a side of the paper and draw increasingly bad-*ss weapons and soldiers until the individual characters are indiscernible and the bloodbath and explosions spill over onto another sheet. They both have a great time with this.

• At the dollar store, he chooses pistols and bowie knives and armor and soldier helmets. He shares these with friends and LOVES playing war. He likes it best when everyone is on the same team, and when the battle doesn't involve actually striking people. The deaths and battle tactics are complex and highly dramatic.

• Our most frequently checked out books at the library are the Eye Witness books on battle, knights, the Revolutionary War, and Pirates. We read these together, and get wide-eyed and groan (mostly with delight) at the really bloody stuff. 

• He loves the History Channel, especially documentaries with real WWII footage. Most of the time, he's content to close his eyes when we tell him that some pretty gory parts are coming up. I think, but don't know for sure, that he does this because he trusts us that he might experience fear and unpleasant emotions if he sees certain things, and he knows we let him watch a lof of other stuff that is war-like but not as potentially disturbing. (But this isn't always true--please see below.)

And I share this because it's his main interest right now, and we play with this theme together as a family every day, many times a day. So my problem (MY problem, I realize!) has something to do with the video games.

When we're sifting through agame.com together, he'll land on something like this:

http://www.agame.com/game/sift-heads-5.html

(For those who don't want to wait until after the ad, it's a mostly black-and-white game where you drive around in a car with your front windshield busted out so you can shoot other drivers and passengers in the back of the head, at which point red blood splatters out.)

And I am flooded with terrible, irrational feelings with no basis in reality. Now, he doesn't usually play this kind of game. He plays more straight-forward war games, many on this page:

http://www.agame.com/games/war_games/war_games.html

If I so much as scrunch my nose when blood spatters out of a soldier's head, he'll get a little testy and say, "But I LIKE this game, mom." And sometimes, when I gently suggest that something might be a little heavy with regards to killing or drama, he'll claim thing like "But I like war, so I like it when people die," or "Since I like killing, I can watch this." And I wonder what this is all about.

I should mention, too, that he has an almost 2 year old brother who follows him around doing everything he does. This is usually great--they love playing gun games together and Aargh!-ing at each other with eye patches on, etc., but I have doubts and bad feelings about the baby being in the room when the 5 y.o. is playing these games. The 5 y.o. is happy to censor his play when his brother is around (after I expressed my concern to him, which I'm not sure was the best idea, either), and asks me to take him out of the room if he wants to play a shoot-and-kill game, but then I usually have to go out with the little brother, leaving the older to play by himself, and that feels weird, too.

I'm not worried at all that he's not or not going to be a compassionate and loving being. Only, I guess I must be worried about something to be writing this, righ!?!  I did read Joyce's page on Grand Theft Auto, and Sandra's page on Tales of Happy Video Gamers, but I kept thinking, But he's 5! I thought this was older kid stuff! Is 5 the same in terms of the benefits/effects/development as 9 or 11 or 13?

He's a compassionate and interested little dude. This is just a mama freak-out, right? What are your thoughts, if you'd be willing to share?

[Sandra Dodd]

It's just a mama freak-out. :-)

As to drawing war stuff, boys in school have doodled war stuff in their notebooks all of my life. When I was a kid in the 50's and 60's I saw them doing it. We played WWII at recess, in 2nd grade. I was a nurse and would pour a handful of dirt over "the wounded" soldiers, and I still remember the joy of resuscitating my boyfriend, Joseph Polacco, when the Germans "killed him" in battle. They paved over that sandy part of the playground the next year, so that was the end of that good opportunity. We were seven,and that was 1960. :-)

When I was teaching, the youngest kids I ever had in my classes were 12, and they were more likely to draw "war stuff" than the other kids. By then, the scenes were mostly fighter jets and bombs.

A couple of years ago I talked to my friend Bo King who's an artist, and recently a kid, and asked him to do some art for a page on my website. I told him I wanted the kinds of things boys doodle during class. Being a boy, and a doodler, he knew exactly what I meant, and did the art on this page:
http://sandradodd.com/violence

Then there are the toy guns:
http://sandradodd.com/peace/guns

Look at those kids' faces; seriously.

If you want to read outside validation for violent imaginary play, the guy to read is Gerard Jones.

