Manly Men and Manly Man-Films and how they're viewed- a personal experience.

Evan Lahee

When covering the subject of masculinity in media in class, it conjured up a long-buried memory.
Growing up I was always made fun of. I was the odd man out. The fat kid. The one who was always just finding out what was "cool" after the others had learned for days. Eventually this began to affect me worse as I grew older and began to take an interest in girls. After tiring of the "ewws" and rejections simply because "you're fat", I began to take a hint from the movies and animes I'd grown up with and go to the gym.

I did the best I can to believe I could be a Rocky Balboa, or train like Van Damme in Bloodsport, to be at the best of my ability and try to look like I had a good physique and (sadly) cared about my looks and appearance. After a couple years of "shaping up" and further watching these films, I decided to replicate the attitudes of these "manly", or what society had deemed "manly" archetypes in my own personal life, as an experiment of sorts to see which people in my life were easily influenced by what culture dictated, and which people were real. I put on the facade (to my close friends' knowledge of course) of a muscle-bound completely confident asshole, and sadly, it worked. The people I'd wanted acceptance from turned out to be the fake ones who took others at skin depth, never asking or prodding for the person beneath, face value was enough. This quickly allowed me to eliminate the people from my social life who were fake and allow in and keep the ones who were real and wanted to know the real me.

It's sad that a majority of the people I've met in my life so far have been this shallow, but luckily by this age and at college people know to look at the real person and past the type of clothes /physique / looks they have, which is a relief, and why my sick experiment has been over with for years and I've never been happier in that regard.