Men and Masculinity: The Basics

Nigel Edley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317653691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Men and Masculinity: The Basics is an accessible introduction to the academic study of masculinity which outlines the key ideas and most pressing issues concerning the field today. Providing readers with a framework for understanding these issues, it explores the ways that masculinity has been understood in the Social Sciences and Humanities to date. Addressing theories which view masculinity as being in a permanent state of flux and crisis, it explores such problem areas as:

• the male body
• men and work
• men and fatherhood
• male sexuality
• male violence.

With a glossary of key terms, case studies reflecting the most important studies in the field of masculinity research and suggestions for further study, Men and Masculinity: The Basics is an essential read for anyone approaching the study of masculinity for the first time.

PART 1

1
MAN-WATCHING

I am sitting on a campsite in Switzerland’s magnificent Saas Valley, resting from the rigours of a day spent in the mountains. In a neighbouring pitch, a man and a woman are busy organising their belongings, preparing to leave the site. They are travelling by motorcycle and a startling amount of equipment has been laid out on the ground, ready to be packed away. There’s a quiet efficiency about the way they approach the task (they’ve been through this routine many times before). Both set to work putting things in bags, strapping them together and attaching them to the bike – which grows ever more impressive in stature. In less than half an hour everything has been put away and they are ready to hit the road. They zip into their leathers and put on their crash helmets. I wait for him to take the handlebars and for her to perch herself on the seat behind him. They do precisely that – before zooming off down the valley.

On 1 October 2012, a five-year-old girl is reported missing from near her home in a small village in mid Wales. Two days later, her mother makes an appeal on national television asking for anyone with any information of her daughter’s whereabouts to contact the police. In the following days, police and search-and-rescue teams scour the local area looking for signs of the missing child. Hundreds of people from the same area give up their time to join in with the search – which was to become the largest missing persons operation in UK police history. On 5 October, a police spokesperson announces that the case has become a murder enquiry. I know that the killer will be a man. On 30 May 2013, Mark Bridger is found guilty of the abduction and murder of April Jones.

In the wake of the publication of The Decline of Males, the anthropologist Lionel Tiger and the feminist critic Barbara Ehrenreich enter into a discussion about the state of men (and women) on the eve of the twenty-first century. Their conversation is featured in the June 1999 edition of Harper’s Magazine – and it struck me as being a highly gendered exchange. See if you can identify who is who from the following (abbreviated) extract:

A:I want to explore your feelings about these things. You say the ‘decline’ of males – there’s a sad tone to that. I would feel sad, as a [parent] of a son, if males suddenly started ‘declining’ in some serious way. Do you feel loss and regret and nostalgia?

B:I’m not interested in characterizing my own personal psyche in this matter, solely because I think it’s of zero interest to anyone. What is of interest is the fact that, as you suggested, young men and women are very concerned about these matters, one reason being that they no longer have a set of rules that they think are emotionally and morally worthwhile. [B expands].

A:You certainly got away from the issue of how you feel about it. See, I’m willing to say how I feel.

B:I’m wholly uninterested in your feelings.

In the course of doing the research for this book, I encountered a paper by the psychologist, Anna Machin (Machin, 2015) in which she described an established psychometric test, called the YIPTA (short for the Yale Inventory of Parental Thoughts and Actions), which is used for measuring the strength of the bond between parents and their children. The inventory includes a fairly long list of actions that are conceived to be indicative of a healthy attachment: the existence of routines around feeding and bedtime; daydreaming about the baby’s future and the creation and repeated use of special nicknames. However, it is another key indicator which catches my attention: ‘thinking that one’s baby is the most beautiful in the world’. I jot down in my notes: ‘Since when was rampant irrationality a sign of good parenting?’

I’m travelling towards the coast on a Bank Holiday weekend and, predictably, the traffic on the road is heavy. Rarely do I get above third gear. The line of vehicles in which I am situated is constantly on the move, but it’s a frustrating case of repeatedly speeding up and slowing down for what seems like hours on end. But in my wing mirror I can see someone making slightly quicker progress. Several hundred yards behind me is a car that is weaving in and out of the line of vehicles. Taking every opportunity of a gap in the flow of oncoming traffic, the driver is engaged in a series of overtaking manoeuvres, leapfrogging two or three vehicles at a time. Some of the other drivers are clearly less than impressed by the actions of this road-user. Two or three have already flashed their headlights in annoyance at having to provide refuge from the prospect of a head-on collision. Eventually it comes to my turn to be overtaken. I glance sideways as the car races past, knowing that I’ll see a man behind the wheel. But I don’t. Instead it’s a young woman, eyes fixed forwards, singing away to something on the radio.

