`` A One Hour Long Film Produced By Media Education Foundation And Directed By Sut Jhally, Tough Guise

We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity becomes this hard, small cage, and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves because they have to be, in Nigeria speak, ‘hard man’ (Adichie).

Holloway begins her essay by stating the traditional standards for both men and women, stating that “If we are honest with ourselves, we have long known that masculinity kills men” (1). She then defends her argument with a brief description of struggles the men go through with their health and mental health that are indirectly caused by masculinity. Holloway then dives into fields of scientific data to break down how the idea of masculinity is built into a child’s mind and how this process is damaging to the young boy’s mind. Holloway ends her essay by reentering her earlier idea that most of the problems that men face with their health and their mental health is caused indirectly by masculinity. However, this time she includes more detail and more scientific evidence to reinforce her idea. Holloway states “ We have set an unfair and unachievable standard, and in trying to live up to it, many men are slowly killing themselves. We have to move far beyond our outdated ideas of masculinity, and get past our

In Guyland, Michael Kimmel chronicles the journey of young males and the issues they face while trying to exert their masculinity and prove themselves to their peers. Based on interactions among North American males between the ages of 16 and 26, Kimmel has found that at an age where young men had previously prepped for a life of work and committed relationships, they are now living in “Guyland” where they spend their time drinking, playing video games, and having immature relations with women. Kimmel explains that these young men are “frighteningly dependent on peer culture” and “desperate to prove their masculinity in the eyes of other boys.” (30) These young men live in constant fear that they will not measure up to the ideals of

No matter what, we are almost always talking about violence masculinity in America. Whether we are talking about the horrifying, high-profile mass shooting we have seen over recent decades, the far greater rates of murder and gun violence we see on a day – to – day basis that barely register in the national news, or the epidemic of sexual violence and domestic violence, the vast majority of this violence is committed by men, young men, and boys (Jackson Katz, 2013). Throughout this essay the topics covered will be how culture defines masculinity, according to the film, violent masculinity as a cultural norm, agents of socialization that teach boys how to be men, the cool

“The Mask You Live In,” the 2015 documentary produced by Jennifer Siebel Newson was made to inform it’s audience which are boy and girls from aged 10 to adults that the social expectations which contemporary society sets upon males through popular culture, sports and media is very harmful. This message is not only important for the males who are negatievly impacted by the “man box” however it is harmful for everyone else in their lives as they are impacted directly. This film hopes to shed light to an issue that has been around since the militarization of civilizations when women became inferior to their male counterparts and patriarchy became the dominant approach to social norms. Through the film, we’re able to understand the term of the “manbox.” This term is societies’s rules for acting like a man; the mentality behaviours and restrictions that men and boys are socialy constructed to such as being strong, athletic, providing, aggressive and unemotional.

In the beginning of the film, the narrator Jackson Katz states that society that the idea of masculinity and being tough are synonymous. While explaining, he cut to a video of several young men being asked to define what it is to be “a real man”. The young men responded with such characteristic as: “ strong, independent, powerful, physical, intimidating, rugged, hard, and tough”. Their idea of being a man is looking and acting tough/mean at all times instead of showing any other form of true emotion. When in reality, those traits do not define what a real man is.

To understand either work’s take on hegemonic masculinity, it is important to identify masculinity as a gendered hegemony. In her definition of gender, Judith Halberstam notes that gender is socially systematized, performed, and reproduced in cultures, institutions, and individual identities (Burgett, Bruce, and Hendler, 116). In a like manner, in her article on gendered violence, Mimi Schippers notes R.W. Connell’s research on masculinity to expand this definition, implying that masculinity is central to gender relations. In short, Connell defined masculinity as “simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage… in gender, and the effects of these practices on bodily experience, personality, and culture” (Schippers, 86). Here, masculinity is classified as a social position, the set and practice

Gender roles often have disastrous consequences for people who struggle to fill their assigned stereotype. Last Wednesday, Carnegie Mellon had a special showing of a new film, The Mask You Live In, that focuses on how society’s narrow definition of masculinity can cause more harm than good.

David Fincher’s film, Fight Club (1999), puts the internal struggles for meaning that heterosexual white men experience within today’s society into motion. Charles Guignon examines the film’s violent and sexual factors as well as how they pose a meaningful appeal to violence, primarily, in the young men of our society. Moreover, the film “stirs up a fascination with violence that many of us may feel, an attraction to inflicting pain and experiencing pain ourselves (35).” Through concepts of absent fathers, consumerism and an aimless being, Fight Club platforms a provocative view on how men in modern society have lost their identity through emasculation and the extremely disturbing activities they combat in order to find it again. Fight Club asserts the path to finding one’s meaning is not simple and, in turn, develops into a despairing and inconclusive struggle. The excessive consumerism in the film signifies a sign of emotional emptiness. The film provides the viewer extensive knowledge on contemporary American society by raising important questions about the embraced values in that society. With the struggle for finding meaning and the prevalent masculine identity crisis manifested in Fight Club, why do some men’s daily lives fail to satisfy them in contemporary society? And correspondingly, how is the main character, Edward Norton, truly “nameless?”

