Expressing feelings and crying is not strange for a woman to do in society as it is for a man. Society has created a scale of masculinity where being inhuman in lacking emotions is what makes a man more of a man. Society’s everyday structure has led to a cruel prescription to the gender roles of men involving the suppression of emotions which causes men to grow up to don a mask of invulnerability, hurting themselves mentally and making them lack a connection with the people around them. The suppression of emotions in the lives of men has become a norm. Through phrases like “don’t be a wuss,” “suck it up”, and “men don’t cry,” it has become something so normal for men to be limited in expressing the emotions and feelings that humans are designed …show more content…
In the documentary “The Mask You Live In,” Tony Porter, an educator and anti-violence advocate states, “From a young age we were taught not to express our emotions.” Parents, teachers, and pop culture have pressured males to not be emotional, believing that showing vulnerability is not masculine. Boys remain quiet about their feelings that later leads to wide-ranging consequences. The film notes that only about 30% of boys that are bullied ever notify anyone. The consequence of holding back these emotions can lead to “repressed emotions bursting in violent ways.” The documentary helps support the idea that this is damaging to men through the scene of an afterschool discussion on masculinity where male high school students are told to write what they think other people see about them on the front of a mask and then write what people don’t see about them. In the front, many wrote positive adjectives such as “funny, goofy, strong,” while the back of the mask said otherwise with responses like “fear and anger.” This comes to show that males are suffering while trying to maintain the figure that society sees as
In the article “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt,” by Jean Killbourne, she discusses the culture of male superiority over females. With the rise of feminism and exposure to media being at an all-time high, the two topics seem to be overlapping more and more. Daily, society is flooded with sexist, violent, and inappropriate ads and messages that usually degrade women and praise men. This is an issue which only recently gained traction while the “feminist” movement increased in popularity. Women are wrongly objectified for the sake of tradition and a male-driven agenda. This thought has been held on for far too long.
The movie, Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity produced by Jackson Katz and Jeremy Earp, deconstructs the concepts that create the social constructs of masculinity. Masculinity, a set of behaviors, roles, and attributes correlating to men, is earned, not given (Conley 190). Starting from television shows to children’s toys, the idea of masculinity has infiltrated their minds starting at a young age. Moreover, the concept of masculinity has physical attributes, such as muscles, a deep voice, and be able to protect themselves. Masculinity, for boys of any races, socioeconomic classes, or ethnicity, has grown up with the same stereotypical image of what a man should entail. Since many media outlets show that a form of masculinity
In the essay, “The High Cost of Manliness,” writer Robert Jensen discusses the harmful effects of having male specific characteristics, such as masculinity. Jensen realizes that men’s actions and ways of living are judged based upon the characteristic of being manly. He argues that there is no valid reason to have characteristics associated with being male. Society has created the notion that masculinity is the characteristic that defines males as males.
As these images become more visible, men are more likely to feel comfortable about the idea of men revealing their emotions. While there is not an equal number of men secure with expressing their emotions as women, there is a much higher instance than in previous
The sex of a person separates and determines the ability for the person to show emotions. Under no circumstance will a man be seen crying over a movie on their friends arm. Although, woman could cry and sob all she wants because she is a women. Both men and women should have the opportunity to share emotions freely because it is natural to feel pain. For instance, a two year old boy will cry when he gets a cut because he is expressing pain through his actions. The boy will be judged for crying by the parents or anyone around him. Now, picture a girl in the similar situation, the parents would have rush to comfort her. Women are stereotyped as weak and this is where men come in action to protect the women. Generations have taught children that women should serve the men and be the ones that clean the house. Although, there are some exceptions to this idea. Women who are single mothers should be able to work and maintain a job just as men. Also, men could be able to clean and cook for their families without being judged by others. Finally, gender roles in a society should not determine a person ability to maintain emotions or
William Pollack, PhD, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, uses his clinical practice to observe a national crisis, a “gender strait-jacketing” of boys (62). Pollack chooses Adam, a fourteen-year old boy who is being bullied and once a good student, as his patient and example of how boys often feel compelled to wear masks to hide their true feelings and thoughts. He does not know how to ask help, even to his mother; in result, his academic performance is left behind because of his inside struggles. Pollack deduces that boys’ self-esteem as learner is far more fragile than of most girls which boys are afraid to sit in front of row or be active in class because they do not want to be called as a nerd, dork, or something like that (65). Recent research indicates...
George Orwell quotes, “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” The documentary, “The Mask You Live In”, directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, shows different ages of males who struggle to be themselves while battling America’s limited meaning of manliness. George Orwell quotes, “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” Influenced by the media, among their age group, and the grown-ups in their lives, adolescents dissociate their emotions, disrespect women, and are aggressive. Society gender stereotypes affect young males to change to fit into the societal norm as they characterize “real” men.