This is a little old; he has two or three books out:


A Defense of Violent Fantasy
Renowned comic-book author Gerard Jones argues that bloody videogames, gun-glorifying gangsta rap and other forms of 'creative violence' help far more children than they hurt, by giving kids a tool to master their rage. Is he insightful, or insane? Check out this interview at MotherJones.com
http://motherjones.com/politics/2000/06/violent-media-good-kids-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Jones

[Alice]

Sandra had great things to say, I just wanted to add that my 6 year old son has been playing Command & Conquer on the computer for a year. It's not bloody really, but it is a war game. He also plays Halo. He and my 4 year old also love to watch my husband play Call of Duty and other bloody video games. They don't associate the game with real life ... b/c it's not. They are very easily able to move between those worlds of real and fake, in a way I think adults have forgotten and/or are very uncomfortable with.

I used to ask my husband not to play those games when the boys were awake, but that became impractical for several reasons. The main reason is that they started staying up a lot later! But also, it wasn't really fair to my husband as he has limited time to play, and the boys really love to watch him and "help." It's something they enjoy together, a way to bond. I may not have the same enjoyment of it, but that doesn't change the way they feel (nor should it).

[Stacie K]

My son has been playing first-person shooters since he was two. By four he was really good at them. He's now 11 and he still loves them. He and my husband play almost every night.

When he was very young I did ask my husband to turn the blood off. I don't ask that anymore.

Many people were appalled that we let him play these kinds of games at such a young age. Many of his friends are still not allowed to play them, and he thinks that is crazy! My son has never shown any signs of being violent, or wanting to kill real people or even animals. He also owns several BB guns and goes into the woods with them, but never kills animals. He only wants to target practice.

I often say I should write an article on all the things Levi learned from playing first person shooters. A few are....counting backwards, simple addition and subtraction, spelling, vocabulary, geography, etc. Also, team work, social skills, and communication skills, since he plays with his dad, friends and people online.

Also, the other day we went to Barnes and Noble with my husband's sister and her family. Her daughter is four-years old, so we were in the kids section. My son had been at the magazine section and came back with a pile of gun magazines, and sat in the kid section reading them. The looks he got were rather humorous. Even from my sister-in-law. But he never noticed. He was just enjoying himself.

I think it's natural for boys to love guns and war. I wouldn't worry about him. Especially if you see him being loving and compassionate in the rest of his life.

Maybe this isn't unschooly of me, I'm not sure. But if my son said, "Since I like killing, I can watch this," I would say...."I don't think you like killing - it's just that it doesn't scare you when you see someone die. Or when he said, "But I like war, so I like it when people die." I would say..."I know you're interested in war, and it doesn't scare you like it does many other people. But I don't think you like it when people die, do you? What if someone you cared about died?" Just so he kind of gets an idea of the difference between the two. I'm not sure how a Radical Unschooler would handle this, but I don't consider myself a RUer (yet). That is just my opinion, and what I would say.

[Meredith]

I would say...."I don't think you like killing - it's just that it doesn't scare you when you see someone die.

It's pretend, though, and that's different from "liking killing". He doesn't like Real killing or death or war, he has no experience with those. These are games, stories. It really important that parents remember that (not so important to say any of that to kids).

It might help to think about the kinds of books adults like to read. Some adults adore mystery novels, or horror novels, or romances (which can be very violent), but we don't worry that those adults are going to go around killing people. We expect adults to get some emotional content out of those books, to related to the characters - maybe even the "bad guys" - but not that its going to warp them for life. It's a way of exploring our complex human natures.

Kids do that too, but they tend to do it more obviously than adults. They actively play out ideas of violence and killing, good vs evil, even complex ethical situations with toys and games and doodles. Its unnerving to adults because we've been sold on the idea of children as somehow more pure than adults, but they have the same complexity of human nature, really. What they're blessed with is less baggage, and that's a big difference. Sneaking and hiding what you love creates a whole host of extra personal and social problems - you don't have to stick that kind of baggage on your kid, though.

[Teresa]

Thanks, all, for the responses. I especially needed to hear that other parents had young ones for whom this was a favorite activity! My 5 y.o. would definitely be the one on the brightly colored cushions in the kids' department reading gun magazines!

