Author: sinasadighmontreal

Masculinities in Interstellar

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The person I’ll be referencing is Tom, who is the son of Cooper in the widely watched and appreciated movie, Interstellar. Tom grew up with his father and grandfather in a hard and destroyed world only for his father to leave when he was only a teenager, only to never see his son again. The hard times and struggles he endured pushed him to be a very assertive and overpowering man. In a specific instance in the movie, Tom is receiving his sister over for dinner when she was intrigued by her nephews’ coughs which seemed to get worse and worse after each visit, as time passed Tom’s sister pushed him to take his family and leave the heavily dusted rural area and settle somewhere else, but Tom hanging on to his father’s house could not leave and used his power and force to keep his wife in order. He used some very toxic tools to help preserve his say so, even though his wife wanted to leave as well, he shouted and used physical force to assert himself in front of his son. His wife was scared and immediately backed down, but the doctor his sister brought over to his house ignored Tom’s wrath and seemingly pleaded with Tom’s wife to follow him, which led to Tom physically assaulting the doctor. I believe Tom displayed the most toxic and unusual ways of masculinity, which is by using force and being the alpha to the extent of not listening to others around him. There are better ways to get a point across than to use violence and silencing others. The relationship shared between Tom and his wife is an uneven and distasteful way to preserve and help grow a long-lasting relationship, and Tom perfectly fits into the stereotype of the macho man who drinks a lot and is violent towards his family. A relationship should be built based on communication and respect, but in this case Tom’s relationship is based the old values and norms, and further depict the old social norms of the woman who stays silent and only obeys her husband when he speaks to her. All the things Tom portrayed are toxic masculinity traits that need to be eliminated to build better masculinity standards.  

Blog 2: Rethinking masculinity

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In this blog post, we will be talking about why western men and boys so frequently view and identify themselves with these red pill social media influencers, and these far reached ideologies. Red pill influencers are a group of influencers promoting and incentivizing extreme and misogynistic point of views, and they mostly look for a younger audience base to influence. I will be using the resources and documentaries viewed in class to further explain and verify my points and find the correlation between these men/boys and their feelings towards these views, and why it’s widely being accepted amongst that specific demographic of people in western society. We will seek to delve into the depths of this topic to uncover its challenge, nuances and even potential solutions, but to mostly understand its importance today.  

As was said before, the topic which will be discussed is toxic masculinity/red pill ideologies and how and why such content resonates with young boys and men in western society, even though it might cause a divide amongst the people and even violence today’s society. The use of the documentaries Charlottesville: Race and Terror, and Inside Incel will be used throughout the blog to explain why men and boys gravitate towards this type of content, and Michael Kimmel’s essay Masculinity as Homophobia will also be heavily discussed and used. The main goal would be to understand why certain men would feel the need to use violent behavior or language to express their frustrations and why such hate in young men even exist. Why would they even venture into such dark content?  

To start off, the documentary Charlottesville: Race and Terror gave insight on many points of views and details concerning men in the west. We understand that these white supremacists believe America has completely forgotten and devalues white men, but have they really? The leading character which we follow throughout the documentary is a man who cloaks his true intentions behind the “MAGA” slogan, but what he really wants to do is make America white again. He feels lost and forgotten and even left behind by society, because the once vast white privilege and power is slowly becoming irrelevant, and more and more men and women of color have gained the control they’ve wanted to attain. He often talked about his wishes to bring back the old America, which would be the white run America where exclusively white men had a vast majority of the power. The truth of the matter is that power is what drives people and the lack of power which they feel and the lack of value that they feel is what drives the harsh and cold sentiment. White radicalistic groups such as the KKK and other modern ones in modern day America often associate themselves with guns and physical force, because that’s how men often feel powerful, unfortunately it comes through physical force and the hurting of others for the “gain” of some. Even though we don’t see sexism within this documentary, we see racism, because their focus is the preservation and the betterment of a white America and these influences could be identified as extremist and red pill ideologies, and we mostly saw young/middle-aged white men in these protests conflicting violence upon rather peaceful protesters to their protest. Such violent groups have always been around to keep the power of men and the KKK is a perfect example spanning decades and causing terror to all minorities. Is this the masculinity and the America we want to see?  

Secondly, Inside Incel really goes into depth on the reasons why certain men feel alienated and have such extreme point of views. We find out most of these men who have turned out to be such racist, sexist or even in extreme cases show these ideologies through violent means have lived through many low points or even traumas which shaped their views. These red pill influencers such as the one shown in the documentary provides his point of view on the matter stating on numerous occasions that his viewers and even the people who share the same ideologies may engage in violent behaviors and view violent behaviors by other precedents as important and view these people as heroic. Most of these men turn out to be sexist and misogynistic, these fresh and hateful ideologies are triggered by a great many of events which can sometimes become extremely hateful and hurtful actions. There are some people that see the wrongdoings in their action such as the influencer interviewed and revert and try to fix their wrongdoings, but others spiral out of control and impressionable young men have access to all of these influencers on social media and could identify some of their past denials and failures with the words of these influencers which sets in motion the next generation of racist, sexist or even transphobic young men.  

Thirdly, in Michael S. Kimmel’s text, Masculinity as Homophobia manhood, which is the key concept, is described to be many things. In society if a man seems to be emotional, they are weak, that’s why in movies the perfect desirable man is often portrayed to be dominant, calm and emotionless which are the key principals of any men. Homophobia is very much described to be as something manly, because gay men are not considered to be real men and respecting them is a lack of respect to yourself. Being a sissy, expressing too many emotions, and even exploring certain new things which are viewed as feminine takes away a lot from manhood which comes back to the theme of these red pill social media influencers. According to so many influencers such as Andrew Tate, men are created to be dominant, and his words align with the words of many of ideas present in Kimmel’s text, even though they are not Kimmel’s words, they are present in his text and one of the main and key principles is to not be a “b….” which correlate to Kimmel’s idea of men are not sissy’s. Once again i am aware that Kimmel did not agree with these words and these are not his ideas but they are overlayed in his text and these ideologies are what these red pill influencers set their foundations, and they try to reach out to a younger more impressionable audience, because as was said in Will James’ talk, the one thing young men are searching for is to be the manliest person possible which is why they are impressionable to these red pill influencers, because they cloak their ideology behind the basis of manhood.  

Finally, every documentary and text analyzed has given a better insight and understanding behind the violence, racism and even sexism portrayed by these men, and i have also come to understand why so many men and boys in western societies align themselves with these extreme ideologies even though many experts believe this ideology to be a threat to the peace of society. Red pill influencers, and many extremists have a great many things in common and what i believe to be a danger to society is growing more and hate in western society’s has only gained momentum more and more through such influencers and ideologies.