September Blog Post

I decided to write my blog post this week on Carlos Andres Gomez’s Man Up. The whole chapter struck me. I am a female, with no brothers, and couldn’t tell you the first thing about growing up as a boy, so for me the contrast was very interesting and at times heartbreaking. I always thought we as women had it worse, with how judgmental everyone is including other women. This is far from the truth. The sentence that struck me the most was when Gomez said “I had spent so much of my life worrying about everything, overwhelmed by the most paralyzing fear”. It was at this point that I realized how stereotypically I judge males, which now that I think about it, is like judging any other gender, race, religion, or ethnicity. I sat there and thought a grown man paralyzed by fear as a boy, I thought they were supposed to be fearless and there I was judging this man, like the rest of society and that is why I chose this sentence because it was an eye opener.

Growing up are some of the hardest times for a kid. For one to write this sentence is powerful because at some point we all go through this and it opened my eyes to the fact that boys have it just as bad as us girls do, just in opposite ways but it doesn’t make it less detrimental to someone’s childhood, mental health and eventual adulthood. I watched Miss Representation for the first-time last year. A film that perfectly sums up the sexism seen in American society and throughout the media. It baffled me, even things I had been blind to but had seen and been subject to everyday. It wasn’t until I read chapter 2 of Man Up, that I decided to see if there were any documentaries about men, low and behold I came across, The Mask You Live In. A documentary that explores American culture and its definition of masculinity and how it is harming boys and men in society.

My perception, whether shaped by society, my parents, or friends, was just that of the rest of America in the sense of masculinity and men and it just makes me think about how all of us are just living and trying to get by. Growing up men and women have just as many insecurities as th other, men are just trying to compete for fear of looking weak and un-masculine. I think about how destructive it would’ve been if someone would have address my fears in the same way the term “man up” is said to young boys.

We all just want to be a part of something but you can’t fit in and stick out at the same time and its during childhood that you make your first decisions on who you want to be and it unfortunate that so many people can’t truly be themselves to feel validated and part of something. I look back at this article and how I grew up within my own social construct and what it was that led to have these thoughts and ideas of what a man should be. This is important to me because I personally hope to have boys, for the sole fact that growing up a girl I know how terrible it was but turns our everyone has it the same, and the grass is not always greener on the other side but maybe by being more informed and changing my positionality that maybe I can teach my children, a different social construct. I hope to always treat everyone with respect and I think that this chapter opened my eyes to all the expectations this world has and how hard that makes it for us to be diverse. Throw in a different race, religion, ethnicity, and genders and it seems almost impossible for our world to ever become diversely cohesive. I hope to change this even if it is within my own social world.