With regards to his comments, "But I like war, so I like it when people die," and "Since I like killing, I can watch this," I have a feeling, though I don't know for sure, that he's testing the boundaries of his own comfort level, and kind of defining for himself what he likes about this subject and what he doesn't. The way he says it, I suspect he's blustering a little bit, and I think that could be a really good thing, something that gets him closer to the idea that one doesn't have to accept ideas whole-hog, but can still be interested and enjoy certain parts.

Stacie, I appreciate your suggestions of ways to clarify it; the times that I've tried something like that (I think I was just more straight-forward: "Really? I thought you didn't like it when animals got hurt."), he's dug his feet in even more. I got the feeling that he was defending a position, and that he didn't think I was asking from a place of genuine, nonthreatening curiosity. And of course, he was right!

[April Nall]

Dear Teresa,

I realize I'm coming to this conversation late but I'd like to offer a contrasting perspective. (I am April's husband, Jeff. I'm a high-school drop out turned doctoral candidate; I am a college professor and teach philosophy and sex and gender.)

First of all, you might notice that at least two folks indicated that their sons played these violent games with their fathers. If your son's father encourages such violent play rather than discouraging it, then it will be difficult to move away from. Second, someone wrote " think it's natural for boys to love guns and war." This is sheer nonsense. 1/4 women in the U.S. are raped. Are men naturally predisposed to sexual assault? I think not. Much of the issue here is that men and boys are being taught and encouraged to exemplify a very violent form of masculinity.

As a father of three children, including one son, and the son of a nuturing war-hating father I can tell you that men are not limited to such shallow, unrewarding identities. While it may be the case that we should all tolerate children's explorations, even into difficult realms such the realities of the world we live in, it is shere apathy to ignore the fact that we create ourselves through our actions. This is something John Holt realized when he explained we knew very little about human "nature" (not to mention male and female "nature); rather, what we know is that through our decisions in life and our commitments we forge our own individual realities.

If our children spend their days and nights engaged in violent war-like play, we should be little surprised when they grow up and wish to join the armed services rather than, for instance, care for children as stay-at-home fathers or primary caretakers and co-parents. I am no conservative pro-censorship advocate; but it is important that someone state what is clear, we do not simply "become" what "nature" or "god" determined we would be at or before birth. Rather we form or create ourselves throughout our lives. So while we often take our children's interests to be "natural" results of their "inherent" interests, we're often seeing the product of their socialization. Just yesterday my wife and I heard two separate mothers discourage sons from entering the "boy" isle. Thus boys soon learn that they are suppose to play with only "boy" toys; and of course most "boy" toys on the toy isle are restricted to violent play, whereas girl isles encourage domestic activities and nutrurance. In short, this is gender, which is a social construct. It is not nature. Our boys are not natural lovers of death and destruction. For their sake I hope we all introduce them to other ways of being.

 

As philosopher Elliott Cohen writes: "....sexually violent and dehumanizing pornography, has made wanton cruelty, sexual sadism, and destruction of human life a marketable commodity in contemporary Western society. Such desentization through graphic depictions of sex and violence has made it easier to tolerate exposure in real life, and there is some evidence to suggest that it encourages at least some very susceptible human beings to imitate what they have seen" (Cohen 2009: 5).

Finally, I strongly encourage you to watch Jackson Katz "Tough Guise" (1999), which addresses men, masculinity and violence. Here is a summary I recently wrote:

In his documentary, Tough Guise (1999), Jackson Katz draws on a varied survey of the pop-culture landscape to make the case that the dominant model of masculinity, what he calls a “tough guise,” is one that normalizes extreme toughness and routine disregard for individual safety and health; rugged individualism at the expense of interconnection with others; and violence as one of the salient expressions of true masculinity. In particular he points out the way in which sport’s culture promotes more than friendly competition, but also athletic expressions of humiliating brutalization and domination. Katz also shows how horror films and shock-jocks such as Howard Stern frequently link violence and sexuality. Horror films, for example, frequently display women typifying “ideal” beauty in sexually suggestive posses or clothing (or lack thereof) moments before they become victims of assault. Katz further cites Stern’s contention that, had he participated in a school shooting, he would have had sex with some of the hostages—the implication of course is rape—before turning the gun on himself. As Stern put it, he would “take them out with sex” (quoted in Tough Guise). In short, hegemonic masculinity promotes a normalization of sexual violence and the idea that sexually degrading women is an act of masculinity.