We live in a world that is manifestly gendered. Turn on the television, open up a newspaper or simply walk down the street and there they are: men and women, boys and girls, plain for all to see. Generally speaking, it doesn’t take much to distinguish one from the other; indeed, we can often spot the difference at a glance – even from a distance. The tell-tale signs are many and varied. We usually make up our minds on the basis of how people look, move and act. Of course, it is not unknown for us to get tripped up once in a while, to occasionally make the wrong ‘call’. But for most of the time we seem to be quite successful in our gender discriminations, as evidenced by the fact that we tend to remember those occasions when our intuitions are confounded rather than confirmed. Yet in spite of the apparent obviousness of gender, there has been a tremendous amount of debate amongst academics about how to make sense of this most ubiquitous feature of human societies. There have been sharp disagreements about the very nature of gender, arguments about the mechanisms by which people become gendered and divided opinions too about the prospects or possibilities of refashioning gender in various ways. However, one of the most striking features of Gender Studies is that, for many years, the focus was really just on women. It was they who were seen as interesting or exotic – in need of explanation. Men, by contrast, seemed like fairly unremarkable creatures; they came across as being just ordinary, normal, ‘nothing to write home about’. This normalisation of masculinity was brought home to me, both powerfully and awkwardly, early on in my research career. At the beginning of the 1990s, I was working on a project which involved interviewing men about different aspects of their lives, such as work, family and friendships. In the very first meeting, I decided to open with a question about what they understood by the term ‘masculinity’. It was met with stony silence. I tried to rephrase the question to give them more time to think; this time it was greeted with a bout of nervous laughter. After what seemed like an age, one of the men eventually piped up: ‘it isn’t really a subject you think about consciously before you ask the question’.

One of the pioneers of masculinity research – the American sociologist Michael Kimmel – can offer us another anecdote that helps both illustrate and explain this tendency for men’s gender to go unnoticed or unmarked.¹ Kimmel was in a postgraduate study group discussing feminist issues, when an argument broke out between two female participants: one white, the other black. The white woman had just claimed that all women were bound together by their common plight under patriarchy, but the black woman disagreed. She asked: ‘When you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, what do you see?’ The white woman replied that she saw a woman in the mirror. ‘That’s precisely the issue’, said the other, ‘I see a black woman’. She then went on to explain how her ethnicity was part of her everyday consciousness, whereas, for white women, their colour was invisible because they were (and still are) privileged in that respect. Kimmel was profoundly struck by this exchange because he realised that when he looked at himself in the mirror, not only had he failed to see his whiteness, but he had also failed to see his gender. What confronted him was just the image of a person – an ordinary human being. It was, for him, what one might call a consciousness-raising experience. It was as if, from that point onwards, Kimmel was bound to see the world through somewhat different eyes. In 1987, he would go on to produce one of the earlier books on men and masculinity, but he was by no means the first man on the scene.

THE EMERGENCE OF MEN’S/MASCULINITY STUDIES

It is often difficult to pinpoint the origins of an intellectual tradition. Even where an obvious candidate might exist, such as in the cases of Marxism or Confucianism, the reality is often much more complicated, involving all kinds of formative influences and antecedents. Tracing the origins of Men’s Studies is by no means a simple task. The current entry on Wikipedia describes it as ‘a relatively new field of study’ – and with some justification, as a high proportion of the books and articles written about men and masculinity have appeared at some point during the last thirty years. That said, some critics would argue that scientists and philosophers have been writing about men and masculinity for centuries, rather than just a few decades. It certainly isn’t difficult to find older books with ‘men’ or ‘man’ in the title; to single out just two examples, the anthropologist Ralph Linton published The Study of Man in 1936 and, earlier still, there was Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, which first appeared in 1871. Of course, neither author would have accepted the charge that they were ignoring half of the human race. Both would have seen themselves as using the so-called ‘male generic’, where ‘man’ is shorthand for men and women. In more recent years, however, the use of the male generic has come under critical scrutiny. It has been suggested that the convention is far from innocent or benign. Critics argued that the image of humankind promoted over the centuries by scientists and philosophers has been decidedly male. We now know that Aristotle saw the human body as a male body, with the female form as something of an aberration. It is now widely recognised that Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, regarded femininity as a failed form of masculine identity. Classical sociology has its own examples of this same leaning. Famously, Karl Marx called for the workers to rise up and throw off their chains; but in his imagination this was to be a revolution of male miners, labourers and factory workers, not mothers and housewives. The critics claimed that, like Kimmel’s own reflection, men have long been held up as the definitive human being against which women are compared, contrasted and, where found different, usually seen as lacking.

