INTRO

Hockey is a sport for the cultural man, because it’s a stage for men to show off their dominance, strength, aggressiveness and competitiveness so they can show everyone who the strongest is.

The cultural man is defined as strong, dominant, tough, aggressive, physical, competitive and forceful which are all adjectives that that describes what hockey fans think you need as a hockey player. Things that you need to be able to do as a man: takes action, protects women and children, gets the job done, takes risks (Kilmartin, Defining Men’s studies). Also, physical risk-taking is one of the negative aspects of today’s masculinity (Kilmartin, Men at Work: Jobs, Careers, and Masculinity). Nick Kypreos said in “The Code”, the hockey documentary that, he himself dropped his gloves and fought just to show that he still a tough guy and physical force. Also, they say in the documentary that teams use this method in order intimidate other teams and win games.

“There is a deep tension between intimacy and masculinity. He wants both, and each seems to be purchased at the price of the other”’ (Kilmartin, No man is an Island: Men in relationships). This causes them to not be open about certain things in their life, such as the negative suicidal thoughts that hockey players feel due to the fighting and concussions on the ice like the hockey player Todd Ewen or Wade Belak. This is why men should feel more open about their feelings and share it with others so their close ones can help. Moreover, “[…] he may find it very difficult to “flip the switch” that turns on all of  the emotional and relationship attitudes that he has suppressed all day at work” (Kilmartin, Masculinity). In other words, at work, which in this case is ice hockey, they contain all their emotions and act like another person so, when arrived at home, they find it not only physically challenging to spend some quality time with their family, but also mentally challenging because they know they spent the whole day being aggressive on the ice with other players. This was something that some players wholeheartedly hated doing just like Todd Ewen who told his wife that.

The code in hockey is similar to the bro code that young adult boys respect nowadays. It’s a “principle” that basically states that you put your boy friends before girls as a guy or a man. In hockey, it states things like don’t body check with your stick or to take off your helmet when fighting another hockey player to protect his hands. “What it means to be a man varies in different institutional contexts, and those different institutional contexts demand and produce different forms of masculinity”.  This means that just like the bro code, the hockey code is also an institution that forces some of these men to participate and practice this code, meaning that they feel obliged to fight because everyone else is doing it and telling them to do so. “Boys may be boys, […] but they express that identity differently in fraternity parties than in job interviews with a female manager” (Kilmartin, Masculinity). This also means that similar to movies, they show how the man respects the bro code when they are with their girlfriend and they just leave her even if they didn’t want to because his “boys” are here even though he would prefer to stay with her. It’s almost as they flip a switch that transforms how they act. I for one have seen this happen with one of my friends whenever we arrived as a group and saw him with his girlfriend at school for example. Not often of course, because we’re the type of friends that leave couples in the friend group some space.

CONCLUSION

All things considered, these hockey players are no different from other “average” men who suffer from emotional suppression, respecting the cultural man norms, and feeling like they have no one to go and develop some suicidal thoughts. This means that despite the fact that these hockey players are around other people such as their teammates and coach, they can still feel lonely, unlike office workers, for example, who spend the big majority of their time only working with numbers on paperwork in front of a computer and not actually talking to anyone.  

Works Cited

Kilmartin, Christopher. “Defining Men’s studies.” (n.d.): 1-7.

—. “Masculinity.” (n.d.): 1-5.

—. “Men at Work: Jobs, Careers, and Masculinity.” (n.d.): 221-235.

—. “No man is an Island: Men in relationships.” (n.d.): 161-171.

 Listening to Jay Marquis-Manicom talk about his thesis entitled “From the Red Pill to ‘White Genocide’: An Ethnography of the Alt-Right in Montreal.” was pretty interesting and he brought up many important topics that needs to be discussed a lot more in today’s day and age. To find concrete material for his thesis, he “hung out” with a couple of people who believe that while male supremacy is their ideal society. Also known as the Alt-Right.

During his presentation he explains one of the four key concepts that the Alt-Right follow: their philosophy. He basically stated that these men do not know how to be men and are anti-feminists. Like in “Defining Men’s Studies”, these people are described as individuals who submit to society’s definition of a man being that you have to “dominate”. From the Alt-Right’s perspective, they basically join dominance and anti-femininity to describe their Utopian or ideal society. Furthermore, these men only correspond through this white male supremacy movement and do not connect on an emotional level. Just like Kilmartin said, some friendships are activity based and provide no real growth relationship-wise like how an emotional-based one does because they reveal their true feelings, but creating that kind of relationship between these men is going to be impossible if they keep seeing that showing emotion is a sign of weakness and not “stoicism”.

Another strong point that Jay Marquis-Manicom is how they are mostly composed of millennial men and that they are the “techy” generation meaning that they were good with technology. Most millennial men are regarded, as kids, as people who stay behind their computer playing with other people online and talking to people online, who are a lot of the time only males, and not face-to-face. This reminds me of the part in “Defining Men’s Studies” where they talk about how some people talk to their peers side-by-side and not face-to-face” because they feel more comfortable that way. And that millennial behavior is very similar because they don’t meet in person and they are activity-based relationships most of the time. Moreover, since the demographic of the Alt-Right being all male also reminds me that Kilmartin mentions that, at a very young age, you start spending more time with the same sex rather than the opposite. Since males grow up with the idea made by society that a man should be dominant and show no emotion and that females are basically the opposite, they aren’t afraid to show their feelings, it might explain why they develop these anti-feminine ideas and why women have an upper-hand when it comes to communication.

