Nowadays, our society is surrounded by fights, violence, and intimidation. It is current to see more boys having those types of behaviours than girls. Men act in such a way, even though they are not good with it, because of their surroundings and the way society raised them. In this blog, the way society thinks, supports, and teaches men that success is important will be tackled, explaining where those kinds of behaviours are from and their effects on their lives.

First, society really does banalize fights. We think that because they are boys it is fine if they fight. We see fights as being a part of what a boy is supposed to be. “Masculinity is characterized by a willingness to take (physical) risks and become violent if necessary”¹ Therefore, society goes with the mentality of “boys will be boys” and that fighting with each other is part of their development. School even goes till hiding how many fights happened in their institutions because for them, it is not an important enough problem, and they don’t want to deal with it. Even more, if boys refuse to fight, people won’t see them as real men, but rather as wimps who are scared to fight. Also, in other platforms such as hockey, people don’t consider hockey as a real sport if there is no fighting. Fights certainly do bring a feeling of manhood² to the one who watches but also to the one who plays. Taking away fights will probably create a decrease in the number of people who watch it, thus, the incomes will decrease as well. Since people live for money, fights won’t be taken away from the NHL. In brief, since we expect boys to fight, we teach them that it is allowed, and it continues to be inhaled in our lifestyle and as they get older, they like being entertained by it too.

To continue, men don’t have access to a lot of moral support. Throughout their lives, men have been raised by learning that they shouldn’t express their emotions as well as their problems. “Further, they should solve problems without help, keep their feeling to themselves, and disdain any display of weakness.”³  Therefore, when men aren’t feeling cheerful in what they are doing, which is the case of the players who are hired to fight in the NHL, they don’t think they are allowed to talk about it and to ask for help before it gets too late. More, since the NHL assumes that their players are all real men, they assume that they don’t need to talk about how they feel, offering no support to their players. Therefore, the lack of support present in the NHL can explain why players reach a point where they think about committing suicide or even do it. However, as the NHL doesn’t want to deal with men’s problems, the players’ wife is the only one really present to help and support them. With the gender role we grew in because of institutions, women are seen as the supportive one and the one who should take care of the other.⁴ Thus, we assume that it is the woman responsibly to take care of how their man feel and to support him. Overall since men don’t have any resources and haven’t learned to talk about how they feel, it can lead to very big consequences.

Moreover, men have been taught since a young age that if they want to be a real man, they have to succeed in life. The achievements and the success they reach are pretty important for men, and they can be described by the amount of money they possess, the number of girls they are surrounded by, and by their job. Almost every little boy once dreams to play in the NHL, thus success for men can be described as reaching this level. Also, once they reached the NHL level, they have fans, money, girls, in other words, they have success. Therefore, they reach what little boys dream of, and at the same time, what men dream of. However, some of these players are only enrolled to give a show by fighting, and they are not truly happy with this. But if they want to keep their success they have to stay in the NHL. Consequently, they have to fight, otherwise, they will be kicked out of the NHL and subsequently lose everybody’s admiration. Due to the importance we accord to their status and achievement, players rather reach success by fighting than being mentally healthy. To sum up, fights in the NHL continue because no one opposed to them, not even the players because they want to keep their success.

To conclude, by imploring standards for men to follow, we put them in a position they don’t really want to be in, for example, fights. Society’s standards do affect the number of fights and violence we are surrounded by. To give a term to these acts of violence, we, the whole society, will have to stand up against it.

 

Kilmartin, Christopher, and Andrew P. Smiler. “Defining Men’s Studies.” The Masculine Self, Cornwall On Hudson, NY, Sloan Publishing, 2019, pp. 6.

Kimmel, Michael S. “Sexuality and Intimitate relationships.” Masculinity as Homophobia. 1994. 147.

Kilmartin, Christopher, and Andrew P. Smiler. “Defining Men’s Studies.” The Masculine Self, Cornwall On Hudson, NY, Sloan Publishing, 2019, pp. 7.

Kimmel, Michael.“Masculinity.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William A. Darity, Jr. 2nd ed. Vol. 5. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. 1-5. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 9 June 2014. pp.1-5.

