Running head: DEFINING MASCULINITY 1
Defining Masculinity: Pop Cultures Effect On Young Men
Ivan Lopez
The University of Texas at El Paso
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While the feminine roles in our society are commonly talked about, the roles of
masculinity usually go about unspoken. Tough Guise: Violence, Media, & the Crisis in
Masculinity, is a YouTube video produced by The Media Education Foundation and narrated by
Jackson Katz. The purpose of this video is to examine the effect that pop-culture and the media
have on young boys growing up in the United States. This essay will examine the rhetorical
appeals (ethos, pathos, and logos) used in the video to inform the intended audience of the issue.
It can be inferred by the various young men that are being interviewed in the first few
seconds of the video that its target audience is high school to college age young men. The video
runs approximately seven minutes and two seconds but in order to fully understand the
information author is presenting, fifteen minutes should be allocated to watching and re-
watching the video. The purpose of the information presented in the video is to inform young
men of the United States pop-culture and media effect on how masculinity is perceived.
Ethos
Jackson Katz, an educator who created a gender violence prevention and education
program called Mentors in Violence Prevention, narrates the video. This brings the audience to
believe that the author is indeed qualified to make his claim. The video beings with various
young men giving adjectives as to what it really means to be a man. You hear the words
physical, strong, powerful, and tough numerous times. Towards the end of the video there is an
interview with an unnamed young woman giving her perspective on her male friends. When she
says them around, they act tough but in private they are the complete opposite. There is
weakness in her credibility because the interview is abrupt and you know absolutely nothing
about the young woman being interviewed. Because the main source of information comes from
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the creator of this video, it could lead the viewer to a very biased view of the subject. The video
needs other credible sources that perhaps are on the other side of the issue at hand.
Pathos
From the beginning of the video, you can see and hear the passion in the narrators voice.
He attempts to make an emotional connection with the audience by providing various interviews
with young men, defining masculinity. He wants to make the viewers sympathize for the young
men and boys who are internalizing their feelings because of the way the media presents
masculinity. He provides a visual image of a box that uses young shirtless boys in a masculine
pose with words like tough, strong, independent, and respected in the interior of the box. On the
outside of the box are words that boys and young men would be called for not conforming to
these stereotypes. Words like wuss, wimp, fag and sissy. Other than that, the video lacks an
emotional appeal to the audience at hand. The author does not go into detail on how the
internalization of emotions is connected to pop-culture and the emotional toll it takes on young
men and boys.
Logos
The logical support is probably the weakest of the three. The narrator uses various biased
statistics comparing men and women but is unable to provide information on how that
information was gathered. Over 85% of the people who commit murder are men, and the
women that do often do so as a defense against men who are battering them (J. Katz, n.d.). He
goes on compare the two on issues of assault, domestic violence, dating violence, child sexual
abuse, and rape. With these statistics, the narrator is putting women on a pedestal and portraying
men as these archaic creatures. These graphs, however, do not show the viewer a biased how the
media and pop-cultures perception of masculinity is affecting young men and boys, it just shows
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how men are more violent than women. The statics should be able to speak to the issue at hand
and not deviate from the topic.
The video was not able to effectively present the information regarding the effect of pop-
culture and the medias portrayal of masculinity in young boys and men. The video was very
biased and never really went into too much detail. The beginning of the video showed various
TV and movies clips portraying men as these macho, violent people but after the first few
minutes the video lost focus and began to talk more about statistics that had no credibility and
nothing to do with the pop-culture references from the beginning of the video. All three appeals
were lackluster and the narrators biased opinion was evident throughout the video. There is no
real foundation or evidence in this video that the media and pop-culture has a negative effect on
the portrayal of masculinity.
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References
Katz, J. [ChallengingMedia]. (2006, October 4). Tough Guise: iolence, Media the Crisis in
Masculinity [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3exzMPT4nGI/
