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The Knotty Death of the Necktie

Not long ago, on a Times podcast, Paul Krugman breezily announced (and if we can’t trust Paul Krugman in a breezy mood, whom can we trust?) that, though it’s hard to summarize the economic consequences of the pandemic with certainty, one sure thing is that it killed off ties. He meant not the strong social ties beloved of psychologists, nor the weak ties beloved of sociologists, nor even the railroad ties that once unified a nation. No, he meant, simply, neckties—the long, colored bands of fabric that men once tied around their collars before going to work or out to dinner or, really, to any kind of semi-formal occasion. Zoom meetings and remote work had sealed their fate, and Krugman gave no assurance that they would ever come back.

Actual facts—and that near-relation of actual facts, widely distributed images—seem to confirm this view. Between 1995 and 2008, necktie sales plummeted from more than a billion dollars to less than seven hundred million, and, if a fashion historian on NPR is to be believed (and if you can’t believe NPR . . . ), ties are now “reserved for the most formal events—for weddings, for graduations, job interviews.” Post-pandemic, there is no sign of a necktie recovery: a now famous photograph from the 2022 G-7 summit shows the group’s leaders, seven men, all in open collars, making them look weirdly ready for a slightly senescent remake of “The Hangover.” As surely as the famous, supposedly hatless Inauguration of John F. Kennedy was said to have been the end of the hat , and Clark Gable’s bare chest in “It Happened One Night” was said to have been the end of the undershirt, the pandemic has been the end of the necktie.

Such truths are always at best half-truths. Sudden appearances and disappearances tend to reflect deeper trends, and, when something ends abruptly, it often means it was already ending, slowly. (Even the dinosaurs, a current line of thinking now runs, were extinguished by that asteroid only after having been diminished for millennia by volcanoes.) In “ Hatless Jack ,” a fine and entertaining book published several years ago, the Chicago newspaperman Neil Steinberg demonstrated that the tale of Kennedy’s killing off the hat was wildly overstated. The hat had been on its way out for a while, and Jack’s hatless Inauguration wasn’t, in any case, actually hatless: he wore a top hat on his way to the ceremony but removed it before making his remarks. Doubtless the same was true of the undershirt that Gable didn’t have on. They were already starting to feel like encumbrances, which might explain why Gable didn’t wear one. And so with the necktie. Already diminishing in ubiquity by the Obama years, it needed only a single strong push to fall into the abyss.

Fashion seems particularly susceptible to such fables of origin and dissolution, though some of them turn out to be true: Babe Paley, in a rush, in legend, does seem to have knotted her Hermès scarf around her handbag, and, voilà, every other woman at, or wanting to be at, La Côte Basque soon did the same. Similarly, the necktie began its journey to dominance in seventeenth-century France , when the recruitment of Croatian soldiers, whose uniform included a distinctive knotted scarf, sparked a new trend at the court of Louis XIV. (The term “ la cravate ” comes from “Croat.”) For the next couple of centuries, the space around men’s throats was host to a bewildering array of cravats, stocks, scarves, kerchiefs, solitaires, jabots, and the style that eventually came to be called the ascot. What we now think of as the necktie—cut on the bias, made of three or four pieces of fabric, and faced with a lining—was actually a fairly recent, and local, invention, that of a New York schmatte tradesman named Jesse Langsdorf . What we call “ties” generically are, specifically, Langsdorf ties.

The Langsdorf necktie that emerged early in the twentieth century was, to be sure, hideously uncomfortable. (It is no accident that a necktie party was a grotesque nickname for a hanging.) Their constriction made them perhaps the masculine counterpart of the yet more uncomfortable fashion regime—high heels—forced upon women. On occasion, of course, a woman might wear a tie, too, as a daring appropriation of fixed ideas of masculinity. Marlene Dietrich was photographed regularly , in the thirties, in tailored men’s suits and club ties (one particularly splendid wide polka dot stands out), but this seemed an expression not so much of what we now call gender fluidity but of perfect gender switching—a passage from one neat cubbyhole to the next.

For all the necktie’s absurdity, it deserves a moment of mourning. It was the last remaining bit of plumage in male attire and an important vestige of dandyism—an aesthetic that, contrary to what people think, was anything but gaudy. Though Beau Brummell’s name has become oddly synonymous with masculine display, in truth he was intent on curbing the overelaborate fopperies of the eighteenth century. Insisting on elegance without ornament, a perfection of line achieved through attention to tailoring and fit, he ushered in the reign of gray which still determines much of men’s formal wear. The one flourish permitted in Brummell’s frock-coat ensemble was the cravat, perfectly tied. (A visitor once encountered Brummell’s valet emerging from his rooms carrying a tray of crumpled cravats and explaining, “These, Sir, are our failures!”) Similarly, the most famously fashionable man I have ever known wore only gray double-breasted suits to any even remotely formal occasion—which included opening nights at the theatre—and regarded even a black suit as a faux pas. (“It’s what a waiter wears.”) But he luxuriated in polka-dot silk ties from Sulka and Charvet, billowing and gleaming.

