Tough Guise – Violence, Media & the Crisis in Masculinity
Tough Guise: Violence, Media & the Crisis in
Masculinity
Program Transcript
(FULL LENGTH version)
Executive Producer & Director: Sut Jhally
Producers: Susan Ericsson & Sanjay Talreja
Written by: Jackson Katz & Jeremy Earp
Editors: Sut Jhally, Susan Ericsson, Sanjay Talreja & Jeremy Smith
Featuring an interview with Jackson Katz Anti-Violence Educator
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INTRODUCTION
[Montage of images and clips from mainstream entertainment and news media]
— We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.
— Never show weakness. The only pain that matters is the pain you inflict.
— It’s the roughest and toughest show on TV: The American Gladiators.
— You gotta out-tough people when you get down there, its man-on-man out there.
— Police say boys ages thirteen and eleven were arrested near the school carrying guns and
wearing camouflage.
— Two in three million Americans are battered in their home every year…
[Pearl Jam song: Better Man]
Talkin’ to herself, there’s no one else who needs to know…
She tells herself, oh…
Memories back when she was bold and strong
And waiting for the world to come along…
Swears she knew it, now she swears he’s gone
She lies and says she’s in love with him, can’t find a better man…
She dreams in color, she dreams in red, can’t find a better man…
She lies and says she still loves him, can’t find a better man…
She dreams in color, she dreams in red, can’t find a better man…
Can’t find a better man…
[Movie: The Wizard of Oz]
Oz has spoken!
— Who are you?
I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.
— You’re a very bad man.
Oh no, my dear, I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.
JACKSON KATZ: The climactic scene where Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal a
nervous, tragic man, pretending to be the great and powerful Oz, represents more than just
the classic moment in American cinematic history, rather, it also gave us a metaphor for
looking at masculinity in a new way. Not as a fixed, inevitable state of being, but rather as a
projection, a pose, a guise, an act, a mask that men often wear to shield our vulnerability
and hide our humanity.
This mask can take a lot of forms but one that’s really important for us to look at in our
culture at the millennium is what I call the Tough Guise. The front that many men put up
that’s based on an extreme notion of masculinity that emphasizes toughness and physical
strength and gaining the respect and admiration of others through violence or the implicit
threat of it.
Boys and young men learn early on that being a so-called “real man” means you have to
take on the “tough guise,” in other words you have to show the world only certain parts of
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yourself that the dominant culture has defined as manly. You can find out what those
qualities are if you just listen to young men themselves:
YOUNG MEN:
— A real man is physical.
— Strong.
— Independent.
— Intimidating.
— Powerful.
— Strong.
— Independent.
— In control.
— Rugged.
— Scares people.
— Powerful.
— Respected.
— Hard.
— A stud.
— Athletic.
— Muscular.
— A real man is tough.
— Tough.
— Tough.
JACKSON KATZ: And just as most young men know what our culture expects of a “real
man,” they also know very well what you get called if you don’t measure up:
YOUNG MEN:
— You get a called a pussy.
— A bitch.
— A fag.
— Queer.
— Soft.
— You’re a little momma’s boy.
— Emotional.
— Girly.
— A wimp.
— Bitch.
— Queer.
— You get called weak.
— Wuss.
— Sissy.
— A fag.
— A fag.
— Fag.
— You’re a fag.
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JACKSON KATZ: So for boys, and this is true for every racial and ethnic background, and
every socioeconomic group, to be a real man – to be tough, strong, independent, respected
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– means fitting into this narrow box that defines manhood. The terms that are the opposite
of that: wuss, wimp, fag, sissy are insults that are used to keep boys boxed in, so if you’re a
boy it’s pretty clear there’s a lot of pressure on you to conform, to put up the act, to be just
one of the guys.
So the next question is, where do boys learn this? Obviously they learn it in many different
places. They learn it from their families, their community, but one of the most important
places they learn it is the powerful and pervasive media system which provides a steady
stream of images that define manhood as connected with dominance, power and control.
This is true across all racial and ethnic groups but it’s even more pronounced for men of
color because there’s so little diversity of images for them, to begin with – for example,
Latino men are almost always presented either as boxers, criminals, or tough guys in the
barrio, and Asian-American men are disproportionately portrayed as martial artists and
violent criminals.
