Masculinity, Homophobia and Violence...Talking point #8

This reading was very interesting to say the least, some ways it made me a little uncomfortable. Because this is a slight shift on what we were talking about the past few week, I was not expecting to read this for our reading assignment and I must say that it took me by surprise. When I first started reading this I was totally against what was being said.  The writers disagreed with experts who made very great and valid points. Points like violence stems from a violent house hold, exposing child to violent movies when younger, allowing children to play video games that involve shooting, and killing, child abuse, absent fathers etc. I was all for what experts had said until a point was made that violence and shooting was only a male problem. This made me atomically shift my thoughts, I began to think about girls who come from broken homes, who play violent video games along with the boys and whole love watching violent movies and listening to music that talk about violence.  I then began to really think. It just didn't make sense to me, there had to have been more to this. As I began to get more into the reading I started realizing certain things. There are a few quotes that I to address and add my few cents to. 

The first quote that I want to talk about is The quote of Eminem on page 1145. He says “The Lowest degrading thing you can say to a man…is to call him a faggot and try to take away his man hood”.

First of all I HATE that would It seems to me that the word “faggot has taken on a whole different meaning, it went from being bundles of twigs that was used to violently burn homosexuals, to being gay, to now stripping someone of their manhood? Can someone please tell me how that adds up? This was very upsetting to me to see how the horrible meaning of the word faggot losses its meaning REAL in slag and becomes something so different. I atomically thought about how this world is in constant evolution, it definitely shows in how the meaning of words are lost.

The next quote that I will be talking about is on page 1446 and it states: “There is much at stake for boys and, as a result, they engage in a variety of evasive strategies to make sure that no one gets the wrong idea about them (and their manhood)”

 This shows that boys would do anything to prove that they are not and have not lost their “manhood”, this includes killing people who have hurt them by, picking on them, bullying them, calling them names etc. If they feel like they are losing their “manhood” they automatically jump on defense and start plotting for ways to help them redeem this manhood of theirs, this plot most likely will be a violent one because that is what boy identify with for protection.

The last quote that I will address is on page 1450 which says “unlike girls, boys  do not lose their voice, they “gain a voice, but it is an authentic voice of constant posturing, of false bravado, of foolish risk-taking and gratuitous violence-what some have called the”boy code”, the mask of masculinity. The once warm, empathetic, communicative boy becomes, very early, a stoic, uncommunicative, armor-plated man."
This “boy code” stems from the dominate ideology that men are suppose to be hard. They can’t cry nor are can the show emotion, if they do then they are not tough and they are called a “wimp”. Any boy who is not in this bracket of what a “man” is suppose to be, ends up getting bullied and because this boy feels like they have their “manhood to prove they go off killing people.