Rachel Simmons was amazed there were so many books regarding aggression in boys, but was unable to find any books on the subject of girls’ aggression. The experiments that were conducted regarding aggression were also only performed using males. Many psychologists considered aggression to be behavior such as hitting, punching, name calling and threatening others as a male issue. Simmons discovered from the many interviews she conducted on women that aggression is just as much a female issue. In her book, “The Odd Girl Out: The hidden culture of aggression in girls”, Simmons interviews many women and girls who were victims of bullying, were the actual bully, and also people who witnessed the abuse. Simmons’ purpose for writing this book was to make everyone aware of the secretive way girls bully each other, and to show how they hide their aggression, which many times is the result of their own struggle for acceptance. This book was effective because Simmons also gives the reader suggestions to help everyone involved in some form of aggressive behavior know how to deal with this behavior, and the lifelong consequences it has on everyone involved.
Holding back tears takes a lot out of any persons’ emotions. University of Manchester’s Billie Andrews reveals that the constant force for a boy to be emotionally repressed, hiding any emotions that negatively impact the boy, eventually leads to boys keeping events of sexual abuse to themselves (“Boys Don’t Cry”). After being consistently told to be “tough”, boys tend to ignore the magnitude of how much danger they are in for the sake of “being a man”. For example, the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center of the University of Michigan provides statistics on male sexual assault encounters; roughly 16% of males have reported sexual assault according to the US Centers for Disease control in 2005 however, there are estimations that declare males report sexual assault even less than females (. A contributing factor to males not reporting sexual assault is because it is hard for society to believe males can be victim to assault because males are always “tough”. Masculinity implies that a male should repress any negative emotions and being a victim is a negative emotion. The fact that the idea of masculinity is so powerful it can force a boy to hide events of sexual assault spells that the male gender role is in need of attention; regardless of gender, sexual assault victimizes
“Be a man”, is on of the most destructive phrases to tell boys and men. The Mask You Live In explains the struggles boys and men have growing up in a patriarchal society. I chose to watch this to understand how men feel oppressed. All year, I became aware of females and their struggles in the patriarchy. It is interesting to see that men are affected too. The documentary should have had more personal stories because it allows the audience to connect with and have empathy for men. On the other hand, the movie thoroughly demonstrated the inner conflict boys and men face in society. Men feel they must be strong and dominate. They feel they need to hide emotion and empathy in order to fit in. They must be manly in order to
If a man possesses the masculinity that society claims he should have, he may still experience many emotional issues within himself. After a man has been taught that domination is the key, they may develop a sense of aggression. Aggression may also follow the fact they men hold all of their feelings into to protect themselves from the schemas. Men have been seen to use violence in their past to solve their issues. In the documentary, one of the prisoners in the group session spoke about how he was in jail because all of his emotions that had been bottled up become uncontrollable in one instance. If a boy or a man does not contain the masculinity expected, he may become bullied and out-casted. The continuation of discrimination toward a boy may cause suicidal thoughts. On top of being bullied for not being a powerful man, he may still be trying to hold in his emotions to prove that he
The documentary film Bully (2011) – directed by Lee Hirsh – takes the viewer into the lives of five families that live in various, predominantly remote, towns across the United States. All families presented have been affected by bullying, either because their child was at the time being bullied by peers at school or the child committed suicide due to continuous bullying. The film also profiles an assistant principle, Kim Lockwood, whose indiscreetness makes the viewer...
The Bro Code: How Contemporary Culture Creates Sexist Men. Dir. Thomas Keith. Media Education Foundation, 2011.
Men feel pressure to fit in the category of what society describes as a man. They have the responsibility to be first in everything. Showing emotions should not be a part of men life. Men need to focus on their role to be the strong sex. Crying its weakness and its only meant for women. The other day I overheard my daughter’s grandmother asking her grandson why he was crying, she told him that he should not be crying for everything because that is only for girls and that he needed to learn that boys don’t cry. This action really pissed me off, how she dare to tell the little boy who is only 8, that he is not suppose to show how he feels because he is a boy. This is how society put in our mind since we are little the way we are suppose to act. I couldn’t agree more with Carlos Andres Gomez that states in his essay Confronting the Superhero Myth, “we need men who are striving to grow and learn and ask questions and risk being wrong and be humble and be better today than they were yesterday”. Indeed, we need men that are equal to women and that don’t feel less because of it, and this includes how they feel. There is nothing wrong with crying or showing your emotions. Being able to express yourself only shows how strong you
On a daily basis people are exposed to some sort of misrepresentation of gender; in the things individuals watch, and often the things that are purchased. Women are often the main target of this misrepresentation. “Women still experience actual prejudice and discrimination in terms of unequal treatment, unequal pay, and unequal value in real life, then so too do these themes continue to occur in media portraits.”(Byerly, Carolyn, Ross 35) The media has become so perverted, in especially the way it represents women, that a females can be handled and controlled by men, the individual man may not personally feel this way, but that is how men are characterized in American media. Some may say it doesn’t matter because media isn’t real life, but people are influenced by everything around them, surroundings that are part of daily routine start to change an individual’s perspective.