Masculinity and Violence

From a very young age boys are taught that they are not supposed to show any emotion. "Only babies cry" and to just shake it off if they hurt themselves or are upset, to just get over it. Society has came up with this idea that in order to be a man, in order to be masculine you need to be strong, aggressive, bold and you must never cry. If a boy cries, he is seen as being weak. If he listens to you and understands, he is seen as being sensitive which is usually a word used to describe women.

Training boys to be societies perception on "masculine" in my eyes is a bad thing. Having them believe that if they cry then they are seen as weak or soft and telling them they need to be hard all the time. I have a son and I don't want him to feel like he can't express his feelings becasuse he will be seen as soft but unfortunately thats what society has come to. Growing up he must win fights, he must play contact sports, he must act like he doesn's care and can stand on his own two feet, he must be buff and work out in order to be catogorized as masculine or he wont be worthy.

The media doesn't help with this either. You have so many shows, movies and music portraying violence so graphically and making it seem like its something cool. Cartoons even portray violence with the bad guys and the good guys fighting it out and to boys this is so "cool". The APA feels like there is to much violence on TV and that it is impacting youth to the extent that they are becoming more violent themselves. You have kids playing video games and wanting to see what would happen when they do that in real life, when in actuality they are taking a life. The APA try to help people on a mental health aspect and want the violence to be cut out on TV. I don't think all violence should be cut out, but at least limit the age of the audience available to watch. Then again, just because a movie is rated R doesn't mean all parents won't allow their kids to watch.
The ACLU begs to differ and believes violence in the media doesn't impact kids. I feel its on the individual and what they have been through in life. Is a movie, cartoon, video game going to be the icing on the cake that will push them off the edge to do mimic what they see?