The Mask You Live In

Last week was one for the books in the YESS room as we dove head first into the ever present theme of toxic masculinity. Our previous week's lessons on Gun Violence and Dating Abuse brought up undertones questioning and critiquing masculinity in our culture and my classes had a lot to say about their own experiences with it so I felt that it was a great time to show them one of my favorite documentaries - The Mask You Live In.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc45-ptHMxo

The doc exposed a plethora of startling statistics, including:

• Boys are twice as likely to drop out of school as girls and four times more likely to be expelled.
• Compared to a girl the same age, boys in late adolescence are 7 times more likely to die by thier own hand.
• Boys under 17 drink more heavily than any other population group. 

As early as elementary school, boys confront messages that encourage them to disconnect from their emotions, devalue authentic friendships, objectify and degrade women and girls, and resolve conflicts through violence.

The Representation Project’s The Mask You Live In curriculum equips K-12 with the critical thinking skills to question gender stereotypes that interconnect with race, class, and circumstance. Students define masculinity and have the opportunity to critique gender representations and norms as they create their own positive representations of boys and men. Additionally, our students learn to develop healthy self-concepts and interpersonal relationships.

We participated in the activity as seen in the documentary where they wrote words describing how we present ourselves at school and in public spaces; what we want others to perceive us as. On the back of the mask we wrote words describing who we really are behind that front that we curate. These fronts, or these masks, are put on for survival. They are handed to us by society and the environment we grow up in and, after a while, we grow to fit those masks, or we slowly and implicitly become them by repeatedly hiding vulnerable emotions. This hyper-masculine narrative links gaining respect and solving problems with violence and provides insight to why boys act out when they are depressed. It begs so many questions for educators and students alike and exposes a universal controversial discussion that prompts us to all explore our own inner masculinity (whether we are male, female, somewhere in between, or neither) and how it can be healthy for us and poisonous for us. What is the line? At what point is emotional expression "weak", or is it courageous rather than weakness? In what ways does dominant culture try to put us in a box? These are all questions we answered and debated by analyzing the media.

What we learn from video games, movies, television, music, and pop culture has everything to do with how we view ourselves in the world. To further explore this, I had them draw a fictional character that they looked up to and share it with everyone while describing personality characteristics that belong to that character. A lot of the boys chose superman, batman, and video game characters (like the one above) and many of the girls chose cartoons or Wonder Woman. We found that the girls valued empathy, justice, emotional strength, and grit and the boys valued fighting evil with violence, having superpowers, and incredibly unrealistic physique while having the responsibility of saving the world or an entire village. This was an issue that they realized before I even shined a light on it... Does idolizing these figures put an unhealthy pressure on us to mirror them? Where is the line that represents a healthy role model?

We explored many definitions including, but not limited to, gender identity and biological sex. It took a while to get the concepts across belonging to the fact that gender is between your ears; it is an innate identity generated in your brain. How people wish to express that gender they most comfortably identify with does not always match their biological sex. This is seen as taboo, but why? Because of the gender roles that are socially constructed, it is the box society has placed on you to be seen as accepted and "successful" in life.

The Netflix documentary is a 9th-12th level content and with proper fast forwarding (I can give you the times), it is an extremely eye opening learning opportunity and makes for fruitful discussions that leave students with the eagerness to challenge the status quo. They were left with the task to QUESTION EVERYTHING! Be curious to find out why society is the way it is, realize when it is unhealthy and challenge it in your own way to do your part in helping to make this world a more inclusive place.

Until next week,
Ms. C