My Personal View Point on Victor Seidler's Language and Masculinity

In the essay Language and Masculinity, written by Victor Seidler, he discusses many arguments about how we use language and how it effects and helps define masculinity. Seidler writes about men and women, identity, and the usage of language in our current day society. He also discusses the tolls language takes on our environment everyday. Two very important points he makes are arguments that should be elaborated on greatly. The first is the effects of masculinity and language having to do with identity; the second is how language aids, or harms our actions and behavior. Both of these arguments have language and masculinity incorporated into them by showing the effects each has on subjects.

The first argument addressed is language and masculinity having to do with identity. Victor says in Language and Masculinity, "Within a liberal moral culture, the very notion of personal identity has been made problematic"(Seidler 558). He means by this that in today's community the smallest sense of individuality is seen as a threat to the "perfect" society we strive so much to attain. In this so-called "perfect" community we have uniforms and dress codes in school, certain specifications you must meat in places such as restaurants, jobs and other public places. This keeps individuals from being unique and being themselves in their clothing, hair, and other items in everyday life.

Seidler makes the point which introduced masculinity into this argument that "Some people are more intelligent than others and some can run faster" (Seidler 558) and these are qualities of masculinity. In masculinity these make men more manly and more of an individual, which is somewhat threatening to the community. Individuality is based on how much of a trait we are, how strong, how big, how handsome.

Seidler makes mention to how we will eventually out grow this need to be stronger, faster, more intelligent, or bigger, which in turn means we will show less of a need to be an individual. This brings Seidler to another point of how language not only affects identity but also our behavior and our actions.