The Tough Guise: Teaching Violent Masculinity as the Only Way to Be a Man

Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood and American Culture explores the relationship between mainstream media content and the construction of violent masculine norms within contemporary United States society. Anti-violence educator Jackson Katz expands upon the themes of the original film, Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity, (Jhally et al. 1999) adding more in-depth analysis, updated exemplars, as well as new information to this second film. What has remained the same is that Katz asks the audience to challenge those aspects of media that he contends teach boys and men to use aggression and violent behavior as defining aspects of their identity. Also like the first film, Tough Guise 2 examines mass shootings, violence against women, homophobia, sexual violence, and redemptive violence to emphasize that violence is largely a taught behavior. According to Katz, boys andmen in the current U.S. culture must put up a front, a tough guise, which hides their vulnerabilities or those individual characteristics that are not considered masculine. Those who fall short of being considered masculine are at risk of being subjected to ridicule and shaming. The tough guise standard cuts across lines of race and class within the U.S. Gun violence, particularly male-initiated gun violence within in the U.S., is a major portion of both films. Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provides evidence of not only an increase in firearm-related violence in the U.S, but a clear gender disparity in the perpetration of these acts (FBI 2013; 2014a, b). Males commit the vast majority of these acts. However, as Katz illustrates, the media tends to present the information in a gender-neutral manner. Headlines use words such as shooter, teenager, suspect, kid, murderer or phrases such as kids killing kids or youth violence to describe the identity of the person committing the shooting. When girls or women commit violent acts, Katz points out that their gender becomes the story. According to the FBI, the estimated homicide rate in the U.S. has declined from 5.0 per 100,000 population in 2009 to 4.5 per 100,000 population in 2013 (FBI 2014b). However, over this same period of time, the proportion of homicides committed by firearm has increased from 66.9 to 69.0 % (FBI 2014a). Although gender was unknown for 28.0 % of the offenders, the majority of homicides were committed by male offenders (64.3 %) (FBI 2014a). In addition, according to the FBI’s study on active shooter incidents, 160 active shooter incidents have occurred resulting in 1043 casualties (486 deaths and 557 wounded). The data show not only an increase in incidents, from an annual average of 6.4 incidents in 2000– 2006 to an average of 16.4 incidents in 2007–2013, but also an increase in casualties (annual average of 35.3 casualties in 2000–2006 compared to an annual average of 113.7 casualties in 2007–2013). An overwhelming majority of these active shooter incidents were committed by male perpetrators (154/160; 96.2 %) (FBI 2013). How can this gender disparity in homicide and active shooter incidents be explained? Katz argues that this gender disparity is typically explained by focusing on evolutionary and biological underpinnings of violence. From an evolutionary perspective males have been programmed to be violent due to their identification as hunters and protectors. The biological perspective focuses on examining the role of * Melissa Bell mbell@chatham.edu