Eduardo Rodriguez
March/03/2019
English 102
Dr. David Gunto
The Things Men Do
During the war against Vietnam, the United States lost just over 58,000 dead soldiers between (1959-1975). The war shook the U.S cultural norms to the core and caused the civil rights controversies, war protest, sexual liberation, and urban unrest. The Vietnam War helped shake apart traditional American beliefs about masculinity. The war, and the arguments that made a negative environment around it, changed an American soldier from a heroic and skillful figure into a soldier who would start to be more open to one of the many interpretations. There was this traditional idea that soldiers were the exclusive emblems of masculine power. After the war, soldiers had a distinctive way to look at issues, such as tolerance for violence, the way they would feel about feminism, black power, and gay rights was different from their initial way of thinking, and changed them by emerging other visions of manhood.
There can be many masculinity changes in society for various reasons, but wars seem to be one of the main relevant points in time for shifts in it. During the Vietnam War, there was great social change. By the 1980s there was a crisis period were attempts were created to restore a dominant masculinity. The reasons behind the changes are complex. One of the main reasons is about women’s challenge to gender relations. For example, the reason that provoked a crisis of masculinity in the 1960s and 1970s was feminism.
The easiest way to understand it from a certain period and time is to know some of the historical changes in political, economic, and social life. There was a lapse of manhood that lasted over fifty years, starting with the Great Depression until the 1980s. By analyzing this period in American history adds ways to explain the changes in masculinity. Changes in it started with the Great Depression in 1929 and these shifts are associated with World War II and the Vietnam War. Even though the changes during the two periods...
