By Geenah Krisht
If gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors and attributes that society gives to men and women, why do gender issues only revolve around one sex—females? Men, boys, women and girls coexist in society, so these gender issues apply to every being.
When I asked my eleven-year-old brother what being manly meant to him, he answered, “It means that you are working hard and have a deeper voice.” I love this answer. It is naïve and observant.
However, I knew there was a deeper definition existing within him; he was just too young to extract it. So, I dug a little more.
When I asked him why he started working out and paying attention to his physique, he answered, “I want to be more muscular because then you can have a good body. If you are thin, it is just ugly. I want to be built rather than someone touching me and I fall down. But I don’t want to be scary big—just big enough.”
What is big enough?
Pause. Let me take you on a tangent. I’d like to clear up a few things. A feminist is a person, any person, male or female, who advocates or supports the rights and equality of women and men. It is that simple. Part of being a feminist is recognizing that the male population struggles too.
In just the last 15 years, movies, television shows, comic strips, advertisements, commercials and so on have almost always displayed men bare-chested with out-of-this-world physiques and twelve-pack abs, an unreal representation. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call this representation the “cool guy.”
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, kids today consume an average of seven hours of media a day, media that is jam-packed with the cool guy. And during these seven hours every day, 18 percent of adolescent boys are constantly noting how to become the cool guy. These boys grow up to become men who believe that they must be lean and muscular to meet societal expectations. Twenty percent of men agreed their bodies could use a bit of work, 43 percent of men are dissatisfied with their bodies, and a whopping 72 percent of men are unhappy with one aspect of their bodies.
Women, I challenge you to reclaim your title as a feminist and teach one another what it means in actuality. We also must value men who disallow the media to influence their levels of “manliness,” for every man is valuable. Let’s change this cultural environment together. Life is short, but not too short to make a difference.
