Teaching boys what it really means to be a man

Benson Saulo (hat) and friend Hunter Johnson. He started a new educational session that reframed what it means to be masculine. Teaching agains violence and macho/ego identities. Pic Simon Schluter 22 May 2015.

An interesting article about teaching teenagers to be better men.  What really disturbed me was the terrifying data about how many young men die via suicide.

Benson Saulo recalls the day his best friend wound up behind bars.

Drunk on a night out in Sydney's CBD, his friend got into a fight with a bouncer. Before long, the towering former rugby player broke the bouncer's neck, rendering him disabled for life.

"I asked him why he did it when he got out, and he said he felt he had no choice. All his life he was never able to back away, he never learnt how to step back and assess a situation," Mr Saulo said.

Many of Mr Saulo's friends from home, a rough part of Tamworth in New South Wales, endured what he described as a damaging cycle. They learnt early their value was measured by toughness. Starved of basic tools to put emotions into words, they resorted to rugby, violence and women, to find expression.

Mr Saulo said a mission to lower the rates of male suicide - the biggest killer of men under 25 - and to end domestic violence, was driving their initiative.

• Men are three and a half times more likely to kill themselves than women.
• Suicide accounts for one fifth of all male deaths between 15 and 34.  And that excludes many single-driver car accidents which experts suspect are hidden suicides
• Some other top five causes of deaths among 15-24 year olds: land transport accidents (i.e., macho driving, hidden suicides) and assault (too macho to back off).

Our hyper-masculine maleness is extraordinarily dangerous and damaging. But we homos always knew that, right?