The Mask You Live In
The Mask You Live In
| 05 January 2015 (USA)
The Mask You Live In Trailers

Compared to girls, research shows that boys in the United States are more likely to be diagnosed with a behaviour disorder, prescribed stimulant medications, fail out of school, binge drink, commit a violent crime, and/or take their own lives. The Mask You Live In asks: as a society, how are we failing our boys?

Reviews
krisdmill

Really great film. Really enjoyed hearing hearing men talk about their experience of growing up. It made me question the way we talk to young people. I grew up a pushy girl with a sensitive brother and now I see why neither one of us could win.

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LovinMoviesMakinGames

Factual or even relevant content is replaced with piano music and hyperbole mixed with contrived nonsense from people who know nothing of the male experience. There are so many factors in modern society affecting men. The ridiculous attack on masculinity mixed in with, well very mixed expectations of men, constant accusations and assumptions that every man is either a rapist, child molester, soon to be violent offender, ... the lack of any support or even respect for single fathers. The 9:1 ratio of men to women in prison and bias there... this documentary fails on every level starting with integrity and ending with any relevant content.

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fugaziNow

This infomercial, I refuse to call it a documentary, is extremely creative in its deceptiveness. Besides being entirely inspired through the narrow, uncritical lens of feminist theory, this production never admits this. It has been specifically designed to groom the viewer into feminist ideology. I could not be more offended about the hypocrisy of this production. Imagine for just a moment, an all male production in the modern age, told through some narrow male ideology, defining female problems, explaining the lived female experience, providing contrived statistics produced through this narrow male ideology and proscribing the solutions to these female problems. I can only imagine the outrage. I can't even count the number of times that in feminist circles it has been stated unequivocally that men cannot understand female experience and that it is misogynist to even try...clearly double standards are perfectly fine as long as they benefit women. The anecdotes and the problems men experience are all real, it is the explanations for those problems that are either lacking or outright deceptive. Women's role in men's problems is completely ignored. Single mother households, something that is completely ignored (they are called single parent families...would not want to bring attention to the fact that 90% of single parent families are led by a mother...such a distraction to feminists...) in the program, is a massive factor in most of the statistics offered...suicide, school drop outs, criminal activity... It's a massive omission...and the "other" single parent families, those led by a father, do not experience these problems on anything like the same scale...both sons and daughters do much better in a father led single parent family than in one led by a mother...almost as well as intact two parent families in fact. Apparently that was not worth mentioning to the producers of this program. This is not at all surprising because if you know anything about feminist ideology, you would know that the ideology has serious problems with marriage...as in I am fairly confident that good feminists would like to see it abolished. If the above is not convincing enough, now we have to turn to the bogus statistics and crisis language that is used in the program, in particular, in regards to rape. A huge flag went up when the narrative promoted the idea of "rape culture". I am kind of surprised that this program went there. The producers had kept their agenda on such a subliminal level for the most part up to that point. The idea that we live in a "rape culture" has always been a huge stretch. Everyone, and I do mean everyone...at least in this country, is aware that rape is highly illegal. In prison, even among the concentration of violent criminals found there, rapists are at the bottom of the food chain. Everyone knows that. Even RAINN, the largest and most important anti-rape organizations had this to say about "rape culture"...and I quote "Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime." Feminists, of course, denounced this judgment but this does not alter the fact that feminists were happily quoting the statistics of the organization for many years before this apostasy. Feminists didn't realize that RAINN was interested in facts, not ideology. The other false statistic is THAT 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted on campus...what the program does not bother to tell you is that the study was done at only two universities, was done online, and suffered from a high non-response bias...super misleading. It is not to say that sexual assault is not a serious problem, it is. It's just not a crisis or an epidemic. The truth is that women have never been safer from violence, sexual or otherwise, in western societies now than at any point in human history...but, you see, that doesn't fit the feminist narrative, so it is omitted.In conclusion, I am both very disappointed, because men do experience a long litany of problems and they are rarely discussed, and offended...the producers didn't even feel the need to include a token male in the production when all of them would have been deeply offended at the reverse. I can't imagine that they couldn't have thought about and discussed that. Is it possible that they are so blinded by their ideology that they couldn't see the double standard? It beggars the imagination. I just wish that the resources that were used in creating this deceptive piece of indoctrination and feminist ideological grooming could have been used for another purpose, mainly the solutions to the many problems that men face. What a waste of time and resources.

