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Analysis Of Tough Guise 2: Manhood & American Culture

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One day I was visiting with my cousins for an afternoon, a boy who at the time was about 6 or 7 and a girl around 9. They were playing together with some toys, as most kids do. But then something occured that perplexed me. The young boy went over and grabbed a doll to play with and almost instantly the girl told him that those where girl toys and he couldn’t play with them. I sat there for a second thinking the same as my cousin, “He doesn’t understand that those aren’t boy toys.” But, then I started wondering what made it unacceptable for him to play with a doll? Everyone was so fast to push him back to his macho GI Joe’s with their bulging muscles and unrealistically large guns, but why? At an early age was he already learning that he had …show more content…

Other than leading to a violent lash out, men acting this way may face other issues. If they feel unfree to show emotion, compassion, or vulnerability (all generally associated with femininity) this could really impact their own human nature. All of these traits, although seeming feminine are necessary things to make up a good person. According to Jackson Katz in his documentary Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood & American Culture, “Qualities like compassion, caring, empathy, intellectual curiosity, fear, vulnerability, even love – basic human qualities that boys have inside them every bit as much as girls do – get methodically driven out of them by a sexist and homophobic culture that labels these things unmanly, feminine, womanly, and gay, and teaches boys to avoid them at all costs.” If these characteristics are things that men have, and make them a better person, why is it so merely reinforced by society that men shouldn’t have the qualities? If a guy is blocking these out because they’re not manly, there could be some serious repercussions. These characteristics that are generally associated with women are made fun of in men and they often feel their masculinity is becoming threatened. Due to this men may suppress certain emotional issues, especially around other men. An example of this is shown in the book Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are by Brooke Kroeger. In chapter one, Not Some Social Agenda Struggle, Kroeger tells the story of David Matthews, a young man who is caught between two races as he struggles to find his identity. David was raised in a single parent household with his father raising him. He brings up how he and his dad rarely talked about his mother or anything emotional saying, “We were just tough guys and it just didn’t seem like the kind of touchy-feely stuff I needed to know”. Here David shows that he and his dad both feel they are too tough to talk about touchy issues that he

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