Deconstructing Toxic Masculinity with Fiction
Incels. School shooters. Mass shooters. Terrorists. Lone wolves. There are so many names, but ultimately, it’s young men killing innocent people.
Little kids. Students. Working people. Old timers. Lives snuffed out by violence. We talk about guns, drugs, the rise of extremism, Ritalin, Adderall, and a whole host of other reasons for and possible ways out of this unending cycle.
But I’m here to fly the flag for fiction. Stories. Words on the page that you sit down and read in your spare time.
Why?
Why does fiction reduce extremism and ultimately save lives?
One: Fiction builds empathy between you and The Other. It’s hard to shoot/stab/run someone over if you know what it feels like to be them. Fiction is an empathy training machine. From Russian princesses to Cockney thieves, a suicidal French housewife and everyone in between, we’re offered myriad perspectives to get to know, spend time and bond with.
Two: Fiction cultivates critical thinking. More than anything else I’ve found, reading fiction helps build a layer of bullshit detection, thus reducing my chances of being hoodwinked by some stupid-ass ideology, whether it’s the latest Ponzi scheme or murderous intifada. Reading stories from the past shows that although context changes, the human centre never does. With such a variety of stories, so often contradicting each other, all heaping up in your head, it becomes somewhat easier to be okay with ambiguity and hold multiple truths in your heart at the same time.
Three: Reading fiction makes you believe in and seek more truths. When you read a line in a book that lands different and you stop and take stock for a second and feel things rearrange in your body and stare off into the middle distance for a while before taking a deep breath and diving right back in, once more seeking pearls, well, then you know you’re addicted. Then, it doesn’t matter what anyone tells you, there’s no single truth but many truths out there and it’s your job as a reader to find them.
Four: Fiction makes you see creativity is right and mindless destruction is wrong. As humans, we coexist with school shooters, terrorists, lone wolves, natural disasters, random accidents, and entropy itself. Every piece of fiction is a shout in the darkness, a statement, a word spoken aloud, saying I exist, I am here, and I’m not leaving.
And the craziest thing about it? There’s room for all the negativity and destructive bullshit within creativity. Murder, violence, people being mean to each other. From Homer to Hogwarts and Hemingway, our Shadow is the bread, butter, and bones of our stories and has been ever since we were beasts circling the fire.
Channel your violent tendencies into the covers of a good book. It might save your life and those of the innocent people around you.
