Gender Roles :: Informative

As boys raise into men, some(prenominal) struggle with what makes real men. This struggle often dramatically changes the childly person. This struggle is greatly exacerbated by the medias portrayal of men. Gretel Ehrlichs to the highest degree Men deals with the stereotypical image of men and what real men are like. Richard Wrights The piece Who Was Almost a Man shows a late man who feels so derided by every peerless thinking of him as a boy that he buys a numbfish to make himself more powerful. Tim OBriens The Things They Carried is about a group of soldiers who all have different methods of heading with their own emotions at the death of a comrade. The media, Hollywood being one of the main culprits, often depicts true men as being tall, dark, and physically strong. They dont feel pain and are able to fight, every with their hands or weapons. They are often emotionally hardened, not display tenderness. The media presents men as macho, and trigger happy. (Ehrlich 127). Th is presents serious problems for young boys who are outset to mature into men. Young men are often told to be yobbo and to man up. Many boys are taught that crying is for girls and are called cry-babies if they do cry. This is fantastically hard on young guys who compare themselves to men like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger and see absolutely no resemblance. These boys are often troubled by a growing peril from contrasting themselves to the unrealistic image of men. The insecurity spawned by this idolatry of the machismo can lead young guys to resort to drastic measures in order to be recognized as men. In The Man Who was Almost a Man, Dave Sunders, a seventeen-year-old African-American in the years later the Civil War, says that he was going to get a gun and coiffe shooting, then they couldnt talk to him as though he were a little boy (Wright 144). He later reasons that He could kill a man with a gun like this And if he were holding his gun in his hand, nobody cou ld run over him they would have to respect him.(Wright 148). Dave at last shoots a donkey that will take him two years to gift for, so he runs away from his home and his responsibility (Wright 154). For him, as for many youth today, the desire to be deemed manly leads to many poor choices.