Be strong, be tough, be cold, be rich, be muscular, be sportive… Be a man. Those words, boys are continually told growing up shape the men that form today’s society. In the documentary “the mask you live in”, many statistics are unveiled to showcase the problems that boys and men have to face in our society. One of those statistics describes that 50% of boys are physically abused throughout their lives. This statistic really surprised me because in today’s world in which, yes, abuse is still a taboo subject, but also in which people are becoming a lot more open about their experiences with this horrible word, boys are a bit left out of the subject. Don’t get me wrong, In this world every kind of abuse is terribly wrong and horrible, but for me this issue facing boys was less heard of than other groups. In this documentary we are also told that rapists in our society don’t surge out of nowhere, they are created by our own society, our own rape culture. This really jumped at me and made me think that it is because of everything we teach boys, all those words that they are continually told growing up, all those things they are told to be and not to be. All of this creates a sort of hatred embedded deep down in people’s personality, hatred that they have to hide beneath a mask, hatred that creates this rape culture.
We can contrast those two pieces of information to the book written by Carlos Andres Gomez, especially the part where he talks about his time in Zambia and how the men there have a completely different way of interacting with one another, a way that, we, men from western societies are not familiar with. We can contrast this part from his book with what is told in the documentary to better understand Carlos’ experiences in Zambia. For a man that comes from this overly masculine society, from this culture where boys shout names at each other to prove to one another who is the manliest, in this world where men are not allowed to engage in any physical act of friendship in the fear of being called a “faggot”. For a man from this world, we can understand that Zambia was an incredible eye-opening experience.
Lovers and Fighters | Section 22 