Manhood in the Media

                 
By Mike Swift

Several years ago, one of my best friends, a fellow journalist, committed suicide. I couldn’t know at the time how his terrible decision would change the direction of my life. His death rocked me because, like his other friends, I had completely missed his depression. Charlie’s death loosened an avalanche of questions. The first: Why? For a journalist, the fact that there was no adequate answer to that question, or the others that tumbled out on its heels, launched me on a journey that I feel hasn’t yet concluded, one that would cause me to choose to take a year away from journalism at Stanford University, and that would ultimately help me find a fresh direction for my career.

Some months after Charlie’s death, I began to research suicide for a piece about his death in The Hartford Courant’s Sunday magazine, Northeast, and I discovered that I wasn’t just researching suicide, I was researching men. Eighty percent of suicides in the United States are boys and men, and in most countries, a wide majority of suicides are male – something that is true in ?Argentina, in Russia, in South Africa. What could it be, I wondered, that would cause such a striking similarity in cultures as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America? Was there something inherently male in our embrace of death? Given that 90 percent of people who take their lives are suffering from a diagnosable mental illness or a substance abuse problem, according to epidemiological data quoted by the National Institute of Mental Health, suicide represents a huge public health crisis that this country has essentially ignored – and continues to. This was what I had in mind when I applied to be a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, studying “Manhood and the Male Code: The Cost to Men.”

  
"I think I've been promoted," says the woman to her co-worker. This is one of the cartoons Swift studied from the Esquire, Father’s Day, 1950 issue.
When I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2005, I expected to find a wealth of resources at one of America’s great research universities. There was actually a gender studies institute, so of course there had to be many professors and graduate students studying the gender roles of men. But to my surprise, I spent much of the first quarter fruitlessly combing the campus in a vain search for an expert on masculinity. The closest I was able to find was a classics professor who studied the gender roles of men in ancient Greece – interesting, to be sure, but not really applicable to what I hoped to do. I doubt my experience would have been different at any other large American university, and that in itself is a telling fact. To a large degree in the U.S., “gender studies” is really about feminist studies. The idea of studying the masculine gender strikes many people as somehow wrong: Isn’t there a whole library full of books about the lives of men? Well, yes.
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Mike Swift was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford Univeristy from 2005-2006. He works for the San Jose Mercury News covering race and demographics, focusing on gender. Before the Mercury News, he was a staff writer at The Hartford Courant. Swift was awarded the New England Society of Newspaper Editors' Master Reporter Award. He also received the Charles Dudley Warner Award for top writer at the Courant. He graduated from Colby College with a bachelor's degree in English literature.