Tough Guise is a film focused on masculinity, and how is is cultivated throughout lifetimes within culture and media. As the film opens, the audience sees a montage of gun-toting action heroes, and battered women. "There's been a growing connection made in our society between being a man and being violent." Jackson Katz narrates and explains the violent culture that forms the idea of what men are supposed to be. This thesis is tied to our class through the film's exploration of the implications of wording in media, as well as examining race and sexual orientation in relation to masculine image. The main arguments supporting the violent idea of masculinity go through a timeline of how visually the media's image of men has become bigger and more violent over the last fifty years.
I found the arguments showing the increase in bicep size for action figures over the last fifty years to be incredibly convincing. I also found the examination of socializing children into violent masculinity very compelling. Violent children's toys are just as much involved in masculinity as video games and movies. The statistics showing the percentage of killers and rapists, and victims of violence in relation to gender division between men and woman were the most convincing, and at the same time, disturbing. That 85% of people who kill are men means for every woman who has killed there are five more men who have killed. There wasn't anything in this film that I did not find convincing. Even asking young men what they thought made a man produced the same result: a man is tough, or he's not a man. It's unthinkable to pretend that our violent culture has nothing to do with the violence we see in our country. In "We've seen This Movie Before", Stanley Fish notes that as soon as McVeigh's identity was revealed to be a white American, all ideas of his culture being responsible for his crime were dismissed. His militia ideals were dismissed as being his own, and not that of a culture that breeds children who will play with toy guns and pretend violence to assert masculinity.
The point I found most interesting was the idea that as masculinity is portrayed in the media, men are taking up more symbolic space, and women are taking up less. I would like to study that further, and see how that ties together with steroid abuse and eating disorders in both men and woman. As an adult, I've heard in response to outcry over the image of Barbie, and the pressure on women to emulate the hypersexualized images of women, that we have not considered men in rethinking body image. As women worry about looking like Barbie, the idea is that we have forgotten about young men who feel they need to look like "Ken" or G.I. Joe, just like women feel the need to look like Barbie. I wonder if steroid abuse with young men is similar in percentage to eating disorders developed in young women, and would like to see how it is tied to the images we see in the media representations of what person should look like, marketed to children. In adults, we see products like the "Elevator Shoes" for men insecure about their height. My old boss, a man of about 5'2, used to wear them all the time. Daily, my height is pointed out as being too tall for a woman. He doesn't take up enough of that symbolic space, and I take up too much. Until we start changing our standard, we'll continue to have tall women who slouch, and short men who overcompensate. Does the fact that Ken is always taller than Barbie in her heels have anything to do with that?
Fish, Stanley. "We;ve Seen This Movie Before." The New York Times. N.p., 2010. Web. 4 Mar 2012. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/weve-seen-this-movie-before/>.
Wade, Lisa. ""Elevator" Shoes for Men: The Market Responds to Heightism." The Society Pages. W.W. Nortion & Company, Inc, 19, February, 2012. Web. 4 Mar 2012. <http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/19/elevator-shoes-for-men-the-market-responds-to-heightism/>.
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