Critical Analysis Of Tony Porter's 'Man Box'

Tony Porter, author, educator and activist, makes a call to men all over, and refers to the “Man Box” and all the negative gender socialization messages they learn at a young age, while reflecting back to his personal experiences from his own life. In reference to the ‘Man Box,” he points out the unspoken rules of what makes a man, and those rules are what he calls “straight up twisted.” Some of those are: do not be “like a woman” or “like a gay man,”” you have to be heterosexual, view women as property/objects, and you cannot cry or openly express emotions with the exception of anger. This “Man Box,” does not allow a man to step out of it without risking their masculinity, and to many men, that is the worst thing you can ever do. This all

Like in the insult scene from the Sandlot, when Ham tells Phillips that he plays ball like a girl, everyone in that scene gasped and stood in shock, because it was as if Ham took it too far. When it comes to the “Man Box,” there is no acting like a woman. Porter brings up when he spoke to a 12-year-old football player, and when he asked him, “How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your couch told you were playing like a girl?” Porter had expected that boy to say he would have felt mad or sad, but instead he said that “it would destroy me.” But what is wrong with being a girl or a gay man? We have been around a world where gender inequality exists and have subconsciously and consciously accepted and enforce a set sexuality and gender roles that we have been influenced to follow. Men have to be tough, masculine, and straight because society says they have to be; they cannot act like a sissy or a woman, which is referencing to all women and gay men being sensitive, dainty, and weak. It pulls men towards a homophobia, which Michael Kimmel has said it is more than just an irrational fear of gay men, it is the “fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men. We are afraid to let other men see that. Fear makes us ashamed, because the recognition of fear in ourselves is proof to

Porter brings up the day his family had to bury his teenage brother, and ten minutes after they buried him and all the women had left out of the vehicle, that was when his father started to cry. He knew his father did not want to cry in front of him, but he also knew that it would have been better to cry in front of his son than in front of the women. If his father were to do so, it would have left his manliness out of the box and breaking that rule of showing emotion. It is the same for women. They have to stay “pure,” in regards to their virginity, and they cannot wear anything that can lead them to getting rape, but they have to be sexy, and that they have to be second to men if not than they are not a real woman. It goes back to gender inequality in the world and how these set gender roles are to be fulfilled. C.J. Pascoe mentions about Judith Butler’s way to challenge this gender inequality, and that is if “individuals who deliberately engage in gender practices that render them culturally unintelligible, such as practices that are at odds with their apparent sex category, challenge the naturalness and inevitability of a rigid gender order,” if girls can engage in “masculinizing processes,”