The art historian Kenneth Clark writes in his autobiography of how, in the nineteen-thirties, when he was the director of the National Gallery in London, he endured a staff rebellion that almost unseated him from the office. When an insurgent colleague was asked for instances of what he had done wrong, “the only concrete fact that my colleague could think of was that he objected to my neckties.” Clark, to his credit, recognized the rationality of this objection. “Neckties, albeit to a lesser degree than hats, are symbolic and almost the last things that link us to the display rituals of birds. . . . So my frustrated colleague’s answer was quite justifiable by Warburgian standards.”

By “Warburgian standards,” Clark meant the standards on symbolism created by the great, mad art historian Aby Warburg . Warburg wrought a revolution in the study of visual communication, high and low alike, by insisting that symbols are the beating heart of style. The meaningful attributes of a visual display—the gown on a Renaissance nymph or the necktie on a middle-aged man—had been handed down by mysterious but durable traditions that filled permanent human needs. We all “stand on middle ground between magic and logos, and their instrument of orientation is the symbol,” Warburg wrote. One sees at a glance the utter applicability of this formula to the necktie: The logic of the suit is balanced against the magic of the tie. The two together become symbolic: the gray or blue jacket reminds us of a common class background; the distinctive pattern of the tie orients us toward the wearer’s unique identity.

That identity can be individual but also communal, as with the club tie, a genre that proliferated much of the twentieth century to denote membership of clubs, schools, universities, regiments, sports teams, Masonic lodges, choral societies—the list is endless. It registered as what might be called a stealth uniform. Emblazoned with emblems of the club or, more often, just its colors in diagonal stripes, such a tie was a kind of code that spoke only to those in possession of it. To others, the pattern of stripes would seem merely a pattern of stripes. Yet, over the years, the club tie, in best Warburgian fashion, set itself free from denoting a particular organization. If you ask for a club tie in most menswear stores you won’t be asked which club; you’ll be shown a rack of ties whose stripes and faded colors have come to connote the idea of clubbiness, the concept of élite belonging.

Examine any now unused collection of ties, and you will find that they are full of tightly compressed meanings—once instantly significant to the spectator of the time and still occultly visible now. Not only the specific meanings of club membership but also the broader semiotics of style. In any vintage closet, there are likely to be knitted neckties that still reside within the eighties style of “American Gigolo”—which, believe it or not, helped bring Armani to America . The knit tie meant Italy, sports cars, daring, and a slight edge of the criminal. There are probably ties from Liberty of London—beautiful, flowered-print ties whose aesthetic ultimately derives from the Arts and Crafts movement, with its insistence on making the surfaces of modern life as intricate and complexly ornamental as a medieval tapestry or Pre-Raphaelite painting. If the closet is old enough, its ties will show a whole social history of the pallid fifties turning into the ambivalent sixties turning into the florid seventies. The New Yorker cartoonist Charles Saxon captured these transitions as they occurred, in a career that can be seen as a dazzling study of ties and their meanings. The neatly knotted ties of Cheeveresque commuters give way in the early seventies to the ever-broadening ties of advertising men, flags they waved to show off their desire to simultaneously woo the counterculture and keep out of it.

The tie could sometimes get so compressed in its significance as to lose its witty, stealthy character and become overly and unambiguously “loaded.” There is no better story of suicide-by-semiotics than that of the rise and death of the bow tie, which, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, became so single-mindedly knotted up with neoconservatism, in the estimable hands of George Will, that to wear one was to declare oneself a youngish fogy, a reader of the National Review , and a skeptic of big government. The wider shores of bow-tie-dom—the dashing, jaunty, self-mocking P. G. Wodehouse side of them—receded, and were lost. It became impossible to wear a bow tie and vote Democratic.

Fortunately, there is still one redoubt of the necktie in Manhattan. It is the tiny store called Seigo on upper Madison Avenue, where Seigo Katsuragawa presides in impeccable elegance over the last remaining harvest of perfect handmade silk ties: club ties, Liberty ties, plus cummerbunds and ascots and all the secondary paraphernalia of the lost kingdom of the decorated neck. Katsuragawa presents his wares in neat, folded array, a bandbox of small ribbons of fictive identity. (He has perhaps the best taste of any retailer on Madison Avenue—exquisitely curated jazz, particularly the music of Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley, plays in the background of his store throughout the day.) He explains to a visitor, in a cautious, rhythmically halting English, still heavily accented after a half century in America, that the existence of the store and its beautiful handiwork depend—with an irony one could not invent—on the previous disappearance of another legendary garment, the kimono.

“Fewer and fewer kimonos being worn in Japan!” he explains. “This means that the silk manufacturers had less and less customers.” The silk mills of Kyoto, in business for centuries making kimonos, were eager for a new market. Seigo, as he prefers to be called, began to design ties and purchase silks. All of his ties are woven in Kyoto and then hand-sewn in a mill outside Tokyo. He produces them in limited editions, usually eight per color at a time.

