White Men, Mass Killings, and the Absence of Safe Male Mentors
After Atlanta
A week ago today, a 21-year-old white man shot and killed eight people, six of them Asian women, in metro Atlanta. It was the most intersectional of mass murders, weaving together strands of racism, misogyny, and sex “addiction.” The killings have spawned hundreds of hot takes, some of them excellent, many of them repetitive.
As always, when a very young man commits an unthinkable act, I wonder about the presence of mentors in his life. We know Robert Aaron Long belonged to an evangelical church, and was overwhelmed by feelings of sexual shame. He presumably belonged to men’s groups through the church, or perhaps online. Did he have one older man he reached out to more than others? Did he only go to that older man to confess his “falls” from grace every time he visited a massage parlor or watched porn, or did they talk about other things? Did that man pray for him, rebuke him, challenge him to do better? Did he remind him that he was loved no matter what? Perhaps we’ll know. More likely, we won’t.
Perhaps it is in prison that Robert Long will encounter the safe older men with whom he can begin a lifelong journey to come to terms with the enormity of the harm he inflicted. For the sake of his soul, I hope he finds them, and does the work with them.
One of the things that I grieve most about my own recklessness is that it ended the opportunity to serve as a mentor to young men. I’m sadly notorious for my relationships with much younger women, but the truth is that over the years --at Pasadena City College, All Saints Episcopal Church Pasadena, and the Los Angeles Kabbalah Centre -- I mentored dozens and dozens of teen boys and young men. I never crossed a line with any of these boys, something I wish I didn’t have to say. I was there for them as confidant, running partner, long-walker-at-sunset buddy, Sunday-morning-before-church coffee date.
I do not write to sing my own praises.
I write because I knew then, and no better still now, how many of us are afraid of boys. So many young men seem so angry, so sullen, so glib, so monosyllabic and impassive in the face of adult queries. “Girls are just so much more alive and responsive to mentoring,” another male youth leader at All Saints Pasadena told me once. He didn’t choose to only mentor girls because of a sexual interest – it was simply easier for him, with much greater immediate payoff.
When people found out that I worked with young men, and ran a weekly discussion group for male students at PCC, they had many suggestions. “I hope you can teach them to respect women,” people said; “I hope you can teach them to be gentlemen.” One colleague, an older woman, took me aside and said with great emotion, “If you do this right, you can save at least a few young girls from getting raped. This is sacred work you’re doing.”
I gave her my WASPiest grin of gratitude, and muttered “oy veh” as soon as she was out of earshot.
The premise always seemed to be that young men were ticking time bombs, and I was supposed to be the bomb squad, defusing all of that rage before it could do more damage than it already had. Too few people are willing to see how much tenderness, emotional depth, and complexity boys have. Yes, they might seem single-mindedly focused on sports or video games, yes, they might be thinking about sex constantly, but their testosterone is not an impediment to empathy. They have been dismissed as one-dimensional all of their lives, raised in a culture that reminds them at every turn that girls are complex -- and boys simple.
When complexity and depth are feminized, boys learn to disguise those aspects of their identities. It is not that boys feel less, think less, see less, empathize less – it’s that they learn early that they need to keep those tender aspects of themselves so well-hidden that they sometimes forget they’re there.
Young girls rightly suspect that depth is there – which is why so many of them fall in love with the brooding boys, believing that their calling is to help their boyfriends open up and become more fully human. We teach young women that one of the ways to measure their own worth is their ability to provide a space where that mute, suspicious young man can be vulnerable at last. This is, of course, why so many young men find it so hard to get over their exes, even stalking them obsessively for months and years after a breakup. The memory of the place where they could be safe lingers, and they are heartbroken and enraged that it was there, and now gone.
A lot of young women get badly hurt because they try to do the work that was an older man’s place to do.
Young men do not just need mentors in order to become civilized, or learn how not to rape. A mentor whose primary focus is on preventing the harm he presumes a boy will otherwise inflict will never gain a kid’s trust. If you don’t love your mentees for who they are, right now in all their messiness, you’re just another manipulative authority figure trying to mold them into something you believe they are called to become. Young men need mentors who will provide without judgment the safe space for pain and anger to emerge.
Many, many times I heard young men confess fantasies of violence. I gambled, rightly, that this was both talk and a test – if I recoiled, or went to the authorities, I’d lose the boy. The cardinal rule of youth ministry is “affirm and redirect.” A 16-year-old might confess that he daydreamed about shooting the pretty girls whom he thought had rejected him. I’d always ask if he had access to a gun, and when the answer was no, which it usually was, we’d move on to how it felt to be rejected. We’d talk about what it would feel like to be accepted and wanted, too. Rage did not dissipate in a single hour’s conversation, either, but the talking could usually turn the temperature down a notch or two.
I fibbed a little, pretending that I too had had dark revenge fantasies when I was a boy. (That was half-true; I did have plenty of bloody daydreams when I was a teen, but they were always only of suicide. I figured that was a distinction without a difference.) Rage is always a secondary emotion – some wound must of necessity precede it. Good mentoring isn’t fooled or frightened by bitterness and anger.
The same is true of sex, of course. Boys need their boundaries respected, but they need to hear that their desires are normal and not sinful. I didn’t ask prying questions about porn and masturbation, but I made it very clear that either together or separately, both were perfectly healthy pastimes. I gently made the case that porn was to sex what the “Fast and the Furious” series was to driving – entertainment, not education. (I was fortunate, when I worked with All Saints Church, to have access to a lot of great, affirming sex education materials, like the Our Whole Lives curriculum.)
I do not mentor much anymore, though a few of the young kids at work do come to me with questions every once in a while. I have a criminal record and a well-known past; even if I had the time, no one is going to let me formally volunteer with young people of either sex ever again. I miss it.
I do have children, my greatest good fortune and my holy responsibility.
On Sunday, I took the bunnies to mini-golf. On the way, we stopped by Starbucks for a long-promised treat.
“I can go in and order everything, daddy,” twelve-year-old Heloise announced. “You can stay in the car.”
I handed my daughter my debit card, and she looked at her brother. “David, do you want to come?”
My son shook his head, and Heloise bounded off.
A minute later, David changed his mind. “I better go in, papa. What if boys are in there and they stare at her?”
I looked at him in the rear-view mirror. I didn’t laugh. “What would you do if they did?”
The eight-year-old thought for a moment. “I would beat them up?” It was a question.
I shook my head, smiled gently. “I love that you love your sister so much, but no. Try again?”
David thought for a minute. “I would be there so she would feel safer knowing I was standing next to her. I’d only beat them up if she wanted me to.”
I nodded. “That’s much better. I think maybe you should go, just in case.”
He did, a beam on his face. I watched him disappear into the store, little hands half-curled into fists.
Neither his mother nor I have ever told David it is his job to defend his sister. Kids pick things up from the culture, or perhaps from something ancient, coded deep within. Some on the right encourage that puerile paternalism – “Damn right, boy, you kick the ass of anyone who even looks at your sister!” Some on the left are horrified by even a soupçon of masculine protectiveness – “Why would you even think such a horrible thing? Let your sister have her own agency. Your strength is never for fighting!”
The middle ground is always best: affirm and redirect.
We must love boys. We must talk to boys. We must sit with boys in their pain, their anger, their most astounding fantasies. It is a great mistake to wait for future girlfriends (or boyfriends) to do this work. It is every older man’s job, as best he can, wherever he can, to ask the gentle questions, to be patient in the face of impassivity, to bear witness, to be present, to be endlessly affirming and endlessly, gently, redirecting.
I think we will find Robert Aaron Long did not have such a man in his life, and eight people paid a terrible price.