A Fast internet Search with the words, Executive Protection Training shows a range of courses which are available for approximately 250-500 dollars per day. Add this into the air fare, lodging and meals and you have easily spent thousands of dollars to attend this sort of training. The websites offering this training seem slick, with specialist rotating images of limousines, private jets, yachts, limos and men with guns. It is testosterone heaven.

As you click through the tabs you see all of the services which are offered: Personal Protection, Witness Protection, Dignitary Protection, Investigations of all kinds, and a great number of classes that are offered; from Handgun Training to High Risk Environments. And, if you enroll for a course today, you receive a 10 percent discount on your next prohibitively costly course. With all these excellent images and all these services which are provided, they need to be professional and legitimate, right? Buyer, beware. A number of these sites are similar to the Wizard of Oz than the Fantastic Four; as what lies behind the curtain is often a huge disappointment. However, you would not know that from looking at the site.

What motivates a man or girl to give an unknown organization thousands of dollars to attend training for a position they will probably never have? The Spanish and Portuguese roots of the word have to do with masculinity being superior to femininity. Machismo, as commonly interpreted now in America is defined as powerful or exaggerated sense of masculinity stressing characteristics like physical courage, virility and aggressiveness; an exaggerated sense of strength or endurance. This definition would explain the stereotypical perception a lot of people have of the Pacific West Academy Protection Agent or Bodyguard. In actuality, a number of these kinds of personalities are attracted to the profession. There are other reasons also.

Author Born B. Ingoldsby presented a paper at the Annual Meeting of the National Council on Family Relations in 1985 entitled; A Theory for the Development of Machismo. The abstract reads as follows: With changes in gender role expectations in marriage, family scientists have started to examine the idea of machismo. Two attributes dominant in the analysis of machismo are aggressiveness and hyper-sexuality. A biological model of machismo asserts that men everywhere have a tendency to be more aggressive than females, a gender difference which seems to have a genetic foundation. A modern concept of sociobiology provides another explanation for macho behavior. According to this concept, much of creature, and possibly human, behavior is affected by the push for one’s genes to reproduce themselves. A generally accepted psychological theory views machismo as an expression of an inferiority complex. Most research on machismo is limited to the lower classes.