Michael S. Kimmel

The structural foundations of traditional manhood--economic independence, geographic mobility, domestic dominance--have all been eroding. The transformation of the workplace--the decline of the skilled worker, global corporate relocations, the malaise of the middle-class manager, the entry of women into the assembly line and the corporate office--have pressed men to confront their continued reliance on the marketplace as the way to demonstrate and prove their manhood.

Single parents - both women and men - can play as critical a role as the traditional two-parent family, and gay and lesbian parents can, and do, raise happy, resilient children. When it comes to family life, form is not merely as important as content. Feeling loved and supported, nurtured and safe, is far more critical than the 'package' it comes in.

To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You__e everywhere you look, you__e the standard against which everyone else is measured. You__e like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a __oman doctor_ or they will say they went to see __he doctor._ People will tell you they have a __ay colleague_ or they__l tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a __lack friend,_ but when that same person simply mentions a __riend,_ everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn__ have the word __oman_ or __ay_ or __inority_ in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses __iterature,_ __istory_ or __olitical science.__his invisibility is political.

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we__ be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We__ hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We__ hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys. Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.