How Is Masculinity Constructed in Our Culture / Portrayed in the Media? Martin Amis on Literature

Masculinity is a set of qualities, characteristics or roles generally considered typical of, or appropriate to, a man. It can have degrees of comparison: "more masculine", "most masculine'". The opposite can be expressed by terms such as "unmanly'" or epicene. A near-synonym of masculinity is virility (from Latin vir, man). Constructs of masculinity vary across historical and cultural contexts. The dandy, for instance, was regarded as an ideal of masculinity in the 19th century, but is considered effeminate by modern standards.[2]
Academic study of masculinity underwent a massive expansion of interest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with courses in the United States dealing with masculinity rising from 30 to over 300.[3] This has led to the investigation of the intersection of masculinity with other axes of social discrimination and also to the use of concepts from other fields -- such as feminism's model of the social construct of gender.




According to a paper submitted by Tracy Tylka to the American Psychological Association (APA), in contemporary America: "Instead of seeing a decrease in objectification of women in society, there has just been an increase in the objectification of both sexes. And you can see that in the media today." Men and women restrict their food intake in an effort to achieve what they consider an attractively thin body, in extreme cases leading to eating disorders.[29]
Thomas Holbrook, also a psychiatrist, cites a recent Canadian study indicating as many as one in six of those with eating disorders were men.[30]
"Younger men and women who read fitness and fashion magazines could be psychologically harmed by the images of perfect female and male physiques," according to recent research in the United Kingdom. Some young women and men exercise excessively in an effort to achieve what they consider an attractively fit and muscular body, which in extreme cases can lead to body dysmorphic disorder or muscle dysmorphia.
Although the actual stereotypes may have remained relatively constant, the value attached to masculine stereotypes have changed over the past few decades and it has been argued that masculinity is an unstable phenomenon and never ultimately achieved.

The driver crash rate per vehicle miles driven is higher for women than for men; although, men are much more likely to cause deaths in the accidents they are involved in.[34] Men drive significantly more miles than women, so, on average, they are more likely to be involved in motor vehicle accidents. Even in the narrow category of young (16--20) driver fatalities with a high blood alcohol content (BAC), a male's risk of dying is higher than a female's risk at the Same BAC level.[35] That is, young women drivers need to be more drunk to have the same risk of dying in a fatal accident as young men drivers.

A growing body of evidence is pointing toward the deleterious impact of masculinity (and hegemonic masculinity in particular) on men's health help-seeking behaviour.[36] American men make 134.5 million fewer physician visits than American women each year. In fact, men make only 40.8% of all physician visits, that is, if women's visits for pregnancy are included, childbirth and associated obstetrical and gynecological visits. A quarter of the men who are 45 to 60 do not have a personal physician. Many men should go to annual heart checkups with physicians but do not, increasing their risk of death from heart disease. Men between the ages of 25 and 65 are four times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than women. Men are more likely to be diagnosed in a later stage of a terminal illness because of their reluctance to go to the doctor.
Reasons men give for not having annual physicals and not visiting their physician include fear, denial, embarrassment, a dislike of situations out of their control, or not worth the time or cost.

Martin Amis on His Writing Career, the British Literary Scene, and His Father Kingsley (2000)

Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949) is a British novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.



Amis's work centers around the apparent excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirizes through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness." Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to heavily influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.

Amis was born in Swansea, South Wales. His father, Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; his mother, Hilary "Hilly" Bardwell, was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He has an older brother, Philip, and his younger sister, Sally, died in 2000. His parents divorced when he was twelve.

He attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s—including the Bishop Gore School (Swansea Grammar School), and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys—where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising." The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father lectured.

In 1965, at age 15, he played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica.

Fukushima The Nuclear Doomsday

My heart is sickened at the level of radiation that has been released in Japan by Tepco's Fukushima's Daiichi 4 nuclear reactors meltdowns over the past 2 1/2 years. No one knows where all the melted nuclear cores went, but it is speculated, they were liquefied and blown up into the wind streams that are moving across North America. Proof is in the pudding, that no one can be trusted with this technology. It's highly dangerous and volatile. Nuclear energy is not our friend and never will be. Insanity rules the day, because, who in their right mind, would build one of these nuclear reactors to boil water to make electricity? And yet, someone did, the U.S., big energy giant, General Electric (GE) built all the Fukushima nuclear reactors. The Japanese Government, and Tepco, who runs Fukushima Daiichi as well as the U.S. big corporation giant, General Electric, the maker of these nuclear reactors, are responsible for Japan's now nuclear wasteland. They contaminated their entire food supply, their farmlands, their ecosystem, the Pacific Ocean, they've nuked their own people & sacrificed their children for some miserable existence until they finally die of radiation poisoning. What kind of inhuman animals, sacrifice children, so they can make big bucks off dirty, toxic, nuclear energy? Their numbers don't add up! Why? Was if for the nuclear weapons of war; the nuclear bombs or was it for, the nuclear tipped ammo? I hope, this is the end of nuclear energy, once and for all time. Between that and big oil, fracking the planet, the oil mining companies are one in the same, destroying our fresh water supply and contaminating the ground with chemical fracking solutions. Is it really worth it when we have a perfectly good clean, free sources of energy. We have unlimited, free, sunlight to work with, the wind, or thermal energy, passive energy, organic matter engines, and more. So what, these guys don't make obscene profits, we don't need them. Why base our monetary currency on barrels of oil, a dirty, toxic energy when we could easily base it on a clean resource. How about doing the whole world a big service and base it on Food? Now, that's a novel idea. I think it's time to say no, to those who tell us we have to eat or drink contaminated food. They lie, no one, has to eat contaminated food or anything bio engineered. We're organic and need organic food to thrive. It's a no brainer! I think it's high time we change and not wait for them too.