Media Exploration of Men

The time is ripe in media for a burst of male exploration and discovery. For the last 40 years, men have been being upstaged by all the attention on women – women’s rights, women as peers in the workplace, and women’s allure being dangled in front of them all the time in media.  Throughout this same time period, women have grown leaps and bounds in personal empowerment and exploration of their gender-identity. Meanwhile, men are still men, yet the world has changed dramatically around them. Many of the jobs that used to go to men are now going to women, many high paying manufacturing and heavy labor jobs have disappeared with the restructuring of our economy, and over 60% of the graduate degrees awarded at Universities are now going to women.

Women have long been told it’s OK to indulge in all that it means to be a woman, but the rules of self-expression and self-discovery for men have always been much stricter and specifically rigid. Men as a species have been hugely typecast to be very predictable with regards to what men want and how men think and behave.  But with modern times has come a shift in human consciousness – among males and females – and it’s time for media to become a part of that consciousness.

Men are in a lull right now, and they need and want recognition – from women, as well as in order to rediscover their own personal power and purpose.  Humans, by necessity, used to better understand all our individual purposes in life, but with modern times it has become harder to recognize our unique path and purpose.  Men, in particular, have often relied on discovering their self-identity through group affiliation, and yet there are fewer and fewer outlets for men to have these self-validating male group experiences, unless they intently seek them out for themselves.

Women are insatiably curious about men, just as men are about women, and certainly women would be very accommodating of film exploring the boundaries of male identity. Women would love to see men explore themes of experiencial growing -- as men, as enlightened beings and as sexual beings. And men too would benefit from the self-validation that there is more to being a man than the very typical basics we generally see portrayed in media, which can be counted almost on one hand.

Media could be a powerful playfield for this exploration of the real male psyche and experience. Who are men today?  What are men today? What does it mean to be a man in today’s world?  These are questions that young men are struggling with today and it would probably be helpful for them if media explored these questions, rather than spewing images at them all the time that are confusing at best and often completely misrepresentative of actual reality.

Males need the opportunity to rediscover what it means to be male in the modern world.  Males need to see expressions of their true selves reflected back at them through art, just as girls and women need to see realistic images of  themselves reflected in art media. Media is the perfect discovery ground for men to discover and challenge what it means to be men in a world where the the roles of men have evolved in relation to women, work, family and society.