Sunday June 14

  Richard Beach, in Teachingmedialiteracy.com, (2007) makes the point that media representations re-present” our perceptions of groups or phenomena.  In this way, the media has the power not only to reflect the beliefs of a culture to craft them as well.  I believe this can be seen in the portrayals of young men in the media and the absence of attention given by the media to the transition from boyhood to mature manhood.  This can be seen by comparing some portrayals of boys in the media to some ideas seen in the fields of anthropology as well as literature.

            Let’s consider first some of the images of boys we currently see in the media.  There is the “slacker” type who is marked by his lack of ambition to do much of anything.  He does not do well in school and does not care to.  He often has a sense of humor and through his charm convinces viewers that his lack of ambition is just part of “boys being boys”.  Bart Simpson is the quintessential slacker boy.  Also, there is the “thug” whose claim to fame is his disdain for authority or the law.  His worldview is often misogyntistic and egocentric, characterized by his pursuit of beautiful women and material objects.  We often see this type portrayed in rap or hip hop music.  A third type we see is “The Nerd”.  He is the character that viewers laugh at rather than with.  He is the antithesis of the previous two types and is rarely the hero.  Viewers may feel sorry for him but they rarely care to emulate him.  “The Athlete” is the prototypical captain of the football team.  He is known only for his athletic talent; intelligence or ambition are unimportant.  There is the “Player” who, like the “thug” successfully pursued women, but the player often has a pleasant personality that causes viewers to ignore his dubious moral standards or doubtfully clean medical history.  Joey Tribianni from Friends or Barney from How I Met Your Mother are good, albeit older, examples.

            Of course there are other types, and there are plenty of regular boys as well.  However, the message that seems to be sent to boys is that society has low expectations of them.  It’s OK to be a slacker or a player or a thug because that’s what we expect of boys.  Leave achievement and good grades and morality up to the girls—boys are meant to have fun and look out for number one.

            There have always been boys who fit some of these types.  Tom Sawer comes to mind as a “slacker” character who loved to get away with bending the rules.  He was harmless and readers loved him for his impish charm.  George Gibbs from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is an example of an athlete who didn’t care much for school.  So the phenomenon of “boys being boys” is nothing new.  However, a concerning trend has been occurring over the last fifty years.  Leonard Sax documents the trend of a lack of attention being paid in our society of the transition from boyhood to manhood in his book Boys Adrift.

Sax writes, ““Almost every culture of which we have detailed knowledge takes great care in managing this transition to adulthood.  One example: The !Kung bushmen of southwest Africa, who call themselves “the harmless people.”  Their culture is nonviolent: war is unknown.  They have no warriors and no tradition of combat.  “Yet even here, according to anthropologist David Gilmore, ‘In a culture that treasures gentleness and cooperation above all things, the boys must earn the right to be called a man by a test of skill and endurance.  They must single-handedly track and kill a sizable adult antelope, an act that requires courage and hardiness. Only after their first kill of such a buck are they considered men and permitted to marry” (Sax 2007, pg. 166).  Anthropologically, the transition from boy to man is something  that is treated with the utmost importance in cultures around the world, including in every subset of American culture.  Sax cites anthropologist David Gilmore in describing another example: “This heroic image of an achieved manhood…has been widely legitimized in U.S. cultural settings, ranging from Italian American gangster culture to Hollywood Westerns, private eye tales, Rambo imagoes, and children’s He-Man dolls and games” (Sax 2007, pg. 173).  We also see importance being given to this transition in literature, as manhood is something that is achieved through a trial or test, something that is earned.  We see this in mythology with the quest archetype and in the literature of Hemingway and Faulkner.  In films we can see this coming of age as well, such as in The Hustler, Rebel without a Cause, or On the Waterfront.  In all of these examples we see a boy go through a significant trial and come out on the other side a man.  

            But these images, according to Sax, have changed in the last fifty years.  In The Hustler, Rebel without a Cause, and On the Waterfront, we see ordinary boys become ordinary men.  They experience the death of a close friend, which challenges them to become men, and through this struggle, they become noble.  These stories are set in their own time, in locations where they could actually happen.  But stories like these are rare today.  Either we have superheores (Batman, Spiderman, etc) or stories like Braveheart and The Gladiator, Star Wars/Star Trek, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings.  It seems like movie makers cannot find a plausible tale of a boy becoming a man that is set in contemporary society with real characters in a real place (Sax 2007, pg. 173).

            It is true that the current lack of representation of a transition to manhood is absent from the media, as it is absent from mainstream culture as well.  Observances of this transition are relegated to religious ritual or quaint anachronism.  Boys are expected to enter into manhood without society noticing or caring.  And the images they have to guide them are questionable at best.  This is one factor that has led Dr. Sax and others to be concerned about the trend of “underachieving and unmotivated young men”.  We set low expectations for boys and then make little to nothing of any transition to become men and we are left with a culture of slackers, thugs, and players who, as men, are unlikely to change much.  This is an example of what Richard Beach noted as he described the media’s power to represent as well as to “re-present” cultural ideas.