Teresa said:

Thanks, all, for the responses. I especially needed to hear that other parents had young ones for whom this was a favorite activity! My 5 y.o. would definitely be the one on the brightly colored cushions in the kids' department reading gun magazines!

With regards to his comments, "But I like war, so I like it when people die," and "Since I like killing, I can watch this," I have a feeling, though I don't know for sure, that he's testing the boundaries of his own comfort level, and kind of defining for himself what he likes about this subject and what he doesn't. The way he says it, I suspect he's blustering a little bit, and I think that could be a really good thing, something that gets him closer to the idea that one doesn't have to accept ideas whole-hog, but can still be interested and enjoy certain parts.

Stacie, I appreciate your suggestions of ways to clarify it; the times that I've tried something like that (I think I was just more straight-forward: "Really? I thought you didn't like it when animals got hurt."), he's dug his feet in even more. I got the feeling that he was defending a position, and that he didn't think I was asking from a place of genuine, nonthreatening curiosity. And of course, he was right!

[Alice]

Jeff, I feel like there are so many things to respond to in your comment that I hardly know where to start.  I'll start with this comment:

 

"Much of the issue here is that men and boys are being taught and encouraged to exemplify a very violent form of masculinity."  

 

My point, and I believe the point of the other posters, is that my son does not identify any video games as violent nor does he associate them with masculinity.  My stepdaughter, who is 16, also plays these games.  She is not violent or masculine.  Many women play first-person shooter video games, which you seem to either not understand or to be purposely ignoring in order to make a point.  

 

"If our children spend their days and nights engaged in violent war-like play, we should be little surprised when they grow up and wish to join the armed services rather than, for instance, care for children as stay-at-home fathers or primary caretakers and co-parents."

 

There are so many offensive and inappropriate assumptions in this comment, it's hard to believe you fit them all in.  My dad spent 22 years in the Army (including 2 tours in Viet Nam).  He also hated war, I haven't met anyone yet who extolls its virtues.  He then retired when I was 7, and became the (kind and gentle) stay-at-home dad while my mom went to work.  Do you think such people don't exist in the military?  I was active duty myself for 5 years (including one deployment to Iraq).  I also hate war and violence.  I have since become a stay-at-home radical unschooling mother to 3 sons (and twin girls on the way).  My husband is currently active duty in the Army, and is one of the kindest and most patient fathers I know.  He has deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and also hates war.  He is also a radical unschooling father, supporting all of his children in the pursuits they love.  His father served in the Korean War, hates war, and is a kind and gentle man and wonderful father and grandfather.  I find it hard to believe that you know not one person who has served in the military who would fit this description, man or woman.  Whether or not you agree with the government, or the military, you should certainly not disparage those who choose to serve their country, or even worse to assume that they choose to serve because they are violent war-mongering individuals.

[Meredith]

If our children spend their days and nights engaged in violent war-like play, we should be little surprised when they grow up and wish to join the armed services rather than, for instance, care for children as stay-at-home fathers or primary caretakers and co-parents.

 

By that standard, though, it would be utterly shocking to discover young people with free access to and a great love of pretend warfare who are peaceful, caretaker sorts, right? Go meet some unschooled teens who've had free access to video games, though, and that's what you'll find - gentle, compassionate people. Those unschoolers who do choose professions in the military or police force, moreover, do so out of a strong sense of morality and desire to protect others.

 

Our boys are not natural lovers of death and destruction. For their sake I hope we all introduce them to other ways of being.

 

 I'm guessing you're pretty new to radical unschooling if you're still thinking in terms of "what to introduce". It takes a good bit of deschooling to get beyond that idea. Learning comes from everything and anything. A strong opinion expressed in a moment of stress introduces violence to the life of a child. A gentle reaction, apology, softness and an effort to make better choices introduces problem solving, compassion, caretaking. Step away from "how/what to introduce" and see learning and exploration flow and swirl all around - its spectacular!