Kilmartin, Christopher, and Andrew P. Smiler. “Defining Men’s Studies.” The Masculine Self, Cornwall On Hudson, NY, Sloan Publishing, 2019, pp. 7

Christopher Kilmartin and Andrew P. Smiler “Men at Work: Jobs, Careers and Masculinity.” The Masculine Self, Cornwall On Hudson, NY, Sloan Publishing, 2019, pp.221-235

Last week, I assisted to a talk given by Jay Marquis Manicom, named “From the Red Pill to ‘White Genocide”. During this talk, Manicom basically explains his conclusion after being surrounded by a group of Alt-Right, and the links that relied the Alt-Right and the Red Pill together. Sadly, they are both against the power of the women and want men to be as powerful as they were before, taking away most of the women’s rights.  

First, Jay talks about how the Alt-Right and the Red Pill are both antifemininity. Usually, the indoctrination starts by the Red Pill and then people join the Alt-Right community, where the hate toward women is brought to another level. They want to feel more powerful than women and to prove that they are stronger than them. Their main goal is to be everything a woman is not. As Kimmel explains on page 2 of his text “Masculinity”: “What it means to be a man is to be unlike a woman.”. Therefore, the group is known as a group that doesn’t show any weakness and doesn’t talk about their emotions, which are considered as women trait. The only emotion that they do talk about and share together is their anger towards women. For men, showing the emotion of anger is totally fine, it only proves that they are more masculine, just like when they get into fights.

Also, the Red Pill is basically a place for men to discuss how they hate women and where they share tips about how to get women. By doing that, men, once again, are trying to prove their superiority over women and that they are real men. According to Kilmartin, in his text “defining men study”, statue and achievement is one of the fourth terms enumerated to prove someone’s masculinity. “Men gain status by being successful in all that they do especially in sport, work, and sexual “conquest”. Powerful men earn respect and admiration of others.”. Which is basically what the Red Pill is about. Men are out there sharing tips about how to get women to sleep with them and trying to convince/prove that and that women should only be used for their need because they don’t worth anything. As they talk about tips to get women to sleep with them, they talk about what has worked for them, therefore they do talk about their sexual conquest and others at them with admiration wishing desperately that it will for them as well.

More, the Red-Pill and the Alt-right is all about a social hierarchy. As mentioned earlier, those men want to feel more powerful than women, and if they could they would like to bring back the system where women are at home doing what their man tells them to do and where women had no right. As Jay mentioned in his presentation the Alt-Right really wants to take away from women some rights that they have, like their right to vote for example. Moreover, there isn’t just a social hierarchy toward women, there is also one inside the group. They divide the group deciding who is going to be superior and inferior. We can say that they use manhood toward each other. Which Kimmel expresses as the power over women and men that men used to prove that they are powerful than others. By denigrating others, they probably feel more in control and confident, which provokes a feeling of power.

I asked my male friend about his relationship with his best friend and his answer kind of shook me. As talked since the beginning of this class and as mention in the text, we expect men to not express their feeling, and to talk about girls, parties, drinking, and sport instead. But when I asked my friend about what he was talking about with his best friend his answer surprised me. He told me that his friend and he were usually talking about their social problems together and asking the other one advises about what they should do. Of course, they do talk about sports, just like girls like to talk about other stuff than their problems but despise what we expect from a male-male relationship, they do talk about more intimate subjects. My friend also told me that after a long time without seeing his friend, he told his best friend how much he meant to him and that he didn’t want to lose him, and his friend responded that it was reciprocal. It means that they are at a state where they can really express what they feel without being called gay or judge by the other one. Also, in the text “No man is an Island: Men in Relationship” they talk about a hierarchy that is usually present between friendship. Unlike what they mention in the text, I really do feel that their relationship is based on respect and that none of them is trying to take advantage of the other one to be more “powerful”. As mention earlier, they are both really close to each other and they tend to talk about their weakness to the other one without being scared that it will be used against them. They have built a true and strong friendship between each other, without really following the norms of what a friendship between two men should look like.

