The Mask You Live In
男らしさという名の仮面
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
How American boys learn 'be a man'; the companion film to Miss Representation.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom made this documentary as a companion to Miss Representation, her 2011 film about how the media portray women. She began it after learning she was pregnant with a son, and part of it was funded on Kickstarter. It opens with Joe Ehrmann, a former NFL defensive lineman who became a high-school football coach. His father took him aside when he was small and told him to stop showing his feelings and learn to dominate; Ehrmann calls 'be a man' one of the most destructive phrases in the culture.
The film separates sex from gender, then follows boys through the stages at which they are taught to bury their softer selves: small boys learning that crying makes them sissies, teenagers proving themselves on the sports field or numbing the pain with drink and drugs, surrounded by pornography, young men who could not say what hurt. Among them are boys who were bullied and boys who turned on themselves, and a young man who describes, with regret, how he dropped a friend the others called effeminate. Around their stories, experts including the sociologist Michael Kimmel and the educator Jackson Katz connect this training to loneliness, violence, what the film calls rape culture, and statistics showing boys more likely than girls to be expelled, to binge drink, to commit violent crime and to take their own lives.
Its argument throughout is that empathy in boys is buried, not absent. Its last part turns to hope, showing coaches, mentors and fathers who are trying to raise boys differently, so that the next generation need not wear the mask.
Starring
Joe EhrmannHimself
A former NFL defensive lineman turned high-school coach, who calls 'be a man' one of the most destructive phrases in American culture.
Michael KimmelHimself
A sociologist, one of the experts who connect the boys' stories to the wider culture of manhood.
Jackson KatzHimself
An educator and author, among the commentators who link masculine norms to violence against women.
Why it matters
Siebel Newsom's film names something easy to see and hard to change: the training by which boys learn that feelings are weakness and dominance is a duty. Its subject is masculinity as a set of rules passed down by fathers, coaches, peers and screens, and it traces those rules to real costs, loneliness, drinking, violence against others and against oneself, that fall on boys and on the people around them. Critics were divided. Some found it overstated, too quick to read society's ills back to boyhood and too ready with easy answers at the end; others thought it belonged in every classroom. It is strongest in its plainest material: boys and men saying on camera what they were never allowed to say. The harder question it leaves is what a boy is meant to become once the mask comes off, and who will show him.