Guns, Trucks, Rambo, wrestling, and many such games are one form of the way boys are influenced to macho men. In today's society, boys are highly pressured to meet the expectations of being masculine. Boys have a reputation to live up to in order to be accepted in society. Boys are influenced to put on a certain image through their family, peers, and media. Boys are conditioned to see rivalry, toughness, domination, and violence as an acceptable normal behavior.
During childhood these harsh masculine values become desirable modes of male behavior. Whereas emotion, sensitivity, caring, gentleness tend to be looked as a weakness in the male characteristic. Boys are treated differently from girls from the start of their birth. For example, as children boys are taught to play rough and tough games like Rambo or wrestling, where as girls are taught to play with delicacy such as play house or with dolls. Boys are not allowed to play with dolls or to play "girls" games. When boys do play with dolls, society tends to see them as weak and in today's day and age, boy will be seen as homosexual. Boys learn to adopt qualities of being tough, brave, emotion-less through their family and their fathers tend to guide boys in a more rougher manner. For example, fathers are known to tell their sons that "big boys don't cry," and if he showed any type of emotion he would be teased. This limits the choice of being emotional and he becomes mute to show any type of suffering. By limiting their emotions and replacing it with aggression, the little boys minds becomes un-balanced. Even if boys feel emotions of sadness, vulnerability, they can't show it to anyone for the fear of being teased or humiliated. Therefore, boys grow up with the thinking that they have to pretend to put on a masculine face to the society in which he lives. This pretense first enforced by their fathers but then is enforced by their peers at school.