 

Trust that your boys are not lovers of death and destruction! Don't get all tied up worrying that you have to guide them away from that - they don't want unhappiness and hardship and hurt in their life unless those are the only (or best) ways to get attention and love. Support your boys in their passions so that they value their deep, strong feelings, and help them find ways to express their negative feelings in ways that let them grow as people, rather than limiting them to knee-jerk, bestial reactions or merely the suppression of those. You can do all those things without ever saying no to pretend violence - and you may come to see pretend violence differently, as a way in which people play with the dark sides of their personalities  without ever, once, harming another soul.

[Joyce Fetteroll]

**** Second, someone wrote " think it's natural for boys to love guns and war." ****

The nature of the average male is different from the average female. Their chemistry is different. Men tend to be more physical and aggressive. Women tend to be more social and nurturing. It may have helped the women's movement to suggest that men and women are the same, but it's just not true.

But average doesn't tell anyone about how an individual male or female will be. Some men have natures that are more nurturing than average. Some women have more aggressive natures than average.

Though, I would definitely agree there are pressures in our culture that encourage men to be violent and aggressive, that encourage women to be passive and submissive. 

But I definitely wouldn't agree that there isn't a biological component to aggressive and nurturing natures. 

**** This is sheer nonsense. 1/4 women in the U.S. are raped. Are men naturally predisposed to sexual assault? I think not. Much of the issue here is that men and boys are being taught and encouraged to exemplify a very violent form of masculinity. ****

Even if the violent and aggressive actions are encouraged by peers and the culture that doesn't mean the aggression doesn't naturally exist in men.

The data gathered from the problems unschooling moms write about points to boys being more likely to be aggressive, loud and in need of large body movements. Sometimes mothers ask for help with aggresive girls, but far more often its boys.

**** If our children spend their days and nights engaged in violent war-like play, we should be little surprised when they grow up and wish to join the armed services rather than, for instance, care for children as stay-at-home fathers or primary caretakers and co-parents. ****

While the idea that playing violent games is more likely to grow aggressive natures than nurturing ones, is that what's seen in unschooling homes? Unschooling kids have the freedom to have more hours of violent play and TV than any other group of kids. If there were some connection, our kids should show it. But they don't.

Undoubtedly some unschooled kids have gone into the military but I don't personally know any. The kids I know are far more nurturing than their average schooled counterparts. They behave as they were treated by their family, not how they played out their fantasies.

**** we do not simply "become" what "nature" or "god" determined we would be at or before birth. Rather we form or create ourselves throughout our lives. ****

You state that as though it were fact.

From 15 years of observation of families what I've concluded from that data is it takes a lot of nurture to overcome nature. There are very feminist moms who are flabbergasted by daughters who embrace pink and princesses. There are peacenik moms who have no idea how they have sons who turn everything into a gun. (There have been a few moms of pink loving boys, I can't recall any moms telling of girls who turn everything into guns. I'm not saying they don't exist, only reporting the data that has been presented.)

What has a more profound effect than play and interests (which reflect a child's nature) on how children treat other people -- and again this is data gathered from unschoolers and not merely a theory that sounds good -- is how children are treated by their parents. If their parents respect and support who they are -- even if they're aggressive kids -- if they're helped to treat others with respect and not aggression, then that's how they treat others.

Joyce

[Cindy Miller]

 

I have two boys ages 8 and 5.  The 5 yr old especially loves to play games that involve someone "dying."  It used to bother me as our other 2 children are girls (21 & 19) and I never encountered that type of play when they were younger.  Now I just play along and frequently find myself lying on the floor with my tongue hanging out while I "die."   LOL!  :-) 

 

 

[Meredith]

A certain amount of play around killing and dying, too, has to do with kids Thinking about those big, universal questions of life and death. Children ponder by playing.

[Jeff Nall]

The problem with your observations is that you are mistaking socialized behavior for so-called "natural" biological behavior. No one questions that girls identify with pink and babies while boys identify with blue and fighting. This is not the case with my children; for my 7-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son blur all of these distinctions. The point is that what many parents perceive as organic processes---those as described above---are rather reflections of socialization. Notice that no one responds to the observation that fathers are primarily those participating in such behavior. Boys don't just wake-up with a desire for aggression.

