Tough Guise and the Performance of Masculinity

Tough Guise ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79ijDA_1FVY&feature=related ) talks about the crisis in masculinity and the effect it has on the larger world. What is this crisis, this tough guise? This is the guise that men are taught to put up from a young age to repress feelings for fear of being seen as weak/emasculine/feminine. This repression results in men/boys releasing their feelings in the only social acceptable fashion, violence. Jackson Katz the creator uses the example of the Wizard of OZ. Specifically the scene when Toto pulls back the curtain on the wizard to reveal that the great and powerful OZ is in fact just a small man putting up a front, its all smoke and mirrors. That Masculinity is a performance. Katz goes so far as to show the scene during the documentary, this is a film that most people have seen and yet you find yourself looking at the scene a little differently.

Tough Guise also interviews young men and what they think a real man is and the consequences you face if you do not measure up. Often these insults are meant to insinuate homosexuality, these boys have such a narrow idea of what it means to be a man. That to be a man is all about being tough and stoic, not about showing emotions or compassion for others. In fact the opening sequence shows a blurred imaged with very aggressive male voices. As the image clears, you begin to realize that the picture is of little boy children posing flexing their muscles. This image sums up Katz's thesis for the movie that just as these children are performing so are other older men performing their own masculinity.

The move talks about the limited ways in which types of people are portrayed in the media and how it has only gotten more severe in some cases. For example looking at the way women are seen (getting smaller and smaller) and the way men are viewed (getting bigger and bigger) Katz theorizes that this is part of a backlash to the rise of women into spheres that were once reserved only for men. The best visual example of this is when the film shows what superheroes looked like originally in film (Adam West as batman) and how this changed dramatically as time went on. Another good example is showing what Star Wars figurines looked like in the 70s and then what the same characters looked like in the 1990s, the differences are startling. A modern example of change could be that of Captain America going form the small asthmatic boy to the impossibly huge Captain America that could lift a truck.