For years, Seigo’s work was essentially wholesale, with him as the middleman between the Japanese silk-makers and big stores: Nordstrom, Paul Stuart, and the like. But the tie market shrank and shrivelled, until now it is enough only for the environs of his tiny store. Occasionally, a club will demand a new club tie—the Union Club has their ties made by him—and, he admits, when pressed, that various department stores, with limited tie resources, send customers. But, for the most part, he depends on the regular visits of the last tie-wearers. “I feel this is almost”—he paused to find words neither too conceited nor inaccurate—“a . . . well, a public service. Fewer and fewer ties in the world, and so few of those are beautiful. I’m not trying to make big money out of this. I’m officially a senior citizen. I get Social Security, so I don’t have to.” He’s retired already from the rat race, and, though he has no immediate plan to retire, he surely will, eventually. Then what will become of the Manhattan tie?

Of course, the human appetite for display will never end, and, so, as the concentrated symbolism of the necktie evaporates, the rest of our clothes must carry its messages. The purposes of Warburgian pattern have now spread everywhere: to the cut of your jogging pants and the choice of your sneakers and, well, the cock of your snook. Where once the necktie blazoned out a specific identity from the general background of tailored gray, now everything counts. The most obvious successor garment to the necktie is the baseball cap, which declares its owner’s identity and affiliation not with some tantalizing occult pattern but the painful unsubtlety of actual text—the club named on the cap.

Of course, there are no true extinctions in fashion—no volcano that once it has gone off cannot be recuperated and relit, no asteroid whose course cannot be diverted. Fashion is made of soft goods—things in every sense, malleable. Just as the undershirt disappeared until Tony Soprano suddenly emerged wearing one week after week, wooing even Miss Reykjavik with his retro New Jersey style, so the hat was gone until the Williamsburg hipsters brought it back. And, just as surely, some new incarnation of the London Mod is doubtless already looking in the mirror and tightening the knot at his neck. Indeed, the one public figure still identified with a tie is the Tony Soprano of politics, the orange man himself, who wears his ill-tied and over-long red banner as a reminder of . . . well, of something. In the meantime, we will cling to our closeted ties, old and new, and wait for an occasion sufficiently formal to call them forth in public, enduring the discomfort round our necks for the sake of that narrow vertical column of meaning that amplifies our heartbeat, our singular identity. If no one else notices, Mr. Seigo will. ♦

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Modern Masculinity: The Atlas Complex

Men may feel like they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders..

Posted June 17, 2021 | Reviewed by Chloe Williams

• About 90 percent of people believe that society would benefit from a conversation about what modern masculinity is, according to a survey.
• Two-thirds of respondents believe that masculinity and femininity are beyond gender and should be defined for each individual.
• "The Atlas Complex of Men," the idea that men carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, can lead to mental health issues.

In 2020, the Mantorshift Institute conducted a qualitative research project in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and Jordan. There were over 200 men interviewed of various age groups and backgrounds. In my previous post , I summarized why we conducted this research. Some of the reasons we highlighted were:

• As longstanding structures and stereotypes are being reevaluated, masculinity and manhood are in crisis.
• The old masculine stereotypes of being aggressive, privileged, and tough, while also being hypersexual and unemotional, are being dismantled.
• At the same time, we are also seeing these old stereotypes being embraced and reembraced around the world by many extremist movements.

We have provided an overview of crisis factors from a health perspective, and some of the business and cultural issues around modern masculinity. Some of the key factors are:

• There are some pretty disturbing statistics coming out about men’s health. For example, males are three to seven times more likely than females to take their own life.
• Most work cultures today are very masculine, mainly due to the dominance of men in these organizations, especially at the upper management level. The women who want to succeed need to adopt masculine traits, such as being highly assertive , strong in conflict, highly competitive, and emotionally reserved.
• Conversely, if you are a man leading a mixed-gender team today, you need to decide how you relate to them as a group and as individuals. You and your organization will need to decide what's appropriate and what's not.
• From a cultural point of view, the images and archetypes of manhood and masculinity that are instilled into us through our upbringing and education are outdated.

Masculinity in the Modern World

We have summarized our findings in nine key points. In this part of our blog series, we will go through the first two findings and provide more information and background on what our respondents shared. We also provide our calls for action as a result of this qualitative research project.

Our first two findings are the following:

• The discussion about modern masculinity is progressive rather than reactionary. Only men and women together can create equality and change the way we treat each other. We are creating a new future together. Our respondents believe that we need to discuss and define what modern masculinity is.
• The definition of masculinity is beyond gender. Two-thirds of our respondents believe that masculinity and femininity are beyond gender and should be defined for each individual. One-third believe that gender will not play a significant defining role in the future.

Masculinity Beyond Genders

Ninety percent of our respondents believe that society would benefit from a constructive discussion about masculinity in today's context, especially when it comes to the balance of what positive attributes people should have and which of them should be considered masculine.

About 10 percent of our respondents proposed to talk about modern gender as a collective rather than masculinity versus femininity, which they believe locks us back into the binary of masculine and feminine. They acknowledge the neurobiological differences between male and female as biological sex, but they also believe that gender norms and the expression and experience of gender is also culturally rooted.

There is a consensus that when we talk about modern gender, we're talking about individuals who have begun to process their gender outside whatever they have passively assumed or understood to be true about gender from their society. This can be different based on sexual orientation or gender identity or both. For instance, this means that a transgender person may also be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or pansexual. We need to speak about two different experiences that intersect: sexual orientation and romantic orientation on one hand, and gender identity and experience on the other.

