Derek Bryant - Blog Post #2

As I was reading an excerpt of Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood by Carlos Andrés Gómez, I found myself relating to a lot of what he said. Growing up, I was never a "man's man". I liked to help my grandma bake sourdough bread and dig in the garden, while my older brother and my dad were busy skating and playing football. I never felt that masculine urge to fight things or catch the old pigskin, I was happy staying inside and trying the newest recipe that my grandma had found in her monthly cooking magazine subscription. 

I felt the judgement from other people at very young age, this idea of masculinity is instilled at a very early stage in one's life, but I was lucky enough to have a family that was supportive in my own hobbies. In today's society, men are held to a standard that is very basic and one dimensional. If you are born as a boy, the only point in life is to become a "man" and pass that knowledge onto your future son. The only issue for me is that men don't bake and garden, that's for the "dainty housewives" according to my sexist math teacher who was recently divorced and very obviously lonely. I saw a lot of my friends struggle as they tried to come to terms with their own identity and where they fell on the spectrum so to speak. A very close friend of mine could never receive his dad's approval and he ultimately ruined his own life to try to get that approval. It seems that as a father figure, you are to teach your son to be masculine and strong, regardless of the emotional and mental abuse that they might endure because that's just part of becoming a man. A quote that showcases this mentality beautifully is this one, "since you think you are a man and want to make man decisions and walk out of my life, I am going to treat you like a man.  And there are a lot of things that are wrong with you... if you do not fix them you are never going to succeed in your life." (Gómez 56) To make up for his own shortcomings, he places a majority of the blame on the boy who is not yet a man. By writing about his own experiences, Gómez talks about a topic that, ironically enough, men are too afraid to talk about. As Jared Yates Sexton says in his article America's Toxic Masculinity, "masculinity might temporarily shelter men from the pressures of their daily lives, inevitably it robs them of their lives."