Studying Men and Masculinities

David Buchbinder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136974991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

The late-twentieth-century anxiety about a 'crisis in masculinity' still persists today, particularly in English-speaking cultures. Studying Men and Masculinities offers an engaging and comprehensive overview of masculinity. Drawing on a wide range of cultural practices and texts from different genres and media, David Buchbinder examines the notion of patriarchy and the challenges to patriarchal power, including queer theory. The book considers whether crisis may in fact be built into the very structure of the masculine, and examines emergent masculinities post-9/11.

Theoretical positions within the field are clearly explained and applied to real life case studies from literature, film, and television. Interspersed in each chapter are a series of questions and tasks aimed at encouraging the reader to engage her/himself in the study of masculinities in everyday life and popular culture.

This topical and thought-provoking book will be an invaluable resource for students of masculinities studies, sexuality studies, cultural studies, and gender theory.

1 The end of masculinity?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203852224-1

Activity 1.1

• Before you begin reading this book, note down what you understand by the terms “masculine” and “masculinity.”
• Now examine what you have written down: is it
  • descriptive (that is, derived from what you have seen of masculinity [and men] in action), or, rather,
  • prescriptive (that is, a set of predetermined criteria applied to men’s behavior as a template as to what masculinity should be)?
• What does your response to the preceding exercise suggest to you about how you think about gender in general, and about masculinity in particular?

After the release in 1999 of David Fincher’s movie Fight Club (Fight Club, 1999), rumors began to circulate about the establishment of actual fight clubs, modeled on the principles of the fight club as outlined first in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel (Palahniuk, 1996), on which the film was based, and then reiterated in the movie itself. Particularly disturbing were news items indicating that many of these fight clubs had developed among boys, especially teenage boys, in schools ranging geographically from the United States to as far away as Australia (see, for example “Police, D203 officials break up Jefferson ‘fight club,’” 2011; Malkin, 2008; “Fight club draws techies for bloody underground beatdowns,” 2006). Aside from concerns about a general increase in violence that such reports suggest, there arises also the following important question: to what in this younger generation of males did the movie speak, so as to encourage this mood of violence and the propagation of fight clubs?

Both the novel and the film offer several causes. We are told early on in both that “What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women” (Palahniuk, 1996: 50). This observation is compounded and supported by the fact that, after the age of about six, the narrator grew up with an absentee father, with whom he has maintained only a casual, sporadic relationship (Palahniuk, 1996: 50). Tellingly, of Tyler Durden, who turns out to be the narrator’s alter ego, the narrator says, “Tyler never knew his father” (Palahniuk, 1996: 49). The implication here is that an earlier generation of men failed in their responsibilities towards their sons, who therefore perforce grew up in the care of women. The narrator remarks cynically, “I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need” (Palahniuk, 1996: 51). He wonders further whether “Maybe self-destruction is the answer” (Palahniuk, 1996: 49).

To this assignment of blame by an entire generation of men is added the accusation that those elders have created for their successors a wasteland that is both physical (the destruction of natural habitats and consequently of the creatures that live in these, the creation of polluted and polluting cities, and so on) and ethical and spiritual. Thus, for example, the narrator has come to invest not only his money but his sense of self-worth and identity in purchasable objects, such as the IKEA furnishings that used to decorate his apartment before the blast that reduced everything in his personal urban habitat to splinters: “ … you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you” (Palahniuk, 1996: 44). Durden’s remedy is, first, to remasculinize the younger generation of men by toughening them up through fight club. This requires their complicity in keeping the very notion of a fight club secret, which in turn binds them as a group. Unlike professional boxing or wrestling and other forms of socially accepted aggressive activity, there are really no winners or losers in fight club:

Fight club isn’t about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn’t about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see the same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There’s grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn’t about looking good. There is hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.

(Palahniuk, 1996: 51)

Fight club, then, is about restoring to men a sense of their own masculinity and a hardened male body no longer softened and sapped by the feminizing influences of the dominant culture of late capitalism.

