From the podcast, my biggest takeaway was how one-dimensional a huge part of history is. Because of the difficulties of obtaining the materials to write, or the ability to be able to write in the past, much of history is focused on the nobles or “great men” of the time. This makes figures in history appear much grander than in reality. It not only distorts our perceptions of what life was like during those periods but for many people it establishes an unattainable falsehood of the capabilities of man. By assuming that an individual person is capable of running an entire kingdom or conquering a land by themselves, it establishes so many unattainable falsehoods.<\/p>\n
I think this connects with Hollywood movies in particular. There are a ton of movies out there that intended to depict great men from history. I can only speak for men, but for us, they create these extremely masculine hero-like characters that do not exist in reality. They create so many falsehoods in men that are unattainable, yet so many people believe that that they are. It creates a toxic representation of masculinity that is neither correct nor attainable. For some people, it creates a toxic level of ambition, and for others, it emasculates them. Either way, it is an unhealthy practice.\u00a0I can not deny that I enjoy these types of movies. However, it is essential to understand that they are just movies and not an accurate portrayal of reality or history. This tends to be twisted especially in today’s culture where we epitomize looks or standards that are unattainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the podcast, my biggest takeaway was how one-dimensional a huge part of history is. Because of the difficulties of obtaining the materials to write, or the ability to be able to write in the past, much of history is focused on the nobles or “great men” of the time. This makes figures in history […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5093,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5093"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7125,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7122\/revisions\/7125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}