Masculinity In The Things They Carried

Soldiers in the military, particularly in America, are seen as one of the manliest individuals in the world. They all go through intensive training and expectations from everyone that brings out not only their toughness, but also their strength to do the unthinkable. The book The Things they carried by Tim O’brien is a book based on a true story about a platoon of American soldiers and their significant belongings-- both physical and metaphorical-- that they carried along with them during the Vietnam war. Examining the standards made for men by the society, the articles Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear shame and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity and Bros before Hos: The Guy Code, both written by Michael Kimmel, would help reveal …show more content…
The more men a soldier kills, the more respect he gets from the other soldiers because it shows the level of his masculinity through his toughness. In the Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear shame and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity by Michael Kimmel, he examines how violence had eventually become a part of the society’s checklist to be able to tell the level of a man’s masculinity. “Violence is often the single most evident marker of manhood. Rather it is the willingness to fight, the desire to fight. The origin of our expression that one “has a chip on one’s shoulder” lies in the practice of adolescent boy in the country or small town at the turn of the century, who would literally walk around with a chip of wood balanced on his shoulder-- a signal of readiness to fight with anyone who would take the initiative of knocking the chip off. ” (215) Kimmel explains how fighting had become an agent to prove one’s manliness to another man. By winning a fight and finding out who is brave enough to prove their strength, shows a man’s status in the scale of masculinity. Tim O’Brien narrates to his readers his first experience of killing a man during the war in his book The Things they