I chose to title my video “Measure of a Man”. I found a video with that same title, but with a completely different context, and I felt it was fitting of my project by talking about how men’s strength is in correlation with how emotional they are and society uses emotions to measure or gauge masculinity. The idea behind the work is to show the problems in society with treating men as if they aren’t allowed to show emotions or cry. Being emotional is seen as woman’s trait. Little boys are taught at a young age that men can’t cry because if they do, that means they’re weak. The arrangement of the videos shows men or boys upset overlaid with voices telling them not to be upset and to try and bottle it up, alongside a musical track similar to the “lifestyle tutorials” of the 1950s, the era most of these videos come from, that told people how to act to be societally acceptable. I was mainly inspired by my own life. My dad has a similar mindset, and I can recall many instances of him telling my little brothers to “suck it up” when they were crying, or upset. I personally don’t agree with that mindset at all because boys are still human. Bottling up problems usually ends in disaster, and being emotional doesn’t equate to weakness. There were some instances where I manipulated the audio to fit the story. For example, I changed “she almost cried” to “he almost cried” to make it seem like a boy was being mocked for crying. I also took a mental health video that was trying to explain how bottling feelings are bad, and changed it to make it seem like it’s an expectation for men to do, that if they don’t bottle it up then they’re weak.