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“Tough Guise” – A Reflection

The premise of the “Tough Guise” psycho- and socioanalysis of modern society is that the root of the majority of problems can be traced back to men feeling an innate need to be violent in one fashion or another. While this has some kernel of truth, since men have been genetically built to be the dominant, and thereby more prone to violence, gender (despite all cultural attempts to the opposite), men will always be found perpetrating some act of violence, ranging from base anger and yelling to murder. But blaming 40-50% of the world’s population for 95% of its problems is not only unintelligent, but highly suspect.

Over the last 25 years, parts of American culture have continually attempted to emasculate the male portions of its population, by any number of means- the most popular of which is the claim of violence. In today’s society there is something of a “backwards gender discrimination”, whereby women being “beaten” by men is highly publicized and critically reviewed, but most actions in the opposite direction, women perpetrating violence to men, are ignored or viewed as “women empowerment.” It is such a culture that promotes the very ignorance of our genetic roots, and a gender bias so strong that some women refuse to even speak to men, that is causing problems in our society, especially with young and impressionable children. These are the same children who are proving to grow up considerably weaker, in both body and mind, than previous generations.

Men, as a gender, are not inherently evil. Nor are we some sort of criminally violent demonspawn. But to use statistics claiming a high rate of violence from men to men as a metric for our natural level of evilness is absurd. For a young boy, a large part of life is dealing with raging hormones. Not hormones that make you cry or emotional, but hormones that alter your thought process, entice you to be violent, and generally alter your behavior as well. This is one of the shortcomings of analyzing men from the outside female perspective- women may understand on an intellectual basis the difference between male and female hormonal surges, but the simple fact is that they try to draw parallels between their own adolescent experiences when absolutely no parallels can be made. So for budding adolescent men, violence is a natural way of life, and, as both history and science show, always has been. It is completely natural for boys to fight each other, trying to discover their roles in the male “pecking order,” just the same as other activities that may be construed as violence are nothing more than further exploration into the dominion of masculinity.

If I were to do extensive research on the background of the author of “The Tough Guise”, I am fairly confident he will have had a tumultuous childhood. Furthermore, he probably was not one of the so-called Alpha Males in highschool, and likely grew up in an all-female household, or, at a minimum, a household with emasculated men. Why? Because he seems to have a deep and searing issue with the fact that he’s a man, let alone with the male gender itself. Drawing conclusions, where none are to be made, about the male gender, combined with his highly effeminate mannerisms, would seem to point to a burning inner hatred and a desire for revenge on actions that happened 20 years ago in his past. However, it would seem that his attempts at just that have failed, since he has only succeeded in pandering to an audience of women who are ready to blame men for their problems, and not the world at large. Better luck next time?

All of this is not to say that violence doesn’t happen, because it does. Nor am I suggesting that men are pacifists as a gender. The plainly obvious fact is that men are violent by nature, to varying degrees, and will continue to be for the rest of the future based on evolutionarily created biological processes and human DNA. However, there are issues in modern society that need to be addressed and the “gangsta” mentality, “chollo” for those of Hispanic descent, is merely one of them. But the larger question is not whether or not they are issues, but rather are these issues any different than those of eras past? The modern “gangsta” and his “gang” are really nothing more than a modern adaptation of the mafia’s gangster mindset of an era past, with minor changes in clothing, speech patterns, and weaponry. Parallels between today’s issues of “violence by men” can largely be drawn to events in prior ages and generations, showing that they are not new issues, but rather new variations on an old theme. And when fingers are pointed to jailhouse statistics, can an answer not be that we, as a society, are trying to improve ourselves? That our laws, and those enforcing them, are not doing a better job than they have in ages past? That our population has had explosive growth in the last few decades, which, from a purely mathematical point of view, will naturally result in a larger prison population and more crimes perpetrated?

Those individuals, and groups, who cannot remove the emotional element from such analyses of our culture cannot be taken seriously, and should not be given a pulpit on which to speak. Science, analysis, and statistics are better left to those who understand how to handle them with calm precision, and without bias. As scientists, engineers, doctors, and mathematicians the world over will tell you: there is a reason and solution to everything, and humans are no different. We may be biological in nature, but our thought processes and actions tend to have a biologically and genetically influenced bias.

One that many pseudo-scientific groups and individuals, such as Psychiatrists and Psychologists, tend to ignore.

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