Like wallpaper, violence has become an unfortunate backdrop to contemporary life. But its drone cannot be completely ignored. I went to Charleston, South Carolina, to view the eclipse last summer, enjoying my first visit to a lovely town with a rich history, and stayed just around the corner from the Emanuel AME Church. Each time I walked past this historic place of worship, my mind involuntarily conjured images of Dylann Roof climbing its stairs and entering its open doors to sit, smiling wanly at the welcoming congregants, biding his time.

Why are men—young men with their whole life before them—so pulled toward violence? In The New York Times, the comedian Michael Ian Black pondered the connection between such flare-ups of male violence and how boys are being “left behind … trapped in the same suffocating, outdated model of masculinity.” Feeling desperate and frustrated, males have “only two choices: withdrawal or rage,” he wrote.

Boys’ relationship with violence begins as early as childhood. The Stanford scholar Judy Chu, whose work has focused on males’ psychosocial development, conducted a study in which she embedded with a small group of 4-year-old boys from largely middle-class families at a co-ed independent school outside Boston, interviewing and observing them for two years.* In a 2014 book based on the study, When Boys Become Boys, Chu wrote that when she first encountered the students, she “didn’t know what to make of the boys’ rowdy, rambunctious, and seemingly aggressive behavior.”** One boy mimicked a gun with his hand and pretended to shoot her when she looked at him. She turned her eyes away, unsure how to respond.

Chu realized that her initial reaction to the boy’s aggressive play might create a barrier to his connecting with her, and she tried to relax and “enter” his world. Shortly after the first incident, as she was reading to another child in the corner of the classroom, the boy shooter approached her and again aimed and pulled the trigger on her. This time, in an effort to engage with him, Chu responded “by smiling and shooting back at him.” But the boy corrected her: When he shoots her, she is supposed to fall dead.

In the first year of her study, the boys proved to be nimble in their relationships: attentive, authentic, direct, empathic. But by the second year, Chu had witnessed how each had realized in his own way that performing conventional types of masculinity was now the only way to satisfy the “hidden” requirement to fit himself into societal norms. The boys asserted these manly bona fides by favoring toys stereotypically designed for males, carefully distancing themselves from girls in their play and dress, and adopting attitudes of toughness and stoicism. The same boys who would sit in Chu’s lap with carefree abandon would also try out tough-guy personas and gang up on others.*** By age 6, these changes in their public behavior, which Chu regarded as examples of “resistance for survival,” had the effect of masking their authentic selves from the world.