The media message

As for video games, in their new book, “The Boy Crisis,” Warren Farrell, Ph.D. and John Gray, Ph.D. tell it like it is: “While extended time on a video game increases our ability to play the game, it decreases our control over automatic impulses … the decreased activity of the prefrontal cortex inhibits the ability to sustain focus even on what we ourselves think is most important.”

Our more recent seriously dysfunctional cultural picture of males will make it much more difficult for 15-year-old grandson to grow up with a healthy feeling of self-worth, optimism and hope than it was for his dad or even grandson-in-law. When they were young, they weren’t bombarded with trash sit-coms, violent video games, ultra violent movies, gory and sexually explicit commercials, nor were they in fear of some psychopath shooting up their schools.

Grandson is growing up in a society that denigrates him on the one hand and expects too much of him on the other. The messages that he gets from our culture about what it is to be a man are distorted and garbled. He is encouraged to behave like an adolescent well into adulthood and is bombarded with the idea that success depends upon how much wealth he accumulates and his position on the power scale. This makes it more difficult for him to grow up with the support that helps him mature into a whole, well-functioning human being and to lead a productive and satisfying life.

“In our culture a false picture has emerged of what it is to be a man. The culture’s emphasis on crude, macho masculinity as a status symbol causes young men to strive for the wrong type of expression of their masculinity.” — John A. Sanford and George Laugh, M.D., “What Men are Like.”

We have carelessly and dangerously allowed our media to seriously exploit and distort boys’ proclivities — their energy and aggressive tendencies, their penchant for action, risk and adventure and competitiveness. It’s all in the name of free speech, and underwritten by corporate greed.

Much of television, movies, electronic games, etc. portray men as one or more of the following: bumbling idiots, uncouth Neanderthals, lecherous predators, automatons obsessed with power and violence, fame-obsessed entertainers and/or brazen politicians who are obsessed with themselves. Even if parents try to regulate their young children’s exposure to such demeaning trash, such are the models that many older boys and young men emulate because they are in their face regularly.

Where do we see the intellectually curious, responsible, thinking and feeling man idealized? Where do we see men who are thoughtful and mature depicted on the TV that most boys watch? How many boys live in a basically loving, well-functioning family with an evolved and involved father (as grandson does) who counteracts the media message?

If we want to produce men who do not need to keep women “in their place,” get their thrills from violence, blood and gore, cavalierly destroy each other, remain adolescent all their lives and/or deliberately and without conscience produce media that defiles our children with blatantly inappropriate programming, we must realistically take stock of our culture, face the fact that much is going against our boys and work to provide many good role models for the benefit of all grandsons everywhere. These days it is especially important to remember that it takes a village to raise a child.

As Myriam Miedzian wrote in “Boys Will Be Boys”: “We desperately need new heroes for our boys — heroes whose sense of adventure, courage and strength are linked with caring, empathy and altruism.” 

Since 1984, Dorothy Dimitre has written more than 950 columns for various local newspapers. Her email address is gramsd@aceweb.com.