Society's Distortion of Manliness

Terry Crews and Paul Theroux are both addressing the same conversation, though they each go about it in a different manner. The “They say” that they are responding to is society’s hijacking of the concept of being a man and the twisting of it to manipulate people to think and act in certain ways. Terry Crews goes about this in his interview by explaining that the way manliness is currently portrayed in society has resulted in many men believing that they need to assert force and aggression in order to prove that they are men instead of showing respecting to others. Examples that he uses are men who will beat women in to order to assert control or rape a woman because he views her as nothing more than an object to be owned. He traces the cause of this to the society convincing people that the only way they can prove themselves as men is to show that they are dominant, which ends up happening at the expense of others. He then talks about a time when his son was scared during a movie theater, but was comforted and told that he didn't have to watch the movie until he was ready in order to show that people should be respected when facing a problem instead of being forced to conform to certain standards, such as society’s interpretation of manliness.

Meanwhile, Paul Theroux explains in his article that he strongly dislikes being a man, and has always disliked it. He views it as something that is both pitiful and insulting to him when he hears somebody tell another person to be a man. The reason why he feels this way is because it pushes the idea that being masculine is something restricted solely to men, resulting in men feeling socially separated from women and viewing them differently than they do men because of what they were taught about the meaning of manliness. He also believes that the promoting of this mindset encourages men to view women as inferior.

Terry Crews and Paul Theroux are responding to the feminist movement and the belief maintained by some that it is a threat to their status as a man. They argue that they fear it because of the belief that the movement seeks to make women dominant instead of men. They make it clear that feminism is about promoting equality between men and women, which Crews emphasizes by saying that being a man isn't about seeking dominance over others. Theroux encourages men to fight for feminism right alongside women, and argues that they have just as much to benefit from it as women do by breaking the notion that men have to behave a certain way just to be considered socially acceptable.