Notions of Masculinity Can Put Extreme Pressure on Men

A significant number of our respondents believe that the old notion of masculinity—defined as being tough and aggressive and protective while being attractive and hypersexual—are still strongly present in society. A softer form of this masculinity is the expectation of being the tough protector and provider in a family or a relationship. This notion puts extreme pressure on men and leads to mental health issues while also affecting relationships at work, at home, and amongst friends. This is what we called “The Atlas Complex of Men,” the notion men carry the weight of the world on their shoulders and it will collapse unless they continue to do so. Starting a conversation about modern masculinity will give us personal insights and the opportunity to learn from the experiences of others so that we can have better self-awareness, feel less alone and live more authentic lives.

Another interesting way of thinking about masculinity and femininity in the modern world relates to the roles men and women should play in a relationship or a family setting. Several respondents brought up the issue that by dismantling the traditional roles of men being distant from home duties, there can be interesting sexual challenges that arise. For instance, some women who spend more time away from home and enjoy a successful career find their partner less attractive when that partner is at home and engaged in more traditionally “feminine” activities. Similar issues were mentioned around the idea of men showing more vulnerability and finding that it creates apprehension and disapproval as a general response from their female partners.

For a small fraction of the respondents, especially in the Middle East or with a Middle Eastern lineage, modern masculinity is understood as a negative term describing those who neglect their families to advance their careers. The so-called “modern men” are seen as selfish, egoistic, and not able to accept feedback.

Mickey Feher is a psychologist and serial entrepreneur. He is a coach and a facilitator who helps organizations and individuals discover their Higher Purpose and connect the two for better results and spirits.

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Rethinking Masculinities Studies 

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Christopher Breu, Rethinking Masculinities Studies , American Literary History , Volume 34, Issue 2, Summer 2022, Pages 586–595, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajac002

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This review essay examines three new books in masculinities studies. It also provides a mapping of the field as it has changed over the past twenty years, exploring how our understanding of masculinity has changed with recent developments in trans, intersex, and queer theory and activism. How does the field change in response to changing conceptions of gender in the present? The review provides a provisional answer to this question.

Three recent books on masculinity in US culture provide an opportunity to examine how much the field of masculinities studies has kept up with changing frameworks around gender and embodiment in the present.

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Voices of the New Masculinity

Welcome to GQ's New Masculinity issue, an exploration of the ways that traditional notions of masculinity are being challenged, overturned, and evolved. Read more about the issue from GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch here and hear Pharrell's take on the matter here .

Jaboukie Young-White

At 25, Jaboukie Young-White is the millennial correspondent for ‘The Daily Show’—or, as the chyron once read, an “actual young person.” His pathbreaking comedy, informed by his identity as a queer person of color, uses jokes to find what he calls “freedom” and “lightness” in the heaviest parts of the zeitgeist.

GQ: Your stand-up includes jokes about being perceived as “masc”—which you have defined as “basically just gay for ‘I'm not like other girls.’ ” Is that part of how you see yourself? Jaboukie Young-White: I would say it's more something I've been made to be aware of. My dad is a barber, and I grew up spending most of my days after school in a barbershop. I remember there being so much casual homophobia. That environment is where a lot of my behaviors that are coded as “masc” come from. It was a survival technique. Growing up in so many of these hypermasculine, super-homophobic environments, I think that just naturally became an extension of who I am.

I always find it weird, especially in the queer community, when people fetishize “mascness” or masculinity. Because for so many people, those are actually scars, you know. They're battle scars on your personality. Which is tragic in a certain way.

Do you see any positive sides of masculinity? The positive aspect of masculinity, to me, is just being sure of yourself. Getting to a point where you can take care of yourself so well that you can also be of service to others. That's always been so tied up with masculinity, for me. Even though I was around a lot of people who were homophobic or exhibiting these toxic mannerisms, there was also this high level of chivalry, where if a woman walked into the barbershop, you would make sure she had a seat, or if someone differently abled walked in, you would make sure they had a seat. There is a code of ethics that I think is noble and good and doesn't need to only be practiced by men. There are aspects of masculinity that we all exhibit.

It almost feels strange to say that, because masculinity has been so demonized. It almost feels like you have to come up with a different word or rebrand it.

Are there advantages in the comedy world to being perceived as masculine? Are there disadvantages? There are pros and cons. Audiences will let me talk about things other than my sexuality.

On the flip side, when I do start talking about gay stuff, sometimes I think people want more of an explanation. I did one super-small house show in St. Louis back in 2016, and I mentioned I had a boyfriend. Afterward, one person in the audience was like, “Look, man, a little advice: That really caught me off guard.” As much as people complain about identitarian comedy, it's necessary up until people stop having normative views of everything.

Much of your comedy touches on aspects of identity that are charged. Does humor change how people hear these things? A lot of the things I joke about are things that at one moment really felt like existential questions I was grappling with. I started doing comedy when I was 19. I was coming into who I was as a human being, just figuring out all these different aspects of me. And every time I would write a joke and it would hit, it would feel like a lock had turned. All of these disparate or chaotic or brooding thoughts had all just coalesced into a really tight joke. Into something that I could show to people and then hear laughter and be like, “Okay, I'm not crazy to be thinking these things.” Not to say that the shit I was doing when I was 19 was cutting-edge. [ laughs ] But to me, those realizations meant a lot.