There also seems to be significant apathy about the way institutions beyond school affect children and adults. Social institutions are not always material; they often take the form of social hegemony, norms that become dominant. I can tell you from experience teaching sex and gender that adult men and women often report of conforming to gendered norms not because they fit their biology, but because of what is called "accountability," in which those who break with convention are ostracized. Moreover, each and every one of us operates within particular frameworks, unschoolers, conventional homeschoolers, atheists, Christians, etc. Everyone masquerades their own view of the world as actuality, objective perception, God's eye view of the world, etc. But none of these are sufficiently honest. Our values significantly impact our thought and action. It is a serious philosophic error to blind one's self to the way in which our conceptions (ideas) about the world inform how we see it. Those of us confident that boys are more violent than girls experience precisely such a phenomenon. Indeed, many of our children merely replicate the gendered behaviors we ourselves exhibit in our homes. Our mouths may be closed, but so long as fathers work and mothers do the majority of the caretaking, the message to boys and girls is clear. But this is not a product of biology; this is indicated in the fact that cross-cultural analysis shows that caretaking was not always so divided; that men and women worked side by side in caring for children and tending to crops; what we see today as biology is a product of historical forces.

I often hear mothers telling me, during class, that upon reflection they realize they are less tolerant of boys crying over injuries than daughters; others tell me how they never even thought to include their daughters in so-called "boys" activities. Many of them discuss how a desire to fit in led them to "perform." And we all perform. The question is whether or not we are aware of our performances; whether or not we are critically involved in the process. Again, I think it is a troubling error to fail to realize the significant influence popular culture (music, film, video games, TV etc) has in determining the kinds of activities and interests our children have. Parents who resolve themselves to not intervene in their children's intellectual development are indirectly but quite significantly merely permitting the dominant culture to mentor their young. Again, the power of unschooling---I am not new to unschooling, but as mentioned in my profile, have lived an unschooled life---is in the recognition of the coercive affect of institutionalized, compulsory education. In addition to compulsory education, we are all significantly influenced by social institutions such as nationalism, consumerism and freemarket fundamentalism, classism, sexism, homophobia, racism, and militarism---as Rev. Dr. King put it, the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, this is evident in the repression experienced by the people of Egypt by rulers propped up by U.S. tax payers like all of us on this website. I wonder, for instance, how many of us are planning to celebrate Valentine's day with chocolate, over 80% of which is produced by child laborers in Africa. Their unfreedom is perpetuated by our economic liberty. Ought this really be permitted? Or should we tell our children that our values disallow perpetuating such partices? (http://thehumanist.org/humanist/08_sept_oct/qureshi_essay.html; http://news.change.org/stories/whats-scarier-than-halloween-blood-c...)

 

What seems to be missing from the responses to my prior post is a recognition that experience or perception is not a passive affair. Our concepts and assumptions about the world assert an incredible power over our perceptions. When one looks at the world through the lens of racism, one finds that whites are better than blacks. When one examines the world through sexism, men have, up until the last 50 years, seen women as inferior to men. When one experiences the world through gender assumptions one sees girls who like pink and boys who like war and blue. But as John Holt explained, what is often passed as necessity is actually power holding onto the way it wishes things to reamin; old orders don’t die easily. The name for presenting social institutions as biological reality is “Essentialism.” Essentialism is a lens which we use to bolster our existing claims. Those who wish to look outside of this narrow box should look at some of the following films:

Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheros, Slackers, and other Media Stereotypes, by Lyn Mikel Brown, Sharon Lamb, and Mark Tappan

Packaging Girlhood

Jean Killbourne, “Killing Us Softly”

Katz, “Tough Guise”

Bell hooks, “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love”

Tarrant, “Men and Feminism”

And perhaps my website: www.Condorcet.info

 

A few words from bell hooks, one of the most important black intellectuals in our country today:

hooks laments that while so many wish to know the cause of routine violence among boys and men nearly no one discusses “the role patriarchal notions of manhood play in teaching boys that it is in their nature to kill” (hooks2004:  11).

 

“As our culture prepares males to embrace war, they must be all the more indoctrinated into patriarchal thinking that tells them that it is their nature to kill and to enjoy killing. Bombarded by news about male violence, we hear no news about men and love” (hooks 2004: 11).

 

“Only a revolution of values in our nation will end male violence, and that revolution will necessarily be based on a love ethic. To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not. Performance is different form simply being. In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved” (hooks 2004: 11-12).