But transcending race, what the media do is help to construct violent masculinity as a
cultural norm. In other words, violence isn’t so much a deviation, but an accepted part of
masculinity. We have to start examining this system, and offering alternatives because one
of the major consequences of all of this, is that there’s been a growing connection made in
our society between being a man and being violent. In fact, some of the most serious
problems in contemporary American society, especially those connected with violence, can
be looked at as essentially problems in contemporary American masculinity.
For example, over 85% of the people who commit murder, are men, and the women that do,
often do so as defense against men who are battering them. Ninety percent of people who
commit violent physical assault are men. Ninety-five percent of serious domestic violence is
perpetrated by males, and its been estimated that one in four men will use violence against
a partner in their lifetime. Over 95% of dating violence is committed by men, and very often
it’s young men in their teens. Studies have found that men are responsible for between 85%
and 95% of child sexual abuse whether the victim is female or male. And 99.8% of people in
prison convicted of rape, are men.
What this shows is that an awful lot of boys and men are inflicting an incredible level of pain
and suffering, both on themselves and on others. And we know that much of the violence is
cyclical, that many boys who are abused as children grow up and become perpetrators
themselves. So calling attention to the way that masculinity is connected to these problems
is not anti-male – it’s just being honest about what’s going on in boys’ and men’s lives. And
while women have been at the forefront of change and trying to talk about these issues in
the culture, it’s not just women who will benefit if men’s lives are transformed. In fact, while
men commit a shameful level of violence against women in our society, statistically
speaking, the major victims of men’s violence are other males. There are millions of male
trauma survivors walking around today, men who were bullied as adolescents, or abused
physically or sexually as children. Thousands more men and boys are murdered or
assaulted every year – usually by other men. So, men have a stake in dealing with these
problems, and not just those of us who have been victims, but also those men who are
violent, or who have taken on the tough guise, they do so also at the expense of their
emotional and relational lives.
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[Young woman] Some of my friends, they just walk around like they’re better than
everybody, and their tough and all that stuff. And then I’ll be alone with them, and they’ll be
like the biggest babies. If they have like a problem with a girlfriend or something, they’ll be
like crying and stuff, but when they’re around a lot of people they’ve got that big front,
they’ve gotta be tough.
JACKSON KATZ: I deal with this front all the time in my own work as an anti-violence
educator. I’ve worked with literally thousands of boys and men on high school, college, and
professional sports teams, in the United States military, in juvenile detention centers. I’ve
seen an awful lot of men and young men put on this tough guise. In many ways, they’re
putting it on as a survival mechanism – they have to do it to survive in whatever peer culture
they happen to be in. But putting on the tough guise comes with a cost and that is a cost in
terms of damage to their psyches and their ability to be decent human beings. So it’s in
everyone’s interest to examine masculinity, to pull back the curtain on the tough guy posing,
and see what’s really going on underneath.
[Movie: Raging Bull]
I want you to hit me with everything you’ve got.
— You sure?
Yeah. Harder. Harder. Harder. Harder.
— That’s hard.
Harder. Harder.
— What are you trying to prove? What does it prove?
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PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING VIOLENT MASCULINITY
HIDDEN – A Gender
[News] There is more details and a profile developing of kids who kill kids.
JACKSON KATZ: One of the things that happens in typical discussions about social
problems is that the very way we talk about the problems, tends to obscure some of the root
causes. For example, violence is not typically talked about as a gender issue, but the fact is
that one gender, men, perpetrate approximately 90% of the violence. Now part of the reason
for this is because men are the dominant group. And one of the ways dominance functions is
through being unexamined. This is true for other areas as well.
For example, when we hear the word race in the United States we tend to immediately think
African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, etc. When we hear the term
sexual orientation, we tend to think gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender. When we hear the
term gender, we tend to think women. In each case the dominant group, white people,
heterosexual people, men, don’t get examined. As if men don’t have a gender. As if white
people don’t belong to some racial grouping. As if heterosexual people don’t have some sort
of sexual orientation. In other words we focus always on the subordinated group and not on
the dominant group. And that’s one of the ways that the power of dominant groups isn’t
questioned – by remaining invisible.
There’s a number of ways that this happens. For example, the linguist Julia Penelope talks
about how the use of the passive voice when we talk about crimes against women, tends to
shift our focus off of male perpetrators and on to female victims and survivors. For example
we talk about how many girls were raped last year. How many women were assaulted? Or
how many women were slain. As opposed to saying, how many men raped women or girls
or how many boys or men assaulted and murdered women.