As many will no doubt have anticipated, it was feminists who were at the forefront of advancing these criticisms. In the 1960s and 70s, second wave feminists were not only complaining about the androcentrism of Western culture but were also busy establishing the field of Women’s Studies. This new discipline was set up to provide a platform for women’s voices and to explore their lives and experiences as women. But what it also did, albeit inadvertently, was to usher in its male counter-part. It is easy enough to see the influence of feminism on the emergence of Men’s Studies. All one needs to do is to look at some of the earliest titles to appear on the scene: The Liberated Man (Farrell, 1974), Men’s Liberation (Nichols, 1975) and A Book of Readings for Men against Sexism (Snodgrass, 1977) – the hallmarks are unmistakable. The influence for some of these writers was intimate, stemming from their relationships as friends, brothers and husbands of feminist activists. They took on board and extended the (liberal) feminist idea that gender was a straitjacket from which people needed to escape. In 1976, Herb Goldberg wrote The Hazards of Being Male and, in so doing, joined a small chorus of other writers in claiming that an adherence to the norms and expectations of the ‘male sex-role’ (Chapter 2) was damaging men’s health and happiness (see also Fasteau, 1974; Pleck and Sawyer, 1974; Harrison, 1978). The feeling amongst such authors was that men had as much to gain as women, perhaps, from a sexual revolution. Not only would it open up their horizons to experience and explore more feminine modes of being, but it would also relieve them of some of the more arduous – even toxic – aspects of being a man, such as the need to always appear tough, aggressive and brave in the face of danger (Brannon, 1976).

However, the subtitle of Goldberg’s book – Surviving the Myth of Male Privilege – reveals another way in which the second wave fuelled the fire of Men’s Studies. For every man inspired to join his ‘sisters’ in their struggle for liberation, there would be at least one other who was left feeling bemused, angered or threatened by their campaigns. Like others that would follow (for example, Bly, 1990), The Hazards of Being Male didn’t so much try to refute feminist claims about the plight of women as highlight the injuries incurred by men within traditional gender arrangements. But, as we can see from the subtitle, Goldberg had no sympathy for the more radical suggestion that men were the chief architects and main beneficiaries of women’s suffering. As far as he was concerned, patriarchy was a myth. In the intervening years, a number of other authors have continued to push this particular theme but in a way that is often much more directly critical of feminist orthodoxy (see Faludi, 1992, for a discussion of this ‘backlash’). Writers such as Lyndon (1992), Farrell (1994), Hise (2004) and Benatar (2012) have gone so far as to suggest that it is in fact men who are now the subordinated sex – which is a claim also found in the rhetoric of various Men’s Rights groups, which have sprung up in various parts of the world, including the US, India and Australia.

There is no little irony about the fact that feminism provided a key spur to the development of Men’s Studies, because many feminists are highly sceptical about the whole enterprise. In Women’s Studies: The Basics, Bonnie Smith (2013) asks why, as a society, we need yet more attention paid to men, when they have dominated the spotlight for such a long time? Understandably, writers like Smith are wary of men wanting to ‘get in on the act’. The fear is that, even where their intentions seem good, men have a tendency to end up dominating proceedings. Like inviting a man on a girl’s night out, inevitably the dynamics change. Almost inexorably, he becomes the focal point of the evening, dictating the flow of topics and dominating the conversational floor (Spender, 1980; Fishman, 1978). Undoubtedly, tensions have been increased by the use of the label Men’s Studies. For obvious reasons, people are drawn to imagine that this must be the male equivalent of Women’s Studies, which has made no secret of the fact that it is dedicated to the advancement of women’s position in the world. By extension, therefore, people tend to assume that Men’s Studies seeks to further the lot of men. Moreover, in the case of writers like Neil Lyndon and David Benatar, such fears appear to be well founded; and yet there are many others working within the same area who pursue a very different politics. Indeed, the most prominent names in the field – Connell, Kimmel, Messner and Pleck – would all align themselves much more closely with the perspectives of feminist scholars. In response to this rather complex political landscape, some of these academics have abandoned the title Men’s Studies in favour of an alternative nomenclature – that of Masculinity Studies. This is also my preferred designation. Like Kimmel, it is used to signal work that not only treats men as men, but which also sees them as operating in a complex field of gender relations in which they are usually privileged.

Feminism has had a major impact on both Masculinity Studies and the lives of men more generally – not least in terms of how it has changed their mothers’, wives’ and sisters’ (etc.) ideas and expectations about what is right and just in the way of gender relations. But it is not alone in providing a stimulus to academic interests in men. Another key factor has been the rapid transformation of the whole political and economic landscape over the course of the last forty years. In that time, Western economies have shifted from being production-based, industrial societies to post-industrial ‘consumer societies’ (Goodwin et al., 1997). In much of Europe and America, this period has seen a sharp decline, not just in the traditi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index