Topic > What it means to be a man in today's culture

“He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.” This means that men have a stereotype by default and are expected to meet expectations. Men feel like they aren't real men, they don't feel like they're enough, or they feel weak. Stereotypes create a false image of someone or something. The danger of a single story makes people victims of someone else's opinion just like what happened to Adichie “The consequence of a single story is that it robs people of dignity. It makes it difficult to recognize our equal humanity and emphasizes how we are different rather than how similar we are.” Adichie was a victim of one story, she is from Nigeria and moved to the US, her roommate thought she couldn't use the stove or speak English because that's what she saw in the media. Her roommate saw that Africa was only poverty and people dying of hunger waiting for someone to save them. There is a single story everywhere and this also happens with masculinity, there is a single story about being a man. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In today's culture being a man can be difficult because a "real man" should be tough and successful "The first lie every boy learns is that we associate masculinity with athleticism, size, strength, or some kind of ability.” Being a man in today's culture with the fitness industry, big men playing sports, all these things make some men not feel like a real man. Personally, I joined the gym because of these stereotypes , I weighed about 230 pounds and I told myself that this is not what a man should look like because I saw all these fit men on TV or in football players, athletic men basically . Adichie, in her speech states that “It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power.” Man is associated with success “The year I turned 26, as the head of my own brokerage firm, I made $49 million, which really pissed me off because it was three less than a million a week.' This is the stereotype of a real man, tenacious and successful, who puts everyone else behind him “What does a man do, Walter? He just endures, and he does it because he is a man despite everything.” stereotypes everywhere, as we can appreciate in this quote. The media are the biggest spreaders of stereotypes because they only show the bad situations “The single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are false but that they are incomplete, they make it so one story becomes the only story.” As this quote from Adichie says, stereotypes are incomplete, they only tell part of the story and that's where masculinity gets messed up because a man doesn't need help especially when it comes to how he feels “I keep my feelings to myself because somewhere I learned that this is what it means to be a male'. I feel connected to this quote and I think many other males feel connected to it because that's what we learn. For example, if a boy cries, he is “gay,” but if a girl cries, she is just expressing her emotions. For a man, looking weak or thinking he is weak can be really bad, a man has to be the alpha male to meet everyone else's expectations because the alpha male is the strongest and everyone else respects him and looks down when the alpha male is in front of them, and this is the stereotype of a man, but not all men feel this way and sometimes the.