Another way in which we can see this idea about the invisibility of masculinity being played
out is in the discussion about so-called “youth violence” You read headlines in newspapers
all around the country about this problem of kids killing kids.
[News] But after ten school shootings in three years, there is more detail and a profile
developing of kids who kill kids.
JACKSON KATZ: But this isn’t kids killing kids. Overwhelmingly it’s boys killing boys and
boys killing girls.
An example of the way the media de-genders discussion of violence can be seen in the
coverage of the Jonesboro, Arkansas massacre in the Spring of 1998. There were all these
headlines about kids killing kids and children killing children and what’s going on with our
kids, etc. In fact, one article in the New York Times, a think piece that was a step back piece
to try to discuss the whole issue of this range of school shootings, in one parentheses said,
“All these shootings were done by boys” and then what was in the parentheses wasn’t
discussed in the rest of the article. So you have a whole article trying to pull together all the
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different factors that are causing these shootings and the one most important, in my opinion,
is in the parentheses and not discussed.
Some people will say, “Well, it’s obvious that boys are doing these shootings.” The reason
why we don’t say it, the reason why we say it’s kids killing kids, everybody knows that boys
are the one’s doing the vast majority of the violence. You don’t need to say it. But the fact
is, if you don’t say it, then in the subsequent discussion about the causes of the violence
then you’re going to leave out one of the key elements.
Another example: road rage. People don’t typically think of road rage as a gendered
phenomenon but one recent study showed that out of ten thousand cases of aggressive
driving or road rage, over 95% were males, but you read the editorials in the newspapers
throughout the country about road rage and the articles, essays, and opinion columns, and
it’s rarely talked about as a masculine or a male phenomenon. It’s just a phenomenon on
our roadways. If women were doing it, if 95% of the people doing it were women, you can
bet that the single issue that would be talked about is, why are women, what is going on in
the gender construction of women that cause them to act in that way?
When girls commit violence, that’s always the subject. The gendered nature of the crime is
always part of the discussion.
[CBS News] A sensational case goes on trial in Virginia tomorrow, involving a man who was
sexually mutilated by his wife.
JACKSON KATZ: Now Lorena Bobbitt, her crime was brutal admittedly, and I understand
believe me, as a man understand why people would be, especially men, would be very
uncomfortable about that, but every day men are murdering and mutilating women and it
doesn’t cause as a great a national outcry.
One of the reasons why the film, Thelma and Louise, caused such a stir back in the early
nineties was that women were the ones who were acting violently.
[Movie: Thelma and Louise]
Oh my god, oh my god.
— Get in the car.
Oh Jesus Christ. Louise, you shot him.
JACKSON KATZ: In other words you have films all the time, go into any video store and
walk down the aisles and look at all the films that feature violence against women including
sexualized violence against women by men, and there’s little outcry and little commentary by
the movie critics for example, when they are reviewing these films. They don’t talk about the
fact that we have this huge epidemic of men assaulting women and we’re making yet
another film about an assault against women? Look at the recent remake of Psycho. That
was not part of the discussion when Psycho re-released. We’re yet again, going to show a
sexualized image of a woman being assaulted and that’s going to be considered great art?
And people are going to go see it? Yet Thelma and Louise you had debates going on in the
newspapers of the United States, “is this a bad trend?” It was similar to the outcry about
Lorena Bobbitt.
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What’s happened is because violence has been gendered masculine we think it’s unusual
only when women do it. When men do it, it is so normal that its masculine character is
unremarkable. In fact, it’s invisible. So one of the things we have to do is to make it visible.
Feminist scholars and activists have been trying to do this for years, but they’ve been largely
ignored. Making masculinity visible is the first step to understanding how it operates in the
culture and how definitions of manhood have been linked to dominance and control.
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UPPING THE ANTE
JACKSON KATZ: Many cultural analysts would argue that if you want to understand the
meaning of something in society, look at its representation in the media – what stories are
being told about it in the popular culture. And if we look at images of men and masculinity
over the last fifty years we’d see that there’ve been some dramatic and really interesting
changes in what is considered to be masculine, especially in terms of the size of men’s
bodies. These changes tell us a story about what’s going on in the culture.
For example if you compare the Superman of the 1950s with what we now think of as the
Man of Steel you’ll see a fairly dramatic difference. If you think of Batman, and Adam West
as Batman in the 1960s and look at his body and compare it to the Batman of the movies of
the nineties there’s a fairly dramatic difference.