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joshuastewartp

This starts out well enough, shedding some light on the fact that some people are raised in unstable environments, lack of father figure/abuse, which can have a very negative emotional/mental impact on growing boys. It also points out that bullying is a serious issue. These talking points should be explored further, as they are very fundamental to understanding how to help boys and men overcome detrimental upbringings. Unfortunately, 5 minutes in, by declaring masculinity to be unnatural and inherently harmful, this film devolves into nothing but transparent propaganda. Manhood, being the catalyst for all of society's woes, is just the rejection of femininity, it asserts. In short, Feminine altogether good, masculine altogether bad. The documentary hammers this narrative from this point onward, so quickly turning from a noble and much welcomed exposition about childhood abuse and abandonment, along with it's outright negative effects of said children, into an incredibly condescending and nonsensical attempt to make masculinity out to be wholly damaging. The film claims that masculinity is nothing but a social construct, designed to make boys and men afraid to speak, or to show emotion, which leads to lives of crime and violence. So never mind what proper science would have to say, only femininity exists, and we males who reject it are everything that is wrong with the world. Men and boys who come from broken homes and hostile environments are used to bolster the narrative that masculinity is indeed synonymous with hatred, violence, rape, murder... But this does not represent the vast majority of men, and I would bet that the vast majority of men have some masculine traits. However, if it's proper statistical analysis and presentation, you may want to look somewhere else. The women who made this film claim that men and women are pretty much the same from a biological perspective, which you would once again have to disregard science as an effectual intellectual tool to believe such nonsense. Here's how they prove their claim. They draw two bell curve graphs side by side. The curves represent the overall positive/negative life experiences of pools of 50,000 men and 50,000 women, separately. The curves of both graphs are similar, as they obviously would be, as they are bell curves intended to present averages... Then they superimpose one on top of the other and... voila! Men and women are the same and everything they have said thus far is true. And they really expect you to believe this, with such preschool presentation and lack of any kind of logic or actual statistical analyses. Clichés and buzzwords are not evidence, either.But people will believe them. Even when they use the 1 in 5 women are raped on campus stat, which has been proved to be entirely misleading. Just look it up. I would only urge you to think for yourselves. Even when they resurrect the decades old claim that video games and movies and toys are turning people into monsters... which has also been debunked time and time again throughout the years by honest research and proper statistical work, people will still believe them. Presenting lies in a tenderly manner does not make them truths.There is just so much wrong here. Written directed and produced by women, unsurprisingly driven by feminism, this film is thoroughly erratic and lacks any kind of real evidence to support its claims about the nature of men. As a young man who has always struggled with depression and father abandonment issues, I cannot recommend this film to those wanting to learn anything true or useful. In fact I find it deplorable that the women behind this get to so passively pretend like they are helping anyone, when they have to use misleading and outright false claims/statistics to lend their ideology any credence, at the expense of those who are suffering from mental illness no less. If this is all that can be offered to help those afflicted, then I'm afraid we've gained no ground on the subject of mental illness in boys and men. Although, I really do not believe that the point of this intended to really help anyone.Those of you who already buy into today's feminist theories/talking points... well i'm sure that you will love it as it will reinforce your incredibly biased and skewed, one-sided perspective of the world. Coming from those who would use fear and misrepresentation to persuade others, whether done consciously or not, I find it incredibly ironic for the film to begin with a quote (half of one anyway) from George Orwell. So I will end my review with a better application."The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink." - George Orwell

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