The video is from popular television series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The lawyer is making a remark on masculinity and what it means to be a man in modern society. The episode as a whole was about a young boy and his father who went on a camping trip. In the camping trip, the young boy fails to shoot a rabbit while his older brother is able to shoot a bigger animal. The audience is given the notion that the father is disappointed in his son and assaults him. The father thinks he is making his sons into men by making them participate in what he considers masculine. The show is revolved around special victims that are assaulted mainly through heinous crimes such as rape. The mother and the brother of the young boy did not think that what the father was doing to the young boy was a big deal because he needed to learn to be a man. Not until the boy is in the school nurse’s office with tearing and bleeding coming from his behind that it comes to the attention of the officers. There is evidence that the young boy was sexually assaulted. Because of that assult, the young boy can not deal with the fact that his father raped him for not being manly enough and thus unlocks his father’s gun goes to his high school and starts shooting at the students. What the lawyer is talking about in the clip is that boys are raised up and taught to be masculine by means of physical force and fighting. He makes the argument that even though boys are taught to be this way it is no excuse for his excessive violence towards his peers.
We have learned that our peers and our school are the Secondary Groups that teach us how to act and behave based on our gender. The young boy chose to shoot his school because he saw that his father’s mindset was not unique. He saw that the definition of masculinity his father taught and acted upon was the same that the society around him believed. In his world, people had the same idea about what it meant to be a man however he did not know that everyone was like his father. It was his way of making a change and ending the cycle of violence. By destroying the society he knew that perpetuated that idea of masculinity he would be attacking his father and his ideas. We also learned about Social Learning theory in which we learn how to behave by watching those around us behave. He saw his father shot animals as a metaphor for dominance and he saw his brother being part of the football team. The men in his life were defining masculinity as it was taught and he saw himself lack in it. His attack on his school was a demonstration of dominance as he knew fit. To him, nothing could be more masculine than shooting people to insert his grandeur over people. This episode was a very plausible situation as to the consequences of today’s masculinity and what we teach children. We have learned that men benefit from the system but when those do not benefit or are punished for not fitting into their assigned boxes then they find extreme forms to demonstrate themselves as true outliers. We have seen in class that men tend to be more violent towards other men and in general. The violence portrayed here is an extreme consequence of masculinity and what it can do to the psyche of a man.
Word count: 603
abbysblog 