The second aspect of Durden’s solution to the dilemma faced by a younger generation of men is Project Mayhem, the aim of which is to conduct a campaign of terrorism focused on subverting and eventually destroying capitalist culture itself:

… Tyler said, picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.

You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.

(Palahniuk, 1996: 124)

Durden’s vision, then, is to return both society and men to a pre-industrial, even primitive state, so that a proper balance can be restored both to nature and to gender, with a particular emphasis on the masculine.

Both the novel and the movie Fight Club emerged from a general sense developing toward the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first in many Western (and especially English-speaking) societies that masculinity has found itself in crisis. Yet, in The Future of Men, a slim, unassuming volume published in 1997, between the publication of Palahniuk’s novel and the appearance of Fincher’s film, Dave Hill surveys the changes in the cultural understandings of what it is to be a man, and of what masculinity is, and comes to relatively positive conclusions. He notes that many believe that there is “a crisis of male identity in the West” (Hill, 1997: 5), but proposes, toward the end of the volume, that there has in fact been a series of positive and desirable changes; for instance:

Never again will masculinity be as containable or as easy to describe in false terms as it has been during the last 150 years. Tomorrow’s materially comfortable young men will have more freedom of identity on their hands than their grandfathers and even their fathers could have imagined. The luckiest will achieve the state of sustained independence which forebears enjoyed for a few years only before slipping into the state of mind called suburbia.

(Hill, 1997: 44)

He remarks that

Even present-day first impressions hint at how much more relaxed and elastic the category of masculinity is becoming: men do not look alike any more.

(Hill, 1997: 47)

Hill goes on to forecast that the new order of things

will involve men and women alike accommodating more flexible models of masculinity which acknowledge many features in common with femininity and which, largely as a result of this, are also able to accommodate those aspects of “masculinity” which do not do damage to children or women and do not denigrate either those men who do not exhibit the same “masculine” traits or those women who do. In this process men will be under the greater pressure to change, for they will need to share pieces of male territory with women with better grace than they have sometimes exhibited before.

(Hill, 1997: 52)

Thus, although Hill does note some problems (for example, that “The capacity of young and not-so-young men, including those who are highly educated and with considerable professional responsibilities, to remain puerile far into adulthood is already a depressing feature of contemporary life” [Hill, 1997: 50]), in the main his view is a largely positive and optimistic one of men changing and adjusting to new conditions of living in the culture. However, compared with the strident claims in the media of a crisis in masculinity and the publication of a spate of books on the topic, Hill’s voice appears to be a minority one.

That “crisis in masculinity” (if this is indeed what it is) has been attributed to a number of causes; for example, second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s (here we might remind ourselves of the narrator’s observation in Fight Club that his is a generation of men raised by women), and the civil rights movements of the 1960s such as Black Liberation and Gay Liberation. Social, political, and other inequities and injustices were traced back to the dominance and power of white, middle-class, heterosexual males, who were then compelled to examine the power structures and dynamics of their societies, and their own roles in these. Changes brought about by these liberationist movements have included legal and political reform, as well as a greater social tolerance, if not always a simple acceptance as equals, of women, blacks, and gays and lesbians, especially in the public sphere, together with an increasing tolerance also of transgender and trans-sexual identities. There have also been shifts in language (for example, an awareness of the way assumptions about gender or race may be structured into the way we speak), which in turn have produced a more careful public use of language. Although this has often been dismissed as mere “political correctness,” it has also brought about profound changes in the ways in which people think of, and speak to and about, one another.