 I think he means that institutions like school, workplace, and society in general, play a big role in how we conceive what women should do, and what men should do. Since those institutions don’t really change their way to process throughout the years, the same dilemma between gender difference happens from generation to generation. Those environments affect in a way how we see women and how we treat them compare to men. For instance, in the text, they give us a clear example of how men easily access promotions in workplaces compared to women, proving that men have many more advantages in workplaces then women only because of their gender. Also, with the episode watched in class, it is possible to make a link with how friendship at school as an influence in the gender difference. As discussed in the episode, it is really bad seen for a man to rub his friend’s shoulder in high school, it is considered as a “gay movement”, and they could be threatened only because of that. However, for a woman to hold her friend in her arms is seen as a normal thing. This shows us how much of gender difference we are unconsciously in and that we don’t realize how big the discrimination between men and women is.

He prefers to use masculinity to the plural because there is a lot of different type of masculinities. Masculinity varies and depends on the sociocultural elements a person grows in. For example, a person that has grown in 1900 won’t have the same perspective of masculinity than a person born in 2000. It’s the same thing from country to country and from culture to culture. Therefore, he wants to include all types of masculinity by saying masculinities instead. By opening up to the mentality that there is more than one type of masculinity could stop a lot of discrimination and could break many rules like the “bro code” as mentioned in the episode. The “bro code” kind of stuck guys in one type of masculinity and avoid them of being their own masculinity/person.

What really jumped at me when I watched the documentary is how bad “acting” like a girl is seen. Men have to be the most masculine possible or other guys will make fun of them. Moreover, guys really can’t have any trait that could ascribe to a women’s personality trait. An obvious example of this is that they can’t express any of their feelings, except for anger. As a society, we expect men to be the strongest, to not express their feelings, and to never cry. This is not how it is supposed to be! How can we expect from them to not be humans? The worst thing in that is that by prohibiting men to express their emotions has a lot of consequences on them. Men are diagnostic at with depression, mental health issues, and a lot of guys tries to attempt suicide because they can’t deal with all their troubles anymore. This happens only because the mentality of the society decided that they were not allowed to express their feelings, either they will look like a girl and end up being bullied.

Also, the second aspect that catches my attention is the freedom that men live when they finally decide to follow what they really want to be, and they ignore what the society tells them to do. As they said in the documentary, men who restrict themselves to the men box are more likely to feel incomplete and to feel like something is missing in their life. On the other side, men who decided to get out of the men box and the restrictions of the society, finally feel whole and good with their life. It shows that what the society tells us to do, may not be the best thing to do for everyone. Every person should be free to express and do what they want with their life without being judged, because the best person to choose what is good for you is yourself.

The part of the book that really got my attention is the part where Carlos said: “She had literally sucked my dick probably twenty times, swallowed my cum every time, but holding hands was too intimate?”. This part really got my attention because it really shows the truth about the society we are currently living in. A lot of people fuck with people they don’t even have feels for, and they are scared of being engaged and seen with someone. With the documentary, I really did understand that the power of the society has a major impact on how we see things. If we perceive relations this way, it’s because we learnt to see them like this since we are very young. The mentality of our society influence people to be scared of the engagement and encourage them to do a one-night stand instead. Moreover, as we seen in the documentary, some people follow the influence of people around them, and they do it just to be like everyone else. But deep down, they are not really good and happy with the way they live their life.

The man who is truly a source of inspiration for me, is my dad. He has always been there for our family, and he makes sure that we don’t miss anything. Unlike most families, it is my dad who does the laundry and cooks dinner, thus going against all the stereotypes we have grown to learn. Also, my dad is my role model. He has a francophone background, but at university he decided to study in English, which was a major change and challenge. To follow his goals, he moved far away from his family and he completely immerse himself in a new environment. Despite all the difficulties he faced, he kept going and it paid off. I recently decided to follow in his footsteps, and enrolled in an English college. My dad has supported me throughout the whole process, always pushing me forward and encouraging me to keep going and do my best. So, I can confidently say that I am the person I am today mostly thanks to him.

In my opinion, an inspiring person is someone who sets an example for others, through simple actions and by encouraging them to work harder and keep going. Being inspirational means helping others succeed and wanting the best for everyone. It’s usually someone you look up to and admire, just like me with my dad.

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