This discussion was never meant to be serious. It was the kind of loose, end-of-class chatter that filled the last ten minutes of a period. People were packing their bags slowly and comparing weekend plans. Someone mentioned Animal, casually, the way blockbuster films occasionally become topics of conversation soon after their release. I expected a quick exchange and then the familiar scraping of chairs as we all left.
What happened instead caught me off guard.
Two boys I had grown up with, boys who I had shared a desk and a classroom with for years, suddenly took charge of the conversation. Their tone sharpened with a seriousness and certainty that felt out of place in an otherwise informal room.
“People who don’t get him are just too soft,” one said, referring to Ranvijay Singh, the film’s volatile protagonist. The other nodded before offering his own perspective, something about “real men protecting what belongs to them.”
A small, uncomfortable ripple went through the room. I noticed the girls’ subtle glances, the uneasy snickers, the eyes that dropped quickly to open books. I stayed quiet. At the time, I couldn’t explain why the conversation unsettled me the way it did. But suddenly their everyday behaviors, the snapped pencils when frustrated, the jokes when someone hesitated during a presentation, the way every disagreement became a test of toughness, clicked into place. What I had once dismissed as ordinary teenage-boy behavior began to look like something more deliberate.
It wasn’t that they were praising a film.
They were affirming a worldview.
One that I could no longer ignore.
Trying to make sense of the moment led me to the research behind it. One finding stood out, according to the American Psychological Association, “By age five, most boys can name more negative emotions than they can express because they have already learned to hide them.”
Five years old. Before they can tie their shoelaces, boys have already absorbed the lesson that feelings are liabilities. From there, the pattern only deepens. What begins as emotional self-censorship becomes a performance of toughness, reinforced by peers, families and the culture around them.
Sociologist R.W. Connell calls this hegemonic masculinity, an ideal built on dominance, control, and emotional restraint. Boys learn quickly which emotions preserve status and which threaten it.
Anger is acceptable.
Hesitation is mocked.
Vulnerability is dangerous.
Seen through this lens, Ranvijay’s behavior doesn’t alarm many boys. It reassures them. They aren’t admiring cruelty, they’re admiring someone who seems to have mastered the script they are still learning to perform.
Many boys interpret violence as evidence of strength because they have been taught to read emotional control as the foundation of masculinity. The problem is not the film itself but the narrow emotional language boys grow up with long before they encounter it. Their enthusiasm wasn’t about the details of Ranvijay’s actions, it was about what his actions symbolized, a man who never loses his ground.
Psychologists note that when masculinity is rigidly defined, even ordinary experiences of embarrassment or fear can feel like threats to one’s identity. Research conducted by Social Psychologist Roy F. Baumeister found that men who were told they scored “below average” on a masculinity test became significantly more likely to support aggression, dominance and risk-taking (Baumeister et al.). A related study showed that when men felt their masculinity was questioned, their willingness to engage in physical violence increased significantly (Willer, Rogalin & Conlon). When emotional expression is restricted, exaggerated displays of toughness become compensatory behavior. For boys taught that composure must be maintained at all costs, Ranvijay’s intensity reads less reckless than admirable.
Viewed this way, everyday interactions take on a different meaning. The pencil snapped in frustration is not about the pencil. The sarcastic joke after a classmate stutters is not about humor. The determination to “win” a trivial argument is not about the topic. These are small rehearsals for a larger performance, each gesture proving that a boy can push back against anything that might expose insecurity.
But this “ideal” man is built on scarcity. When boys are denied a full emotional range, they are left with a narrow set of tools. According to the CDC, boys who internalize rigid masculinity norms are three times more likely to engage in violent behavior by late adolescence . A boy who cannot name his fear learns to swallow it. His uncertainty turns into a need to assert control. Little by little, the expectation to stay rigid steals his ability to bend at all.
But a posture of hardness is not the same as resilience.
And the performance of control is not the same as confidence.
If boys are pushed toward models of masculinity built on inflexibility, they will keep gravitating toward characters who seem unbreakable, even when that “strength” depends on harm. The answer is not censoring films but expanding the emotional space boys are allowed to occupy. A broader emotional vocabulary won’t make them “soft”, it will make them balanced and less tied to the brittle ideal they’ve inherited. Only then will someone like Ranvijay stop looking like a blueprint and appear, instead, as a man unable to face fear honestly.
And perhaps one day, when a violent hero is held up as proof of manhood, another boy will respond, not defensively, but with understanding: “Strength doesn’t have to look like that.”
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
