Media's violent messages are part of 'boy code,' experts say
BY BARBARA PALMER
Violence is ubiquitous in the popular media that boys consume most -- present in nearly 90 percent of top-selling video games and used as the means to solve problems by one out of five male characters on television programs, said Patti Miller, a director of Children Now, an Oakland-based child advocacy organization. During sports programming, announcers use terms like "battle," "attack" and "weapons" to describe sports action nearly five times an hour, she said.
"How does that look to kids?" asked Miller at an Oct. 17 symposium examining definitions of masculinity, organized by the Ms. Foundation for Women and Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG). According to a survey of 1,200 children conducted by Children Now, three-quarters describe the images of males on television as "violent" and two-thirds describe the images of males as "angry."
Miller was among a group of researchers, journalists and others who spoke at the symposium about the effect of the "boy code," a term used to describe messages that society sends to boys, including "Be tough" and "Don't cry." The term was coined by William S. Pollack, an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who also took part in the symposium, "Supporting Boys' Resilience: Expanding Definitions of Masculinity and Manhood."
Research into the lives of girls has shown that gender socialization to accommodate traditional feminine ideals was harmful to girls' development and to their relationships, said Judy Chu, a lecturer in the Program in Human Biology and an affiliate scholar at IRWG. More recently, researchers began to ask whether it was possible that boys' socialization toward traditional concepts of masculinity might be detrimental to their development, despite the fact that males are in the dominant position in society, Chu said.
Studies of infants have shown that both males and females are born with a fundamental capacity and desire for close, interpersonal connections, she said. "At the same time, adolescent boys and adult men have fewer friendships and close relationships than women."
One of the most powerful socializing forces in children's lives is the media, where violence is one of the key behaviors displayed by boys and men, said Miller, who holds a master's degree in social sciences and education from Stanford. Although all children spend more time on computers, television, music and other media than on any other activity except for sleep, boys spend more time than girls playing video games and watching television, she said.
A Children Now study showed that video games portray males as three times as likely to appear unaffected by violence than women, she said. Additionally, nearly two-thirds of African American video game characters appear unaffected by violence, compared with one-quarter of white characters.
African American males have the added weight of social stereotypes that place them in a very limited number of roles, including "criminal," "thug," "pimp" and "hustler," said symposium panelist Byron Hurt, associate director of Mentors in Violence Prevention-Marine Corps, a gender violence prevention program. Hurt, producer of the documentary I Am a Man: Black Masculinity in America, is at work on a documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, about machismo in rap music and hip hop culture.
Hip hop has brought success to black artists, but it also has turned sexist, violent and misogynistic images of African American men into popular commodities, Hurt said. "There's a silent majority of people inside and outside the hip hop culture who question it. We don't have to buy into the images."
"Most men don't buy the boy code," said panelist Patrick Lemmon, executive director of Men Can Stop Rape, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization organized to prevent rape and other forms of male violence. "We may buy into it, but when one person speaks out, 10 people join in, in relief."