Young-White’s first stand-up special, ‘Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents…Jaboukie Young-White,’ premieres on October 18.

Thomas Page McBee on…Recognizing the Power of His Own Privilege

Thomas Page McBee is a journalist and author who, while reporting his most recent book, ‘Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man,’ became the first transgender man ever known to box at Madison Square Garden.

The first time I quieted an entire, rowdy newsroom just by speaking, I'd been on testosterone for only a few months. I'd felt gangly and pubescent, despite being 30 at the time, but my new baritone seemed to create an unconscious response in my colleagues: Whenever I spoke, they swiveled toward me. They listened keenly and with such focus on my mouth, I became self-conscious.

My life was dotted with a thousand such revelations in the first years of my transition: When a woman crossed to the other side of the street to avoid my newly weaponized body, late at night. When my uncle offered his hand at my mother's funeral. (“Men don't hug,” he told me, not unkindly.)

The expectation of what being a white man “meant” was apparent in how the world reacted to me. In the years since I first silenced that newsroom just by speaking, I figured out how to be the man I am, mostly by doing the exact opposite of what's expected of me: I listen more, I talk less, and I hug other men—even my uncle. And I think about that day when I first opened my mouth and realized how disturbingly powerful I suddenly was, simply for existing in this white man's body. I hope I never forget it.

Asia Kate Dillon

Thanks to roles in ‘Billions’ and ‘John Wick: Chapter 3,’ Asia Kate Dillon has made headlines for playing Hollywood's first gender-nonbinary characters. Off-screen, Dillon, who uses the singular “they” pronoun, has become a powerful advocate for greater inclusivity in popular culture.

GQ: Is masculinity an idea that resonates with you personally? Do you feel like certain parts of the way you see yourself, or the way you present to the world, are in some way “masculine”? Asia Kate Dillon: Traditionally, masculinity and femininity have been seen as binary polar opposites. What I was excited to discover for myself, and what I'm excited to see happening in the larger cultural context, is a redefinition of masculinity and femininity as things that are all-encompassing—that masculinity can be hard or soft, strong or vulnerable, and that those things aren't opposites of each other, because being vulnerable is a sign of strength. I'm excited to see people deciding for themselves what masculinity and femininity mean to them. For one person, masculinity might mean a dress and a face of makeup, because that's how they see themselves.

You've done a lot to bring attention to the gendered nature of acting awards. What kind of change would you like to see? I think that the “actress” category should be removed from awards shows. If people want to identify as actresses, then they absolutely should. But we don't have categories for people who are assigned female at birth or identify as women in the director or cinematographer categories. The acting category is the only place where we're separating people, either by how they identify or based on what we assume is in their pants, or their assigned sex at birth, or their visible biological sex characteristics.

In addition to your advocacy around gender, you're also a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter. Has your journey with gender influenced your work with other social justice movements or vice versa? As someone who was assigned female at birth, I was already a marginalized person, and then on top of that I'm queer and nonbinary and trans. So I have several marginalized identities. And I also carry white-bodied privilege. That doesn't negate my talent, my innate gift. It just means that even though I carry these marginalized identities, I still hold power in rooms where there are queer people of color, for example. For me it's an understanding that when I'm working to make the world safer for other people, I'm also working to make it safer for myself. We're all in it together.

Asia Kate Dillon currently stars in ‘Orchid Receipt Service,’ a play written by Corinne Donly and produced by Dillon’s MIRROR/FIRE productions, at MITU580 from October 8-26.

Liz Plank on…the “Marie Kondo Approach to Gender”

Journalist Liz Plank—you may know her on Twitter as @FeministFabulous —is one of feminism’s most visible faces in the social-media era. A producer of Vox podcasts and news shows such as ‘2016ish, Consider It,’ and ‘Divided States of Women,’ she recently published her first book, ‘For the Love of Men,’ a hopeful prescription for what she terms “mindful masculinity.”

One of the first things I did when I started writing my book was a social experiment in Washington Square. I asked guys, “What’s hard about being a man?” It’s a very simple question. If you want to know what’s hard about being a woman, it’s like, “How much time do you have?” But they just froze. And you could tell that not only did they not necessarily feel that it was safe to share that, they’d also never thought about it.

Women have been encouraged to ask themselves these questions about how they were raised and how it affected them. I think men have to do the same thing. I know it doesn’t feel like an action item, but really pausing and thinking about things like “Where did you learn what it means to be a man? And who taught you and how?”—even thinking about that is huge for men. When I started talking to men for my book, it became clear to me that so much of manhood is automatic. A lot of the attitudes aren’t conscious behaviors. They’ve been learned, and men don’t even know where they learned them. In the book, I compare it to the Macarena.