Despite the evident belief of many that masculinity and femininity are unchanging and inevitable properties of male and female bodies, respectively, these attributes are in fact culturally specific and historically conditioned. If this were not so, men and women could be expected to behave identically everywhere, in all cultures and at all times; but this is not the case, as much historical, anthropological, and sociological research indicates. Take, for example, the case of the Wodaabe people of West Africa, especially in Niger. Once a year, at the end of the rainy season in September, this nomadic people, split into various clans and families, gathers at an appointed site which has been kept secret until this point, in order that the young men participate in the week-long Gerewol (or Jeerewol), to dance and impress the marriageable women. The men paint their faces and decorate their bodies to accentuate their best features, paying particular attention to enhancing the whiteness of the eyes and teeth through the use of dark pigments; and it is the women who judge this male beauty pageant (see, for example, “Wodaabe” online video). Such a practice appears to invert the roles and relationships between men and women as we understand them in the West. Yet, within Wodaabe culture, the capacity of a young man to attract the attention of an eligible partner through his physical beauty and his ability to dance both is a sign of his masculinity and, at the same time, in part constitutes that masculinity. (For an anthropological account of the Wodaabe and the Gerewol, see Bovin, 2001: 37–54 and 58–61; for travellers’ accounts, see Jones, 1998; Middleton, 2004.)

Activity 1.2

• The Wodaabe Gerewol is a ceremony designed to enable men to find wives, and women to find husbands; but it is the women who choose, on the basis of the men’s physique, body decoration and looks. Whiteness of eyes and teeth constitute key elements in the men’s attributes. Imagine in our own culture a similar beauty contest held in which women judge men:
  • In what, do you imagine, the characteristics of male attractiveness and beauty consist?
  • To what degree are these determined by current representations of ideal masculine beauty, and to what degree by other concerns, such as evident physical and mental health, earning capacity, temperament, etc.?
• Who determines the standards of male beauty in our culture, women or men?
• Who determines the standards of female beauty in our culture, women or men?
• These standards are obviously disseminated through the culture through such factors and media as advertising, film and television; can you think of any other ways they are circulated and reinforced (for instance, through parental or peer instruction)?

Modern Western notions of gender may be traced back only as far as the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the period known as the Enlightenment, and to the Industrial Revolution, to which the Enlightenment contributed. The shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial one had important consequences for people in society. Whereas in an earlier social and economic structure, work was centered in the home, whether in cottage industries such as weaving of cloth or in agricultural occupations, with the building of factories and the development of towns and cities around them, together with the emergence of mining centers, a new structure of work appeared that had an impact on family structures and on gender. It became normal for men to leave their homes to find and maintain employment, whereas women remained at home, keeping house and tending children. The public sphere thus came to be identified more strongly with men; the private, with women.

Although of course many members of a culture will refuse and resist changes in its structuring of gender, such transformations are inevitable. Cultures alter as their historical conditions alter. The so-called “crisis in masculinity” of the closing decade of the twentieth century and the opening decade of the twenty-first may thus be understood as a reaction to shifts occurring structurally in the culture, shifts that affect the way people understand and respond to notions of sex, sexuality, and gender. Moreover, given that historically men have wielded the most power in the culture, it is to be expected that it has also been men who have been most vocal about the perceived crisis in masculinity, because it is they who have the most to lose.

One way of understanding the notion of crisis is as a reaction of anxiety or even panic to cultural change. This usually alarming and undesired emotional response on the part of individuals is then projected outward as a generalized social response that redefines change as catastrophe. The “crisis” then ceases to be simply a reaction to perceived change. Instead, it is understood as a real threat. An important question we might ask, therefore, in relation to the perceived crisis in masculinity toward the end of the twentieth century is the following: is this the first time that such a crisis has occurred, or at any rate has been perceived? Certainly, much of the rhetoric around the notion of a crisis in masculinity implies that this has been a unique moment, historically speaking; yet some investigation into the history of masculinity suggests that this may not be the case. For example, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England a debate arose regarding the feminization of men and the masculinization of women...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The end of masculinity?
• 2 Thinking (through) gender
• 3 Doing/undoing gender
• 4 Regarding patriarchy
• 5 Troubling patriarchy
• 6 (Em)Bodying masculinity
• 7 Postapocalyptic masculinities
• Notes
• References
• Index