Violence is integral to far too many narratives of masculinity

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13577/the_power_and_the_story/

The Power and the Story

A man walks into a movie theater, his hair oddly dyed. He walks out, then walks back in, in costume. Some nerd, some superfan, watching his big movie. Good for him. At least it’s not Captain America; those spandex costumes a few months ago were not fun to see. So, the nerd sets down two grenades. A special effects guy, maybe? Maybe he’s getting paid for this. The gas grenades go off. And then he starts shooting.

One thing you will notice, about this sequence of events: The man gets more important, and vastly more powerful, at each progression of the story. By the end of it, he’s become one of America’s most famous—and most feared—men. You will hear him spoken of, every time you walk into a coffee shop or a bar, for the next week. One phrase, usually, repeated between strangers: He said he was the Joker.

But James Holmes could have called himself anything, depending on the movie and the year. He could have said he was Hannibal Lecter, Travis Bickle, Leatherface, the Green flipping Goblin. In the aftermath of all this—which is more dramatic than even most mass murders; there was the voice mail message left in a goofy Batman voice, the apartment filled with Batman paraphernalia, the apartment (need we be reminded) rigged with explosives, should police attempt to enter—the standard take is to ruminate about our violent pop culture. About how Heath Ledger’s Joker represented the terror of randomness, and how he radiated the same scary-intense glamour the late Ledger always did radiate in his roles, and about how, well, gosh, movies are filled with violence, aren’t they? With killers, even. Someone could get the wrong idea.

Not mentioned, however: The fact that this “someone” would almost certainly be a man.

If we weren’t looking at pop culture here, we might look at place: James Holmes struck in Aurora, Colorado. A few miles and 13 years away, in Columbine, Colorado, two young men—Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris—massacred 13 of their fellow high school students, injured 24 others and killed themselves. There, too, we looked to pop to inform evil: Violent video games, Marilyn Manson and some imaginary teen-Goth conspiracy called the “Trenchcoat Mafia.” (I was being home-schooled in Ohio at the time; friends who went to public school told me they were not allowed to wear black outfits, or long coats, for the rest of the school year.) With Seung-Hui Cho in Virginia, who killed 32 and wounded 25, some insisted he’d imitated the movie Oldboy. (He apparently hadn’t seen it.) And in the case of Jared Loughner in Arizona, who killed six people and wounded 14, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, we hardly even had pop. But the leftists among us (including, sadly, me) were happy to immediately, and strenuously, blame Sarah Palin.

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1. The positive news is that 4 male heroes came out of the Aurora disaster

And 3 gave their lives.
See:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/25/opinion/bennett-aurora-three/index.html