So much of the conversation around men is negative, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and there are a million reasons for that. Women have been hurt by men, and women have been traumatized; I've been traumatized by men myself. But I wanted to approach this conversation differently, because the way we’ve been approaching it so far doesn’t work. I wanted to come up with a term that was positive, one that signaled a decluttering of masculinity, like a conscious spring cleaning. “Mindful masculinity” is the Marie Kondo approach to gender: “Does this spark joy for me? What kind of behaviors do I like? What kind of attitudes do I like, and what don't I like?” I think women have been taught how to do that. They’ve been encouraged to take on behaviors that are more quote-unquote traditionally masculine: to be more assertive, to communicate in a way that’s more in line with the way that men communicate, to unlearn their passivity and other quote-unquote feminine behaviors of making yourself smaller. I wanted to give men the opportunity to do the same thing.— As told to Nora Caplan-Bricker

Two years ago, when her solo debut opened at the New York gallery 56 Henry, the celebrated artist Al Freeman presented objects that could easily be found in a frat house: a beer can, a lava lamp, a set of male genitals—except that these were understuffed pillows. Freeman's soft-sculpture work is an effort to examine hypermasculine spaces, an exploration of what she calls “a club I can't be a part of.”

The objects in my work come directly from what's considered to be the most toxically masculine culture. It affects me personally, and it affects the people around me, and it's everywhere—from frat houses up into our government. The soft sculptures are a way to address the problems in that culture without being didactic or finger-shaking.

As an artist, you're either critiquing things that are in the world, or you're glorifying things in the world, or you're just mirroring things in the world. This work is a mirror of the things that I wish would be softer, or more benign, or less threatening somehow—or just something that I could participate in that isn't abusive.

I think a lot of the conversations about toxic masculinity are just preaching to the converted, and to some degree I want my work to be inclusive. These are items that everybody can identify with or recognize without them being off-putting or judgmental or aggressive.

I've never tried to make funny work. But I guess it's castrating humor, to some degree. It robs the masculinity of its power and its potency. There's also the idea of all of these kinds of macho objects being cuddly pillows. The idea of a frat boy seeking comfort in a pillow version of his Jägermeister bottle, as if the pillows are teddy bears that would comfort some terrible man.— As told to Nora Caplan-Bricker

Tarana Burke on…How to Break Through to Men

The founder of the #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke is an activist focused on racial justice and sexual violence. She spoke with GQ about the work she does, creating allies out of men.

It's best to start with men who at least have a conscientiousness around women's rights and see us as equals. And then it's always best to engage men who can engage other men. I may not have as much success coming into a room full of men and trying to talk to them about women's issues, but another man can connect.

A lot of times, once you start saying things like “rape culture,” “sexual violence,” “gender equity,” men's ears turn to mush. So I try to narrow it down to concepts I think men can connect to, like dignity. That's universal, and men in particular are socialized to protect their dignity. I frame it in terms of their own lives, like, “When you go into a meeting, does somebody stop you and say, ‘Hey, listen, you might want to put a jacket on and cover up your butt, because these guys are handsy’? Or ‘Watch out for Joe, because he likes to grab people by the balls.’ ” I ask them: What if that was a life you had to live?

Once you start connecting the indignities women deal with, they're like, “Oh, God.”

It's about getting them to tap into empathy. Sympathy is fleeting—you can feel sorry for somebody today and not think about it tomorrow. If you can have empathy for another person, you'll always come back to that because it connects to a place inside of you.— As told to Nora Caplan-Bricker

Collier Schorr

Collier Schorr is a celebrated photographer whose work ranges from fine art to editorial to advertising while flipping gendered scripts—of assertive women, queer and transgender models, and androgynous boys.

When I go to shoot someone, I'm always curious: How will we relate? I'm not the traditional face that walks into the photo studio.

Men have fewer facial expressions than women, and so in terms of making pictures and showing a range, it is harder. I don't know if it's because men haven't been encouraged to have more emotional responses and therefore their expressions are more limited, or if it's that we as a culture are less interested in that range.

I do think that today maybe there's more possibility of play for men. Play in the sense of just being able to shift around and borrow—just kind of soften. Women probably can't appreciate how big a small shift is in masculinity. Maybe there's permission for men to be a little more curious about who they really are. I'm not sure that people have encouraged men to be curious about who they are. And so maybe in pictures I try to play with that a little bit.— As told to Nora Caplan-Bricker

Katrina Karkazis on…the Science of Masculinity

A cultural anthropologist, Katrina Karkazis is a professor at the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College and the co-author of the new book ‘Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography.’

GQ: Your new book, Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography , with co-author Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, debunks some commonly held ideas about the connection between testosterone and masculinity. What do people get wrong about this hormone? Katrina Karkazis: High T is thought to be the substance in the body that produces masculinity—physically, through muscles and hair, but also behaviorally. But it doesn't actually map on very well to what we understand as masculinity.

What's an example of a stereotypically masculine behavior that actually has nothing to do with testosterone? Aggression is a great example. Researchers say the relationship between testosterone and aggression is weak or nonexistent.

How do you think the idea that masculinity is rooted in biology impacts the way that our society views gender? As #MeToo was heating up, there was a conversation between the writers Ross Douthat and Rebecca Traister. She asked him what's at the root of this, and he said testosterone. I think he was joking, but people believe that. And if we accept that gender hierarchies are tied to evolution and biology, then it seems impossible to change.

