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THE MASK YOU LIVE IN follows boys and young men as they struggle to stay true to themselves while negotiating America’s narrow definition of masculinity, and contemplates how society can raise a healthier generation of boys and young men.
Director: Jennifer Siebel Newsom
Share THE MASK YOU LIVE IN with the women, men, boys, and girls in your life. Consider watching MISS REPRESENTATION, Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s companion film analyzing society’s misrepresentation of girls.
Visit The Representation Project website, which offers links to videos, articles, and further reading material.
Read a book about gender issues written by a member of THE MASK YOU LIVE IN cast. Try Lise Eliot’s Pink Brain, Blue Brain, Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, Joe Ehrmann’s Season of Life: A Football Star, a Boy, a Journey to Manhood, or Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection.
Sign up to take The Representation Project’s Pledge: “I pledge to use my voice to challenge society’s limiting representations of gender.” You will receive weekly suggestions of practical tasks you can do to this effect.
“I didn’t really identify with this group or this culture at all,” said a man in a recent leadership development session I was running. He was standing among a group of male colleagues, to discuss what it was like to be a man today. “I really don’t like the jockeying for position, the loud voices, the false cheeriness,” he explained. The executive facing him — ex-military, 6’5” — looked astonished. “That’s all we were ever taught to do,” he said, “Take a position and hold it.”
Continue reading here.
Find out in this article.
Read IndiWires interiew with filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom here.
“The white identity politics, grievance mongering, conspiracies, paranoid thinking, eliminationist rhetoric about liberals and progressives, hostility to women, rage against immigrants, anxiety about those who are not “Christian”, and mainstreaming of white supremacy and white racial resentment, are the fuel for toxic white masculinity.”
Read the full letter on SALON.
The lowdown on everything from the ‘gay gene’ to the animals with four genders.
Read the article on BBC.
“To start reversing the effects of the boy code parents need first to examine their own biases, assumptions, and fears about the emotional expressiveness of boys, especially around vulnerable emotions such as fear, hurt, sadness, shame, and neediness. Parents may be surprised to find out how they themselves have internalized many of the oppressive messages of the boy code in terms what is a ‘real boy’ and what they believe will subsequently make him into a ‘real man.'”
Read the full article here.
