The Tough Guise: Teaching Violent Masculinity as the Only Way to Be a Man: Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood and American Culture. Created by Jackson Katz, directed and produced by Jeremy Earp, executive produced by Sut Jhally, Northampton, Mass., Media Education Foundation, 2013. 78 minutes $295.00 (University Price). ISBN:1-932869-91-3 www.mediaed.org

Sex Roles (2015) 72:566568 DOI 10.1007/s11199-015-0479-8

MEDIA REVIEW

The Tough Guise: Teaching Violent Masculinity as the Only Way to Be a Man

Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood and American Culture. Created by Jackson Katz, directed and produced by Jeremy Earp, executive produced by Sut Jhally, Northampton, Mass., Media Education Foundation, 2013. 78 minutes $295.00 (University Price). ISBN:1-932869-91-3 www.mediaed.org

Melissa Bell1 & Nichole Bayliss1

Published online: 7 May 2015# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood and American Culture explores the relationship between mainstream media content and the construction of violent masculine norms within contemporary United States society. Anti-violence educator Jackson Katz expands upon the themes of the original film, Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity, (Jhally et al. 1999) adding more in-depth analysis, updated exemplars, as well as new information to this second film. What has remained the same is that Katz asks the audience to challenge those aspects of media that he contends teach boys and men to use aggression and violent behavior as defining aspects of their identity. Also like the first film, Tough Guise 2 examines mass shootings, violence against women, homophobia, sexual violence, and redemptive violence to emphasize that violence is largely a taught behavior. According to Katz, boys and men in the current U.S. culture must put up a front, a tough guise, which hides their vulnerabilities or those individual characteristics that are not considered masculine. Those who fall short of being considered masculine are at risk of being subjected to ridicule and shaming. The tough guise standard cuts across lines of race and class within the U.S.

Gun violence, particularly male-initiated gun violence within in the U.S., is a major portion of both films. Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provides evidence of not only an increase in firearm-related violence in the U.S, but a clear gender disparity in the perpetration of these acts (FBI 2013; 2014a, b). Males commit the vast majority of these

acts. However, as Katz illustrates, the media tends to present the information in a gender-neutral manner. Headlines use words such as shooter, teenager, suspect, kid, murderer or phrases such as kids killing kids or youth violence to describe the identity of the person committing...