Anttech said:
LYN I was talking about
Geert Hofstede's theory of society. I don't say nor do I think that Masculinity means being a psychopath, but it usually means Violence is used before diplomacy to solve an issue, it also means a whole host of other things too, which are
nt all bad.
IMO I see violence through the whole of American society today, from this episode to recent wars and also the bravdo (you bunch of nancy's) abuse I have seen thrown at the UK because it took a more diplomatic approach to its recent Issues with Iran.
What I was actually trying to say is that I think popular depictions of masculinity
have become borderline psychopathic, even if that wasn't your claim. I was writing specifically of depictions in American film. Looking back at older westerns, the heroes were usually men who were independent and solitary and who remained strong in the face of violence, stoically defending their towns or families, and that seems to have changed.
Looking back at the best western of the last two decades,
Unforgiven, the climax occurs when the hero finally breaks out of his self-imposed restraint and becomes the cold-blooded killer he used to be, slaughtering a bar full of people. Then we have the whole "wronged man forced to get revenge" motif that forms the plot of every Mel Gibson film, many Schwargenegger films, and even a Denzel Washington film with
Man on Fire, and plenty of lesser actors like John Cena or Vin Diesel. Some guy has his family threatened or killed by some kind of terrorist or thug and is forced to go on a killing spree to burn through an entire network of criminals just to get at the man he's actually after. The
El Mariachi films did the same thing, as did
Kill Bill, with the interesting twist that the hero is a female.
Heck, look at the way James Bond films have changed. Sean Connery and even more recently Pierce Brosnan mostly just looked good, got the girls, were witty and charming, and slickly killed when they needed to. Daniel Craig gets down in the trenches being tortured and beating people to death against porcelain urinals. Masculine heroes don't
resort to violence any more, and the violence isn't restrained or reasonable. Violence is now the first and only means of getting results, and it is far out of proportion to what any reasonable would consider necessary. We have Daniel Craig killing a man by repeatedly slamming his head against a urinal. Denzel Washington kills a man by placing a bomb inside of his rectum. Arnold flies a Harrier jet up to a building, blowing out an entire floor of the building because a terrorist inside kidnapped his daughter. These behaviors go beyond masculine violence and in my opinion constitute glorified psychopathic behavior.
Maybe the latest greatest example is
300. These guys were
glad that Greece was being invaded, since it gave them an excuse to kill and be killed in battle. They murdered infants with weaknesses, slaughtered captives rather than take prisoners, and lived their entire lives
wanting to die at the edge of a sword. This is the kind of behavior being celebrated as masculine. We were joking in a creative writing workshop a few weeks back about how men hope to be attacked to give themselves an excuse to fight someone. I personally joked about waiting for the day that someone tries to break into my house and I can legally and justly kill a man. Sure, we were all joking, but we grew up in a place where this behaviors are actually celebrated in popular culture. Part of me really does want that. When there was a huge surge in military enlistment right after 9/11, how many of those teenage boys do you think had spent the last few years just waiting for a just reason to go shoot some towel heads? There was a lot of rhetoric going around about 'waking the sleeping giant.' People were excited at the chance to go kick some ass, and we're not talking about a little street fight. This was air raids and surgical ground strikes, the calculated deaths of hundreds of thousands of enemy combatants. What kind of masculinity exists when men are excited by something like that?
I am saying that Mens libido's are stronger than Woman, why is it that hardly heard of Woman raping men? Woman perhaps have more control of there sex drive, or is it just that it isn't as strong as a mans. There are definite Biological (historical, pre-society) reasons for this anyway.