My Opinion on Tough Guise

Tonight in class we watched the documentary called "Tough Guise," and it addressed an issue that I was made aware of a few years ago, and still often think about. The issue was violence in men, the masculinity complex that is forced on them through social norms, media, and direct and indirect learned behaviors, and finally the negative effects that we are seeing from this throughout all of society. When I learned about this issue, believe it or not, I was in a psychology of women course. We often compared women's issues to men's issues, because lets face it, for every action there is an opposite reaction. Every time a woman is being unfairly treated by a man, and facing trauma, the man is experiencing an abuse of power and a need for power, and that caused emotional trauma too, and a sort of PTSD or addiction to that feeling that may make them need to feel that power again. The violence issue in America does not only affect women, who are the victims, but it clearly affects men more, or they wouldn't be the ones committing the crimes almost all of the time. I was introduced to this concept through watching this Ted Talk class with Jackson Katz in that psych class, and I loved it so I have included it here.



The Ted Talk stuck with me so much that during the next semester, in a psychological adjustment course, I wrote a paper about sexual harassment being a man's issue, and pulled a lot of my ideas from it. I basically said that sexual harassment is all about men needing to feel some sort of power over women, and that adult males are teaching younger males this cycle of having to be masculine and in control. Through the media boys see what women are supposed to be like, and feel threatened by any woman who doesn't fit the media norm, so they learn to sexualize and objectify women. The children grow up and teach their children too, and the boys who suffer mental illness or cant control these urges for whatever reason, usually end up doing some sort of violent act, often times against women or weaker men. I attached the paper in a pages document on this blog. you can see it on the right sidebar!

Tonight in the video we watched pointed out how nearly all violence committed is by men. I knew that sexual harassment and sex crimes were committed mostly by men, and considered this in my paper, but I had not considered how mostly all violence in general is committed by men. Tough Guise threw some interesting statistics out tonight, and I found the infographic online:

As you can see, and if you are like me then you feel like you already knew but never really considered because nobody ever made you, men by a huge margin are committing these crazy crimes that we live our lives talking about, and are in fear of. Aggravated assaults, murder, stalker, rape, mass shootings, firearm suicides, domestic, and violence incidents are all lead by men. As a country we need to do something about this, because clearly the way we are raising our men is causing them to be violent.

The problem is that we allow our boys to fight, and be aggressive. We subject our children to gender specific toys that lead them to hold certain standards for men and women; and we let them watch media and see advertisements that sexualize women and make men more masculine.

In the media phrases like the "wussification of America," and men claiming that the world is attacking traditional male roles, are only making the problem worse. Some women, most feminists, aren't wanting men to change just so that we can be equal and have power; we want men to be able to experience the freedom of expression and emotion, and the mental health that it promotes.

In my paper I talked about a way to fix sexual harassment, and now I would like to extend it further and say that it is true for all of violence. I think that this isn't going to change until we start teaching our adults how to influence our children, teach our children how to interact with each other, and hold our media responsible for what they are exposing our citizens to. There should be education, all throughout school, and seminars or presentations in the workplace, and counseling for anyone who needs it, about the seriousness of what can happen when a problem or psychological issue goes untreated or not talked about. There should be teacher and parent workshops on how to work with children and not expose them to gender social norms. Men shouldn't have to bottle up everything, or be allowed to violent because as children because "boys will be boys." They should be taught early about social responsibility, and learn to go to someone when they have a problem rather than turning to violence.