How about pro wrestling? Pro wrestlers’ bodies in the 1960s were more flabby if you will. If
you look at them in the eighties and nineties they’ve become much bigger and stronger and
more rippled.
If you look at the Star Wars toy figurines that kids played with in the 1970s and contrast
them with the Star Wars toy figurines that are being marketed to kids in the 1990s you see a
dramatic shift. There really is something happening here. Something’s going on.
Look at the way that the body of GI Joe, the doll that millions of boys play with, has changed
over the last twenty years. Researchers had calculated in fact that the size of his biceps in
real life equivalence has increased from 12.2 inches in 1964, to 15.2 inches in 1974, to 16.4
inches in 1994 and up to 26.8 inches by 1998. If you wanted a comparison to a real person,
Mark McGwire’s biceps are only 20.0 inches. As I said something is really going on.
One of the interesting things is that if you compare this with the image of the female body,
you’ll see the reverse thing happening. Whereas full-figured women as Marilyn Monroe or
Jayne Mansfield were the representation of ideal female beauty in the 1950s, by the eighties
and nineties the ideal has become much thinner, more waifish, more girlish – so that today
its Kate Moss or Tyra Banks and Calista Flockhart who reflect the beauty norm.
One of the ways to explain these shifts is that in an era when women have been challenging
male power in business, the professions, education, and other areas of economic and social
life, the images of women that have flooded the culture show women as less threatening.
They’re literally taking up less symbolic space. At the same time, images of men have gotten
bigger, stronger, more muscular and more violent. In other words, one of the ways that men
have responded to women’s challenges is by overcompensating and placing greater value
on size, strength and muscularity – and it terms of media images this means big beefy men
have been taking up even more symbolic space.
We can see the same pattern if we look at the way gun imagery has changed over the last
fifty years. If you look at images of Humphrey Bogart in the 1930s and the 1940s the way
he’s posed as a masculine figure and look at the size of the gun that he’s holding, it’s a very
small gun and it’s a very non-imposing pose, by contemporary standards.
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If you move to the 1960s with Sean Connery as 007 the gun gets bigger, right, then if you
move into the 1970s with Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry for example the pose gets more
menacing and the gun gets bigger.
And if you move into the early eighties you have Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, not only is he
holding big guns and presenting himself as really tough, his body is now a spectacle, his
body is not one of the sites of his projection of power. The epitome of this historical
progression is Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator, so its not just that his holding a
big gun or has a big body but rather his whole body is literally a killing machine. There has
been a ratcheting up of what it takes to be considered menacing and hyper masculine in the
1980s and nineties.
It’s really important to remember that there is nothing natural about images – they don’t just
come about by accident. They’re made by someone, and mostly in our culture it’s been men
that have been in charge when it comes to being the authors and creators of popular culture,
so if these images are changing, they’re reflecting what’s going on in the psyches of these
men. Actually what we’re seeing in part, is their pathologies or anxieties being played out on
the screen. But this isn’t just happening inside the heads of some advertising gurus or
Hollywood screenwriters. There’s a historical context for all of this.
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BACKLASH
JACKSON KATZ: These changes in the images of masculinity are in part a response to a
perceived threat to the traditional or dominant idea of masculinity – that is of white, middle
class, heterosexual masculinity. In fact the various social movements that arose in the 1960s
represent an incredible threat to established power. The Civil Rights Movement had started
in the 1950s and sixties to challenge the deeply entrenched system of White supremacy.
The Women’s Liberation Movement had catalyzed serious challenges to male power,
winning court battles and making headlines all over the country in the 1960s and seventies.
The gay and lesbian movements had been challenging and disrupting heterosexual power
and privilege since the early 1970s. And the anti-war and student movements that opposed
U.S. intervention in Vietnam disrupted the plans of political elites, especially as the U.S.
suffered what many people regarded as its first military defeat.
All of these social movements that were taking place around the same time were a really
serious challenge to the dominant white heterosexual masculinity that held social, political,
economic and cultural power in the United States. Take the modern multicultural women’s
movement for example which is one of the most important social movements in history. This
movement has given us a new way to think about gender relations and sexual relationships
and identities, and as a result, many men in society have experimented with new personal
styles as well as new attitudes and approaches towards things like relationships, work and
parenting, and many other areas. And, as a result there are many young men today who are
living lives that are very different from our fathers’ and grandfathers’ and who have
incorporated these changes and who are thinking in a much more egalitarian way about
relations between men and women, about sexual equality in the work place and a whole
bunch of other areas of social life.
