STANLEY CROUCH Masculinity: A new definition is needed

In a time as dangerous as ours, it is crucial to see that so much of what is going on in our world has to do with the importance given to revenge. We see this throughout our popular media, which almost always connects "pure" masculinity to the supposed necessity of getting even. A punk is someone who does not see the importance of revenge, of letting the other side know that it is not going to get away with whatever the supposed injustice was.
A whole crew of avenging heroes began to appear in the late '60s and early '70s, and continue to appear today. We have had Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and now Vin Diesel.
Bad influence
I now think that these movies have had a bad influence on American youth and might well be one of the driving influences behind the hysteria in the Middle East.
If I am right, Hollywood should be held accountable for something it did not intend but may surely have done.
There's a logic to it. In a civilization, a criminal can hide behind flaws in the law and get away clean. Someone has to take the law into his own hands because these criminals have to be brought down.
Those heroes might be exciting fantasy figures to watch as they mow down the bad guys. And kids here and abroad -- young men especially, without maturity's filtering systems in place -- might take those heroes literally and measure themselves against them.
Unpardonable sin
We have seen disrespect raised to the level of unpardonable sin in Mafia movies. Those movies have unquestionably influenced the dumbest of the rappers and the most gullible of their fans. The result: So much violence among these young men stems from their reactions to the most trivial insults.
In 19th-century Louisiana, so many men had mutilating and slaughtering duels over nothing of consequence that duels were outlawed to keep a significant portion of the male populace from killing itself off. It seems that we have reached the same kind of a place.
We need a new definition of masculinity, not one that excludes a willingness to de*fend oneself against deadly threats, but one that recognizes a cold fact: Civilized societies do not always offer the immediate gratifications of punching, stabbing and shooting.
X Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.