The Man Problem

Destructive Masculinity in Western Culture

Ross Honeywill

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137551689
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137551696
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Critical Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In The Man Problem, Ross Honeywill posits that the potential for evil in all men is the social, political, and economic problem of our age. Drawing on the work of social critics and theorists including Zygmunt Bauman, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, and others, the book traces destructive masculinity through cultural texts, social systems, and everyday life practices. Using the lens of social theory, social philosophy, feminist cultural studies, and sociology, The Man Problem explores the legacy of the Enlightenment as a context for a social world constructed by men (in modernity), deconstructed (in postmodernity) and reconstructed (in the liquid present). This book investigates the outlines of the patriarchy and why the men who legitimate it behave the way they do. Despite the troubled and troubling legacy of masculinity, Honeywill reveals an alternative path forward.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I Modernity: Its Birth and Death
• 1-1 The Politics of Exclusion: Enlightenment Masculinity
• 1-2 God Does Not Play Dice: Modernity, a Masculine Enterprise
• 1-3 Tyrant or Hangman: The Evil of Ordinary Men
• 1-4 Two Genocides: The Sins of Modernity
• 1-5 End of Modernity: The Radical Dimension of Normality
• Section II Oedipal Schism: Whence Destructive Masculinity
• 2-1 Being Human: Biological Determinism
• 2-2 Gender: Sex and Gender . . . and the Psyche
• 2-3 Difference and Discrimination: Men Subjugating Women
• 2-4 Savage Torpor: Moral Blindness
• 2-5 Oedipal Schism: The Origin of Destructive Masculinity
• 2-6 Rape: Men Choosing Emptiness
• Section III Postmodernity: Its Birth and Death
• 3-1 Certitude and Contingency: A Segue to Postmodernity
• 3-2 Denial of Legitimacy: The Destructive Beast in Postmodernity
• 3-3 Enabling Fictions: Postmodernism Thrives as Postmodernity Falters
• 3-4 End of Postmodernity: The Threat to Mother Earth
• Section IV The Liquid Present
• 4-1 After Postmodernity: The Liquid Present
• 4-2 Knowledge Culture + Monoculture: A Bifurcated Society
• 4-3 The One-Gendered State: Women Reinventing Themselves
• 4-4 Masculinities: Beyond Men, Beyond Help?
• 4-5 The Moral Phene: Not the Selfish Gene
• 4-6 Now I Am Become Death: The Man Problem-Solvers
• Notes
• References
• Index