Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

 

Within the United States is the nation of Guyland, a demographic of 16-26 year-old white males who live by the credo “Bros Before Hos” and binge drink their ways through their formative years. At their most innocuous, the citizens of Guyland are nothing more than young men who play too many violent video games and watch too much porn (often with other guys). But at the core of Guyland are toxic mores that permit and encourage date rape, vile fraternity hazing and beating homosexuals.

Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, posits that the hyper-masculine culture that has emerged among young men is the male backlash to gender equality. With more women achieving the same things as men, men now feel they must assert their manliness in increasingly extreme ways – ways that usually incorporate the degradation of women. Additionally, the homogenization of American culture has created an atmosphere in which these guys have choices of where to turn for camaraderie, as citizens of Guyland have become the dominant social groups on many college campuses and high schools.

From interviews with hundreds of guys, Kimmel writes a highly readable account of the Guyland mentality and its consequences for those both inside and outside Guyland’s borders. 

Review of “The Longshots”

The idea that Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst would direct a family film like “The Longshots” is the stuff of late-night talk show jokes, an idea so absurd that there would seem to be some law of nature prohibiting it. But you’ve got to hand it to Durst. The guy skyrockets to fame and coolness, plummets twice as hard, and manages to earn himself a job as a film director. “The Longshots” is his second film, following up on “The Education of Charlie Banks” last year, and Durst and screenwriter Nick Santora should be lauded for their ability to make it slightly less mundane than most family comedies. The real life-based story follows Jasmine Plummer (Keke Palmer) from humiliated nerd at school to the first female quarterback of a Pop Warner football team in history. Her athleticism is nurtured by her uncle Curtis Plummer (Ice Cube), a washed out former football player (in college or high school? The movie never really tells us) who became unemployed after the manufacturing sector upped and left their town of Minden, Illinois. They’re seldom shown apart as the film moves from symphony-backed sentimentality to football-in-the-crotch gag. For as one-dimensional as a family film directed by Fred Durst and starring Ice Cube inevitably will be, though, the film at least includes some subtle socioeconomic commentary about how the departure of blue-collar jobs has impoverished small American towns, and – surprisingly – there aren’t any moments so horribly executed as to be considered intolerable. But “tolerable” is the strongest endorsement the movie gets.

 

One Family, Two Factions, Split Along the Cochlea

Perhaps it’s one of the ultimate exercises of postmodernism: what you call a disability, I call a culture. To the deaf, the malfunctioning cochleae are the source of their language and unbreakable bond between one another. And as Josh Aronson’s documentary “Sound and Fury” shows, the culture strives for its own posterity as does any other. Preventing a deaf child from hearing seems counterintuitive, if not downright abusive, to most who can hear. But Aronson provides an extraordinarily fair look at a debate that is mostly unknown to the hearing world: If the deaf are altered to hear, is it the end of deaf culture? And should deaf culture be preserved at such a cost anyway?