A Problem With No Name...For Guys?

Thus far in the course, and especially within our community action project group, we have been viewing the media though a purely female oriented lens.  We haven’t really taken the time to look at how the images presented to us everyday in the media effect not only ourselves, but our male counterparts as well.  It is doubtless that coming up in our celebrity driven, sex saturated society men have played just as much the victim as women.  So why is it so easy to forget about them?

            I think the obvious answer is that the really haven’t actually played just as much the victim.  After all, it’s easy to say that women are the ones who are reaping all of the damages of our current society.  After all, we have so much empirical proof.  After all, women are starving themselves and being beaten and not receiving equal pay for equal work.  After all, these are the obvious things.

            On the other hand we are currently seeing what Michael Kimmel calls “a virtual war against boys in America” (Kimmel, 187).  We see boys falling behind in school and being diagnosed with ADD and ADHD at alarming rates.  We are also seeing a rising trend in depression rates of young boys and a greater prevalence of behavioral problems.  So how come there boys, who are destined to grow up to be the ruling sex, are having so many problems at a 

young age?          

  Many have cited the media as the center of these gender troubles.  As girls are provided with role models in the form of Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan, boys are presented with Chris Brown.  They are taught from a young age that to be a man is to hind your emotions and to be “tough”.  Boys embrace what Pollack calls the “Boy Code”, “a kind of swaggering attitude that boys embrace to hide their fears, suppress dependency and vulnerability, and present a stoic front” (Kimmel, 188).  This is problematic because boys are growing up emotionally stunted.  We can see these effects even into other forms of popular culture; take for instance any sit-com or drama that has ever mirrored couple’s therapy where the therapist encourages the man to talk about his feelings, which he has doubted been able to do up until that point.

Ok, so there’s the problem, how do we fix it?  Well, by promoting gender equality in the most public way possible, popular culture and the media.  I am glad to say that the trend of broadening gender horizons seems to be secure among today’s television stations.  There are many shows, most of which have came around in the past ten years or so, which are showing gender roles in a new light.  Brendan O’Sullivan talks about some of these in his essay “Dead Man Walking” including Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Blowout along with others like Will and Grace, Friends, and Scrubs, all of which feature male leads, who actually cry. Some of them are even straight and still cry.

            Just because the symptoms of a larger problem are hidden, such the poor performance of boys within our society does not mean that there is not a problem.  For too long, it seems the feminist movement has centered too much on the feminine.  Although this phenomenon is completely understandable, after all we were the ones who were getting beat up and raped and abused.  We were, and still are to a great extent, the ones with the more visible symptoms.  But the problem runs deeper than something that can be fixed with the elevation of women within society.  Instead we need to work towards promoting equality between both genders, in all areas.