The Effects Of Masculinity

In the United States, there are many problems that stem from one seemingly small problem; masculinity. In our country, and many others, men are expected to behave a certain way or they are considered invalid to their gender. The reason masculinity is toxic is because it leads to higher levels of violence and sexual assault. As a society, we need to redefine what masculinity means and how we can change it so it will be a positive thing in our country opposed to a negative thing. Michael Kimmel is a renowned sociologist who is knowledgeable in gender studies. In his video, “Boys Will Be Boys: Deconstructing Masculinity and Manhood at Dartmouth”, he talks about how gender has become an issue because women have made it an issue. Men never looked

They had a portion where they interviewed men and asked them what masculinity meant to them. They all responded with traits like tough, strong, independent, and respected. While those are good traits to have, it begs the question about how we treat men who don’t have these traits. Not every man is tough or muscular. When they aren’t either of those, they tend to be regarded as gay or interested in academics. What we see is that there is no middle ground for men. They are either tough and masculine or weak and gay. In our society, we don’t let men be weak. In the same video, a girl was interviewed about her guy friends. She said they would all put up a front about being strong and not caring what anyone thought of them, but in private, they would express their fears about their relationships or any problem. It makes me wonder how ingrained is this in our society. I read a story about a group of gorillas where all the males, who were aggressive and fought with each other, caught a disease, and died. The female gorillas all lived and went on to raise their young by themselves. Interestingly enough, all the male gorillas grew up to be non-aggressive and would sit around with each other. Obviously, this would never happen to humans, but if it did, how would our sons be raised? Would we have less violence and less sexual assault if there were only women raising their sons? In our book, we looked at the male sex-role identity paradigm. Two of the paradigms are that mothers make their boys masculine because men dislike their mothers for punishing them for femininity and the other is that mothers make their boys feminine because they are always around and men find this overwhelming and so they in turn try to control women. So, if all the fathers were to contract a disease, would the boys still grow up to be aggressive or would they become more