The Mask You Live In (2015)
Compared to girls, research shows that boys in the United States are more likely to be diagnosed with a behaviour disorder, prescribed stimulant medications, fail out of school, binge drink, commit a violent crime, and/or take their own lives. The Mask You Live In asks: as a society, how are we failing our boys?
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This documentary is fantastic! As a woman, I never really considered this perspective. I never realized the struggles men face on a daily basis. I realize now how the mass media, marketing, and society put so much pressure on men. I'm very glad I saw this film and am much more understanding of what men go through. The statistics in this film were shocking to me. I had heard stories from male friends that these problems existed but so much of it is viewed as normal and swept under the rug. This film sheds light on how as a society we shame men into being what we think is easier to compartmentalize instead of giving them the social freedom they so much deserve. I don't think I would have watched this had it not been recommended to me, but I'm so thankful I did. I wish all parents would watch this so that their sons don't have to go through these hardships.
Hard to believe these women couldn't find a man (other than the severely traumatized or psychiatrists in it) to work on this. If they had, they might have better addressed the enormous role women play in this problem. The vast majority of women encourage this wounded alpha male behavior. Its what I tell my 14 year old son- you'll get those women who pathologize boyhood, like the filmmakers and most every female teacher he's ever had (anyone notice the dearth of positive female educators in this film?), or they are going to get the "I want a bad boy" from most young women. I tell him to just be decent, humble you, and sooner or later you'll find the minority of decent women out there. Take a look at online dating profiles of women. What's the two characteristic almost every woman asks for? "You have to be confident and make me laugh all the time." They don't want a real person. They don't know what to do with them when they find one. Full time confidence and weakness and vulnerability don't jibe, my dears.
This infomercial, I refuse to call it a documentary, is extremely creative in its deceptiveness. Besides being entirely inspired through the narrow, uncritical lens of feminist theory, this production never admits this. It has been specifically designed to groom the viewer into feminist ideology. I could not be more offended about the hypocrisy of this production. Imagine for just a moment, an all male production in the modern age, told through some narrow male ideology, defining female problems, explaining the lived female experience, providing contrived statistics produced through this narrow male ideology and proscribing the solutions to these female problems. I can only imagine the outrage. I can't even count the number of times that in feminist circles it has been stated unequivocally that men cannot understand female experience and that it is misogynist to even try...clearly double standards are perfectly fine as long as they benefit women. The anecdotes and the problems men experience are all real, it is the explanations for those problems that are either lacking or outright deceptive. Women's role in men's problems is completely ignored. Single mother households, something that is completely ignored (they are called single parent families...would not want to bring attention to the fact that 90% of single parent families are led by a mother...such a distraction to feminists...) in the program, is a massive factor in most of the statistics offered...suicide, school drop outs, criminal activity... It's a massive omission...and the "other" single parent families, those led by a father, do not experience these problems on anything like the same scale...both sons and daughters do much better in a father led single parent family than in one led by a mother...almost as well as intact two parent families in fact. Apparently that was not worth mentioning to the producers of this program. This is not at all surprising because if you know anything about feminist ideology, you would know that the ideology has serious problems with marriage...as in I am fairly confident that good feminists would like to see it abolished. If the above is not convincing enough, now we have to turn to the bogus statistics and crisis language that is used in the program, in particular, in regards to rape. A huge flag went up when the narrative promoted the idea of "rape culture". I am kind of surprised that this program went there. The producers had kept their agenda on such a subliminal level for the most part up to that point. The idea that we live in a "rape culture" has always been a huge stretch. Everyone, and I do mean everyone...at least in this country, is aware that rape is highly illegal. In prison, even among the concentration of violent criminals found there, rapists are at the bottom of the food chain. Everyone knows that. Even RAINN, the largest and most important anti-rape organizations had this to say about "rape culture"...and I quote "Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime." Feminists, of course, denounced this judgment but this does not alter the fact that feminists were happily quoting the statistics of the organization for many years before this apostasy. Feminists didn't realize that RAINN was interested in facts, not ideology. The other false statistic is THAT 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted on campus...what the program does not bother to tell you is that the study was done at only two universities, was done online, and suffered from a high non-response bias...super misleading. It is not to say that sexual assault is not a serious problem, it is. It's just not a crisis or an epidemic. The truth is that women have never been safer from violence, sexual or otherwise, in western societies now than at any point in human history...but, you see, that doesn't fit the feminist narrative, so it is omitted.In conclusion, I am both very disappointed, because men do experience a long litany of problems and they are rarely discussed, and offended...the producers didn't even feel the need to include a token male in the production when all of them would have been deeply offended at the reverse. I can't imagine that they couldn't have thought about and discussed that. Is it possible that they are so blinded by their ideology that they couldn't see the double standard? It beggars the imagination. I just wish that the resources that were used in creating this deceptive piece of indoctrination and feminist ideological grooming could have been used for another purpose, mainly the solutions to the many problems that men face. What a waste of time and resources.
Such an important topic, namely trying to get to the route of masculinity to understand more fully why good boys oft turn into bad men ... and maybe, what we as a society, can do about this. But this documentary misses the mark, and turns out to be a confused, meandering, expose using irrelevant shock stats, several dubious commentators (and several excellent ones) and sadistic raw footage to villanise the male. The finger of blame is pointed at fathers, schoolyard bullies, schools, social hierarchy, TV, Hollywood movies, Internet Porn, Video Games, sport culture and rap. The message is that male dominance is endemic and pervasive, resulting in a small percentage of sensitive male teens become alienated, depressed, violent and possibly suicidal and *all* women being at risk of rape, violence and abuse. The female aspect needs exploration in a separate documentary, and to confuse the two in a documentary that masquerades as a factual narrative explaining the modern-male psyche is a big miss.