But some men have not reacted well to these changes and there has been a backlash. In
fact, one of the best selling books of the 1990s was Susan Faludi’s, Backlash, which argued
that a lot of men were very, very disrupted and reacted very poorly to some of these
changes.
A backlash is an angry and often violent reaction by groups who feel threatened by
progressive changes in the culture. Look at the response to Andrew Dice Clay, one of the
most popular hate comedians of our time. In fact, Andrew Dice Clay himself, is one of the
most financially successful live comedic acts and his career peaked in the early 1990s and
one of the key parts of his comedic act was verbal assaults against women.
[Andrew Dice Clay on stage] Don’t marry her, man, how do you know where she’s been?
Let me tell you, I was out with this dishrag whore a couple of weeks ago, right? … And let
me tell you something, actually you’re a fucking dog, alright? So why don’t you just, like I
said, sit there and shut your fucking hole, do me a favor, stupid…
JACKSON KATZ: What’s most interesting about Dice Clay is not necessarily what he’s
saying, although that is significant, but rather the audience reaction. The fact is, when this
guy was articulating this anger towards women he would not have found an audience if there
wasn’t something going on in the culture that he was tapping into.
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Another popular performer who’s tapped into the same kind of anger against women and
misogyny that Dice Clay did is Howard Stern. Stern is often portrayed in the popular
discourse as this bad boy who’s challenging traditional morality and transgressing against
authority but that’s such a superficial reading of what he’s doing. What Stern actually does is
simply reinforce, in crude fashion, some of the most tired, old fashioned conservative sexist
values.
[TV: The Howard Stern Show]
You wearing panties today? Pull your pants off. What about your bra? Is that coming off?
That bra’s gotta come off. You gotta take that off.
[TV: The Howard Stern Show]
OK ladies, are you ready to disrobe? Ok, take off your shirts. Let me see, face me. They’re
not horrible, but I think they should be bigger. Do you have hair on your ass? Why don’t you
girls go to the gym and work out a little bit?
JACKSON KATZ: What Stern does is he creates a world for his largely young male
audience, a world in which they can feel good about themselves by putting down and
sexually degrading women. The gender world might be changing all around them, but on the
Howard Stern Show, women are bimbos to be stared at and exploited. That is anything but
transgressive. Howard Stern is no anti-authority rebel. His shtick absolutely reinforces
traditional sexism.
[TV: The Howard Stern Show]
I see a six, nine, eight, ten. You’re like a horse, you’re like a fine horse.
JACKSON KATZ: A clear indication of how the supposedly lovable Howard embodies
contempt for women is in his reaction to the tragic shootings at Columbine High School.
When the news first broke about the horrific massacre being perpetrated by Harris and
Klebold, the people that Stern identified with were not the boys and girls running for their
lives out of the school, but with the male shooters, and what he would have done if he was
them. On his radio show he said, and these are his very words “There were some really
good-looking girls running out with their hands over their heads. Did those kids try to have
sex with any of the good-looking girls? They didn’t even do that? At least if you’re going to
kill yourself and kill all the kids, why wouldn’t you have some sex? If I was going to kill some
people, I’d take them out with sex.” So Howard Stern took the Littleton tragedy as an
opportunity to make a rape joke. What a rebel.
Another personality who has become popular by playing upon men’s insecurities in the face
of women’s increased assertions of equality is Rush Limbaugh.
[TV clip: Limbaugh] Feminism was established so that unattractive ugly broads could have
easy access to the mainstream, right? Did you see it? Yes!
JACKSON KATZ: To me, feminism is about equal rights, justice, fairness, and in that sense
it’s as American as apple pie. But if you listen to Limbaugh, you’ll notice that he’s almost
obsessed with discrediting strong women. They seem to make him very nervous, even
angry.
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[TV clip: Limbaugh] A bunch of cows. Moo, moo…
JACKSON KATZ: The reason that Limbaugh uses such derisive and personally insulting
terms is that it has the effect of shutting off thinking about the ideas that feminists represent
– if you kill the messenger, you don’t need to face squarely the implications of the message.
And let’s not kid ourselves – feminist ideas are threatening to the conservative, white,
heterosexual male power structure that made someone like Rush Limbaugh a star in the first
place.