How so? Testosterone often gives men a pass for their negative behavior, and a pass for their success. With titans of Wall Street, for example, testosterone didn't have anything to do with those men reaching the highest level in their field—there are other structures that elevated men and suppressed women. If biology and testosterone aren't the explanation, then we have the much harder work to do of addressing the social causes.

So, if we move away from the idea that biology explains the behavior we associate with gender, how could that open up the definition of “masculinity” a little wider in our culture? I hope that we can stop attaching so many behaviors to masculinity as though they're exclusively the province of men. Because they often happen to be things that are valued, like risk-taking or athleticism. Conversely, I think we’re reaching a point where we can shove more under the umbrella of masculinity. Men staying home and parenting their children, or men expressing feelings in public ways, can be understood as masculine. There are many things that are shared human behavior, shared human feelings, that don't need to be labeled masculine at all, or else can be fit under the umbrella of masculinity.

After raising his voice about his own struggles with depression and anxiety, the Cleveland Cavaliers' Kevin Love has become a new kind of role model, pushing to modernize men's attitudes toward mental health—and what it means to be strong.

I remember 2008, I had made it to the NBA, and I was like, “I'm super emotional, but I'm not going to show it.” My playbook from my dad was to never show weakness. Never cry. Always show ruggedness, toughness, in everything you do.

Last year I was in such a terrible place. And I was just suffering silently. After DeMar DeRozan came out and said he dealt with depression, I felt like saying, “Hey, this is what I'm going through.” We still have what you define as masculinity. We still have that ruggedness, that toughness. But we're more evolved in our thinking. You're allowed to be soft. At some point in your life, you're going to have to apply some softness or a gentle touch to something.

Basketball is a very emotional game. I thought it was so cool when Giannis Antetokounmpo just let it all hang out when he accepted the MVP. Water of the heart, right? He was just crying, crying, crying. Showing that vulnerability, to me that's supercool. It's special to see that in our game, we're supposed to be emotional.— As told to Nora Caplan-Bricker

Blair Braverman on…Occupying Traditionally Male Spaces

Writer and dogsledder Blair Braverman’s book, ‘Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube,’ about her education as a musher, put a feminist spin on the hyper-masculine canon of adventure writing. Fresh off running her first Iditarod earlier this year, she continues to chronicle her experiences bending gendered expectations in the great outdoors.

GQ: In your book, you write about encountering a lot of sexism in your early years as a musher. As you’ve grown more established in the sport, do you still deal with men who don’t think you should be there, or don’t believe a woman can be as tough as a man? Blair Braverman: Mushing is one of the only sports where men and women compete against each other, so in that way it’s unusually egalitarian. When it comes to the races, I’ve found that male mushers are very respectful of female mushers’ skills, because we’re all out there together: on the same trails, facing the same challenges, weathering the same storms.

When I encounter sexism now, it’s usually from non-mushing men, who seem to think that because I can do it, the sport isn’t that hard. Like dudes at a bar who hear that I ran the Iditarod—a thousand-mile race through the Alaskan wilderness—and say things like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve thought about doing that.” Really? You’ve thought about competing at the elite level of a sport you’ve never even tried? Be my guest, but don’t come complaining to me when you freeze to death.

Despite the presence of many elite women athletes, adventure sports remain synonymous with a certain rugged masculinity in the cultural imagination. Why is that link so persistent? From the time settlers came to what would become the United States, the American narrative has been one of (white) men risking everything to tame the wilderness and shape it for their own purposes, whether they’re pioneers or cowboys or prospectors. For a woman to participate in adventure sports or expeditions, on her own terms, complicates the narrative: What if it’s not man versus nature anymore? What if we’re not—gasp—conquering the wilderness at all? What if a woman’s skills can surpass a man’s in a realm that’s been safely cordoned off as male—which is to say, a realm that’s been safe from the possibility of a woman coming in, succeeding, and thereby threatening the supremacy of masculinity itself? If any part of that man-versus-nature narrative is fallible, it calls into question some very deep-seated stories and values that our country is based on. And once that foundation is built, it’s awfully hard to change it.

Many of your themes as a writer—toughness, courage, the desire to test one’s limits—are traditionally associated with masculinity. Are there ways in which you see yourself or your work as masculine? Nope. My work is women’s work—and that work happens to involve crossing vast expanses of frozen wilderness with my dogs. It is women’s work because I am the one doing it. I see part of that work as challenging sexist assumptions, some of which relate to masculinity and femininity, and one of the biggest assumptions we have about those categories is that they’re mutually exclusive. Think about someone being brave, or speaking truth, or protecting their loved ones: Those efforts could be masculine, feminine, or something else entirely, all depending on who’s doing them. And we have a lot to learn from each other.

What does masculinity mean to you? Masculinity is, among other things, a man being authentic to himself.

Where do you think or hope that the genre of adventure writing, and particularly its relationship to masculinity, is headed? How is the genre’s relationship to masculinity changing, or how would you like to see it change? I think it’s already changed, even if perceptions aren’t changing as quickly. Writers like Jill Fredston, Rahawa Haile, Eva Holland, and others are breaking down boundaries every day.

