Masculinity

So the last couple of days we have watched videos in class about masculinity, or a least what men in America think masculinity is. These videos say that men think violence, not talking about feelings, treating women like objects and many other negative actions and thoughts represent masculinity. They blame these misconceptions of masculinity on the evil media. Movies, TV shows, ads, and music, especially those rappers, are making men terrible people. I cannot see where some of these ideas come from.

In the film, Tough Guise, the man talking throughout the film as obvious problems with how the media portray men. He brings up an example about action heroes through out recent history. From James Bond to Rambo. He talks about the size of their guns and how they increase. He also criticizes the violence in movies such as Rambo, the movie about a man on revenge in Vietnam. I would just want to ask the critic, What should Rambo do? This ACTION movie about WAR should not be violent and Sylvester Stallone is too ripped. His body gives false messages to men that they need to be strong and violent. I agree, being strong and violent in war is no good. Instead i think we need to remake Rambo. We keep the same setting, but instead of uberjacked Stallone, we get David Spade and instead of a gun, we will just have Rambo talk it out. Jokes aside. It is a movie! It's for entertainment, how can not only a person but a whole culture take a movie an say it is what makes them a man?

Even if these films and shows make men think they need violence to be a man, these men in the movies rarely harm women, children or the innocent. Tough Guise showed clips from the film Raging Bull, a classic about boxer Joe LaMotta. In the film Joe beats his wife, it's a horrifying and powerful scene where you see the how screwed up LaMotta was. But this is based on real life... What should the director do? Make Joe a nice loving husband when in reality he was a cheating, wife beater? No. and he is not glorified in this film. He dies a criminal, low life, with no family or friends. No one walked away from that movie saying, "I wanna be like Joe!" Tough Guise, in my opinion, took many scenes of films out of context.

We also watched a short piece on Disney. This was a very biased film that did not hide from its disdain from the company. Now while I agree with all things the film had to say about Disney's portrayal of women in their movies, I noticed their weaker argument for their portrayal of men. The claim was that Disney pushed the male character as a dominant, strong, fearless individual who is the superior o women. I do think that Disney makes the female character weaker and dependent, which is wrong and terrible for young girls to look up to. But the film's main character to prove all these qualities? Gaston. The vilain of Beauty and the Beast. Unlike the female characters who are the heroes toward young girls, the male characters that influence masculinity are the villains? That doesn't make sense. When I watched The Beauty and the Beast, Gaston has all these qualities of big and strong and arrogant, but he is the bad guy. I don't look up to him. I look up to the beast. He gets the princess, he is kind and caring. He is the hero the idol for young boys. Another criticism of Disney was how the hero needed to be physically strong. The film's example, Hercules. The half god half man who, in Greek mythology, is the strongest man to ever walk the Earth. So Hercules should have been a scrawny weakling to better suit reality. Once again these films are fantasies and in the end parents should dictate what "normal" is.

A father should teach his son what a real man is. Real men can still be tough but the definition of tough needs to be more clear. Tough doesn't mean using violence whenever possible. Women, children, the innocent, should never have violence used against them. So when I hear about two boys in high school shooting up a school full of innocent boys and girls, and then the "experts" like Jackson Katz saying it is because of the culture in our media. I don't understand where that logic comes from. Sure there is violence in media and the heroes of our movies par take in violence, but where is the movie glorifying the psycho who kills his classmates, or rapes a woman, or beats his girlfriend? There aren't any, if anything it is the opposite. The bad guys of our movies commit those acts. I think it's time to stop blaming the media for every bad thing in our world and culture and start looking at the parents who raise these "men" and what we need to change about how we nurture and raise our children.