You can see the desire of some men to retreat into a world where they can act like “real men”
and not have to worry about treating women as equals in a lot of different places in the media
system. Just recently there’s been an upsurge in what’s been called the men’s shows, like
the “X show” or “Happy Hour” or a show actually called the “Man Show” where these mostly
white men sit around and talk about sports and beer and sex, and surround themselves with
highly sexualized women out of some male fantasy world who are not at all threatening. In
fact these shows are the fantasy world that some boys and men would like to live in – a world
set in the past where men could be men and where women knew their job was to look good
and not ask questions.
Around the same time the women’s movement was challenging male power, the gay and
lesbian movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, began to challenge heterosexual
power and disrupt heterosexual power and privilege. Many heterosexual people, men and
women, responded very positively to these changes and welcomed the changes in their own
families as well as in the culture, the more open culture.
[Man in parade] Hey, this is my son. I’m marching for his rights.
JACKSON KATZ: But many heterosexuals did not respond very well at all and in fact there
was a backlash.
[Message left on answering machine of gay activist] Gay boy, gay boy, gay boy… I hope
you die of AIDS.
[Message left on answering machine of gay activist] Go to hell you lousy homosexual. I
hope you die of AIDS.
[Message left on answering machine of gay activist] I kill fags, you fucking losers. Die!
JACKSON KATZ: One of the most virulent aspects of that backlash is the level of violence
being perpetrated by young, presumably heterosexual men against gay men, lesbians, and
transgendered people.
[NBC News] It was one a.m. Wednesday morning, when Shepherd, a small man, was
allegedly beaten with the butt of a pistol, burned with cigarette butts, and finally tied spread
eagle to the fence and left to die. Today, two young men, Russell Henderson and Aaron
McKinney, who whispered an obscenity as he came into court, were charged.
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JACKSON KATZ: The rise in anti-gay violence is one of the clearest indications that a lot of
young men are very insecure and anxious about their sexual and gender identities as the
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culture increasingly opens up. Why else would some of these young men target gay men for
brutal violence? Is it supposed to show themselves, or their friends, that they’re “real men”?
Doesn’t the very fact that they need to prove it by beating people up demonstrate the depths
of their own anxieties and self-hatred? Violence, abuse, and harassment by young men
directed towards gays harms the victims, first and foremost. And it keeps a lot of gay people
in the closet out of fear. It also helps fuel the pain and self-loathing that accounts for the fact
that nearly one third of all teens who kill themselves are gay. But it serve another function as
well, and that is it sends a message to heterosexual males that they better not try on any
style of manhood that breaks out of the accepted norm. Because they too might become the
victims of violence and abuse.
[Movie] Doesn’t this cafeteria have a no fags allowed rule?
[Movie] Unhappy, faggot?
[Movie] You a queer?
[Movie] Oh you’re a big tough country faggot, ain’t you?
[Movie] What do you faggots want?
JACKSON KATZ: A number of scholars have argued that on top of all the internal social
movements that were transforming American life in the 1960s, there was an external aspect
as well that is represented by the loss of the Vietnam War. And one way that some people
responded to that was to say that we lost in Vietnam because we had lost our masculine
pride. In fact the Sylvester Stallone character Rambo is based on this idea that if America
reasserted its masculinity everything would be fine again.
Here was Rambo the ultimate in rugged individuals who took on whole armies. And what
Rambo in some ways represented was macho, sort of American men saying that we didn’t
really lose in Vietnam, what really caused us the defeat was the wimpy anti-war movement
and spineless politicians.
[Movie: Rambo] You wanted my war – you asked me, I didn’t ask you. And I did what I had
to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win.
JACKSON KATZ: But if a real man came in and kicked some butt then our problems would
be solved. Well, Hollywood produced a series of films in the late 1970s, including Rambo
and others, in the early 1980s, that sent the strong message that the reason why we lost is
because we had lost our masculine will. We had lost that rugged individual ideal that we’re
going to go in and kick butt when we need too.
In addition to Rambo, there was another Stallone character that reflected the tensions that
many men felt in response to some of the really big changes catalyzed by the various social
movements of the 1960s, and that was Rocky Balboa. Like most of my friends, I love Rocky
as an inspirational underdog story. I used to hum the theme song to myself when I’d go
running to train for football. But the film can also be read as a metaphor for white working
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class men reasserting their authority against the challenges to that authority that had come
from all these movements, especially the civil rights movement. So when Rocky takes