Another good point was when he mentions that people join because they are lonely and are searching for their “identity”. From my perspective, I’m just guessing that these men are just looking for someone to talk to, but are scared to talk to open up, so they look for people in the search of the same thing but in the end they’re just fed with these dangerous ideologies.

My male friend says he is close to his male best friend due to the fact that they’ve known each other for quite some time, that they share the same interests and that they’re open to telling their secrets to each other. For things they like to do together, he said that they like to converse a lot. Not just about their activities, but also about their feelings. When they converse, they also relate to the gender norm where men are competitive with each other, but they also have a bit of intimacy in their conversations. Moreover, he has told him before how he’s felt about him. He told him how his friend is like a brother to him and his friend replied the same thing.

After interviewing my friend about his relationship with his best friend I realized that he is a mix of what defines male-to-male and female-to-female relationships. Firstly, because they are friends who like to be competitive, like betting on something or arguing about a silly matter which is very common in male groups, but they also like to get somewhat intimate and talk about their feelings and problems. They also hug each other when they greet each other. Secondly, they’ve told each other what they mean to each other, which show how emotionally open they are to each other, but when they converse, they speak “side to side” and not “face to face” (p.169) because he told me that he feels somewhat uncomfortable or more vulnerable when speaking face to face with his male friends, but with women, he is not as uncomfortable.

Overall, they share an intimate friendship both physically and emotionally. They share a level of intimacy in which they can share personal things to each other and not be scared to. These things describe how to build relationships and how growing relationships should be. They both do male-bonding and answer each other’s intimate/emotional needs (p.169).

What Michael Kimmel means by “Institutions accomplish the creation of gender difference and the reproduction of gender order through several gendered processes.” is that our society is separated into genders such as men, women and other genders which then creates a gender hierarchy which then gives birth to a gendered system in the society meaning that some processes, such as some teaching/education or jobs, are going be based off of or aimed at one main gender. Moreover, women are disadvantaged when it comes to finishing their studies at an early age compared to men because they have certain responsibilities such as taking care children after labor while the men provide for the family. This shows how women have less time to “live” their lives than men do.

One way this can relate to the “Man Enough” episode is through the different definitions or characteristics that society nowadays ties into masculinity, because nowadays basically we define men as the opposite of women and as people who dominate. Men are defined as the dominant gender of society, as superior to women and other genders which form the gender hierarchy. Moreover, an example of a gendered process that young boys go through is when making friends: they avoid making friends with girls because of the code that “boys and girls can’t be friends”.

Kimmel uses plural “masculinities” because there isn’t only one definition of masculinity. It differs in each culture or country. For example, what it means to be a man as an Italian doesn’t exactly mean the same as being a man in America. The term masculinity and its definitions in the episode is brought up a lot. They say to be a man today is to be strong, to not show emotion or to avoid anything feminine. That to be a man is to be sexually dominant, that you can’t just be “friends” with a girl. In the their discussion they say that all these definitions are what oppresses men and causes them to be less open about their emotions which then causes them to feel alone and helpless, because they feel like they would be judged and seen as weak by society.

One aspect that caught my attention was when they addressed the fact that when coaches try to motivate or strengthen their players’ mental when they’re not performing so well that they would say, for example, “stop being a pussy and man up” or “you throw like a girl”. This caught my attention, because it was pretty much true. It wasn’t something that was new to me. And when they started to explain that these were insults that were demeaning to women, I started to realize that too, that they were giving them the idea that acting like a girl is bad, that being emotional and sensitive is bad which could lead them to isolation in their toughest moments because they don’t want to show emotion or what their coaches would call “weakness”. That could lead them to thinking that they can’t reach out to anybody whenever they’re dealing with something.

Another aspect of the video that caught my attention was when parenting was addressed. I never really questioned modern day parenting where girls were raised in a pink room with dolls and boys were raised in a blue room with toy cars, but now I see that all of that is to shape how the boy and the girl should act and be like. I agree with the experts that say that we shouldn’t impose anything to young kids at such a young age. For example(for boys), that pink is for girls or that crying is for girls only, because that is nonsense that is being carved into their thinking and will stick as they grow up. This is one of the reasons that boys tend to bottle up their emotions.

In p.82, the part where Gomez starts to talk about how society’s definition of masculinity is to be strong, stoic, brave or powerful was clearer to me after having watched the documentary. I now understand what he meant when he says that by oppressing women and gays, ultimately, we’re also oppressing ourselves, because it’s true that most men these days try avoiding doing even the simplest way of showing affection to other men which is a hug and now I understand more why that is.

Kobe Bryant was a professional American basketball player in the Nation Basketball Association (NBA). He won 4 consecutive state championships in high school and directly got drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers soon after. As an NBA player he has won 5 NBA championships, has made 18 appearances in All-Star games out of his 20 years in the NBA. He was the first NBA player to have played at least 20 seasons. He also got the title “Most Valuable Player” in 2008.

To me, he is an inspirational player because he is a hard worker. He has achieved great things in his long career due the efforts he has given for the game he loves. His focus and hunger for victory are very well known among most NBA players and fans and that is one of the biggest reasons that most people and I find him inspiring. He has many practice session stories where he is the first on the court and last to leave it. Also, despite the amount of injuries he has suffered, he kept coming back strong to play and win the game. And that is why some consider him the Greatest Of All Time. Thinking of him, his work ethic, his drive and passion for the game inspires me to put effort towards my own goals and to work harder.

To summarize, my definition of an inspiring person is someone who is strong, passionate, driven and hardworking.