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Through the Glass Darkly
| Article
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18754 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
3,087 Words |
| Author
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Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese directs the Institute for Women's
Studies at Emory University and has recently published
Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism
(University of North Carolina Press, 1991). |
BOYS WILL BE BOYS
Breaking the Link between Masculinity and Violence
Myriam Miedzian
New York: Haper Collins, 1991
337 pp., $22.50
DEADLY CONSEQUENCES
Deborah Prothrow-Stith, with Michaele Weissman
New York: Harper Collins, 1991
269 pp., $20.00
My occasionally paralyzing childhood terrors focused on fires, large dogs, and the innumerable threats I could not name but could capture in the evil clown who lived under my bed and who might at any movement grab me by my ankle and throw me down the stairs. I grew up in a world in which the reading primers that featured Dick, Jane, Sally, and their dog spot were plausible--if something less than an accurate picture of reality. I never had a key to my parents' house, which, except when we were all away on vacation, was never locked. Nothing more substantial than ghosts troubled me when I walked alone at night. I assumed that policemen were my friends and that no man whom I dated would force me to have sex with him.
Today I know that I might well have been exposed to sexual or physical abuse within my own family, school or community. Today we all know that the world of Dick, Jane, Sally, and Spot concealed much more physical and psychological battering than we suspected, or than those who nostalgically mourn its passing would admit. More important, we know that it never represented the experience of all Americans, many of whom knew the indignities and deprivations of poverty, urban crowding, and racial discrimination at first hand. But when all the caveats have been filed, it was a different world for all of us--especially for those who are poor, black, and male and who today live in a nightmare of violence that is unique among industrialized nations. Rare among all the nations of the world, it currently promises to result in tragedy of massive proportions.
A violent society
We all know--or have no excuse for not knowing--the statistics. More than twenty thousand Americans die each year in homicides. Of those, nearly 70 percent are men, nearly 60 percent of who are between fifteen and thirty-four years of age. As Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith insists in Deadly
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