The issue at the heart of the David Fincher film, Fight Club, is not that of man’s rebellion against a society of “men raised by women”. This is a film that outwardly exhibits itself as promoting the resurrection of the ‘ultra-male’, surreptitiously holding women accountable for the decay of manhood. However, the underlying truth of the film is not of resisting the force of destruction that is ‘woman’, or of resisting the corruption of manhood at her hand, but of penetrating the apathy needed to survive in an environment ruled by commercial desire, not need. In reality, Fight Club is a careful examination, through parody, of what it means to be a man; carefully examining the role of women in a society busy rushing towards sexual

We know from Holt & Thompson’s writing that men consume their particular brand of masculinity, and this “loveable loser anti-hero” is no exception. Korobov’s approach to understanding emerging masculinities through discursive analysis is fascinating -- although observing actual human behaviour can be considered far more accurate, the ways in which we speak about things have a certain creative power. The things that we say off the cuff are often an accurate reflection of the culture we live in. In Korobov’s study, he explained that he did his best to create an environment where young men’s discourse could emerge naturally, but we know intuitively that such an attempt is fraught with many difficulties which can include observer bias, impression management, and

The Mask You Live In is a 2015 American documentary film that covers the topic of hyper masculinity in American society and its effects on the development of boys in this country. The primary argument that this film makes is that it is highly unrealistic for men to live up to the standard of hyper masculinity that our society as created and forced upon them. In fact, the film makes the argument that men who try to live up to these standards are setting themselves up for failure because many of them fall in to deep depression as they fail to measure up to society’s skewed idea of masculinity. This film uses various interviews from many different individuals including a single father, victims of abuse, and teachers in order to support the overall claim that it is trying to make along with going into some of the effects that hypermasculinity has on boys as they grow up. Overall, I feel that this film does a fantastic job of communicating both the dangers of trying to live up to a frankly outdated model of masculinity as well as showing how unrealistic this standard of masculinity is in modern society.

Masculinity, a seemingly simple concept. Yet, when examined more closely, it is clear that masculinity is constantly changing in its definition as well as in its most basic essence. Throughout the years, one can see this evolution firsthand by looking back at the men who have been portrayed in popular media in the United States of America. From the suave Don Draper types of the 1950s to the more casual, educated, and easygoing men- with perfectly chiseled abs, of course- that are portrayed in media today, the difference is clear. This drastic, yet unsurprising, shift in ideals, as well as the exponential increase of media consumed every day, has led to a change in how “masculinity” is perceived, as well as how it is enforced by society in the modern day. Alarmingly, this trend has led to the birth of so-called “toxic masculinity”, a bastardization of the original ideas behind masculinity which has created an enormous, detrimental effect on society as a whole. As defined in the article The Difference Between Toxic Masculinity and Being a Man, toxic masculinity is “manhood as defined by violence, sex, status, and aggression. It’s the cultural ideal of manliness, where strength is everything… where sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured,” (O’Malley) This is a clearly displayed truth, and it’s astounding to see how even from a young age boys are taught not to show emotions other than anger, conditioned to believe that being “like a girl” is the worst possible

Strong, Independent, Intimidating, Powerful, Strong, Independent, In control, Rugged, Scares people, Powerful, Respected, Hard, A stud, Athletic, Muscular, A real man is tough, Tough, Tough” These are the responses of young men when they were asked what they believed what being a man was in the movie Tough Guise. This is a movie by Jackson Katz who is an anti-violence educator. The media that is taken in by the young men in our society is a very violent one. The men in most movies are portrayed as violent, tough, powerful, and criminals. The roles played by these men create an image for these young men making it seem ideal to be like them. The media influences the men and makes them have the negative portrayal of what a man is supposed to be. Masculinity reaches many people by influence through others.

In recent years, masculinity has been said to be in crisis. This situation entails that men are the new disadvantaged, with mental health issues and suicide rates of men increasing while those of women are decreasing, and are becoming increasingly unable to cope with life in general as shown by CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) (Telegraph Men 2014). Wiegman (2013, p. 32) supports this point, suggesting that through the lens of Hollywood and academics, masculinity has been “newly marked and newly in crisis”, and argues that masculinity in crisis is caused by both social movements and the forced sustainment of nationalist manhood. The former point can be said to be feminism with second wave feminism in particular (Horrocks 1994a) and the latter can be said to prove that masculinity in crisis is a paradox (Horrocks 1994b, p. 25) With this context in mind, this essay will briefly outline the distinctions between gender and sexuality using cathexis, analyse and discuss a newspaper article by the Telegraph, argue that masculinity in crisis is a paradox that is caused by discourses in masculinity such as the hierarchy of hegemonic, marginalised and subordinated masculinities as shown in Connell’s hegemonic masculinity model and the tensions that arise as a result.