You have an incredibly devoted following on Twitter and in general. Anecdotally, do you have a sense of the gender breakdown of your fans? For a lot of women, seeing the things you push yourself to do seems pretty life-changing—why do you think that is? Do you find that men (generalizing very broadly here) tend to respond to your work as strongly as women do? I think my followers are about two-thirds women and one-third men. I’ve found that men tend to respond to the gendered elements of my work in different ways; women might see themselves, but men see a different way of experiencing the world, a parallel universe that’s less visible to them, that can help them understand the experiences of the women they care about. Some of the most meaningful responses to my book, Welcome to The Goddamn Ice Cube , have come from men—men who say it helped them to connect with their wife, or to start a conversation with their teenage son. And of course everybody—regardless of gender—likes dogs.

John Waters

John Waters has been called the King of Camp, the Pope of Trash, and the Prince of Puke. At 73, the filmmaker behind ‘Hairspray,’ ‘Pink Flamingos,’ and ‘Polyester’ might be the closest thing we have to a patriarch of unconventional manhood. He spoke with GQ about how the culture seems to be catching up to him—and how the meaning of “masculinity” has evolved.

GQ: As the culture has shifted over the course of your career, how do you think the definition of “masculinity” has changed? John Waters: It has taken on so many different meanings in my lifetime—today it's almost a word you can't use. When I was young, it was a threatening word. It meant that you were going to be hassled for not liking sports or not wanting to fight. And now “masculinity” is a word that is embraced by transgender men. It can mean so many things to so many different communities. It can be a very negative word, or it can be a positive. I think it should be a neutral word, and so should “feminine.” Then they can't be used against anybody.

In your new book, Mr. Know-It-All, you ask, “What is a real man today?” What's your answer? A real man is not scared of strong, smart women. Freud was wrong. Men are the ones who have penis envy—for good penises that respect women and are not threatened by people who are smarter or more powerful than them. And I think that is what a good man is.

How widely do you think your notion of “a good man” has caught on? It's an economic question. It depends on where you live in the country and how you're doing financially. And I think the more men are threatened, the worse they get at masculinity. Humor is how you get people to change their minds. Humor is the way that people escape. Humor is how you can embrace the enemy.

You write in the book that with all the progress we've made, there's little left that feels radical. I'm glad it's not illegal to be gay anymore. But I go to the gay parades, and it's mostly all straight people showing their respect. It's a good step. But Stonewall was a gay riot. And I don't know why gay people aren't rioting now.

I wonder what happened. All those high school students were walking out of school. That was so brilliant. Why did they stop? Why aren't people marching every day? I don't get it. It seems to me there's more to be angry about than there has been in a long time. I think we need to use humor to humiliate and embarrass the extreme right. I'm not for violence, but I'm for humor as terrorism.

Aymann Ismail on…His Modern Muslim Marriage

Writer Aymann Ismail covers the intersection of masculinity, race, and relationships as host of the podcast ‘Man Up’ at Slate. He and his wife, Muslim chaplain Mira Abou Elezz, talked about what it means to them to call their partnership a Muslim marriage.

Aymann Ismail: My ideals for what a marriage is supposed to look like were influenced by both American culture and Islam. I had two separate expectations that were kind of in conflict with each other. The American in me was like, All right, you meet somebody, you date for however long, maybe even move in together first, then get married. The Muslim in me was like, That’s not gonna happen .

Mira Abou Elezz: Yeah. Religiously, we're not supposed to be doing any kind of physical intimacy until we're married. And culturally it just doesn't look appropriate for a young couple to be spending nights with each other when they're not married.

When we got married, I was about to move to L.A. My mom floated the idea. She was like, you guys are going to want to visit each other while you’re in California, and if you’re married, it will just be a lot easier for everybody.

Aymann Ismail: I think it played to our advantage that we did it in a very mature, grown-up way. I think, had we followed some kind of script, the American one or the Muslim one, then maybe I’d be caught up in whatever expectations I carried over from my childhood.

I wanted to ask you if you felt any pressure to be any particular kind of Muslim. There aren’t any Muslim families on TV, really, so my only frame of reference for what a Muslim marriage is supposed to look like is my parents’. Their relationship is very informed by scripture, which makes me feel like I’m falling short when it comes to being a Muslim man. I get insecure about how Muslim I really am.

Mira Abou Elezz: Well, we're both Muslim, so our marriage is Islamic, right? That’s all it takes.

Aymann Ismail: To be honest, the first time I opened a Koran to read the verses about marriage was to answer anti-Muslim trolls who were using those verses to prove to me that I must be complicit in abusing women if I’m Muslim. One verse they’d use a lot—I'll read it in English—was "Men are in charge of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others." I read the original Arabic closely, then looked for different English translations, and found it translated someplace else as “Men are the maintainers of women.” That actually made sense to me. Maintainer , that’s a good word, like, protector , supplier . I gelled with that really hard.

Mira Abou Elezz: Our marriage doesn’t have to look like other Muslim marriages. It’s about principles, like love, and respect, and humility, and faith in something bigger than us. There are verses I didn’t understand when I was younger, but as I get older, I'm starting to understand some of the wisdom behind those rules and applying them to us. It doesn't feel like a box anymore. It actually feels freeing.

Aymann Ismail: Islam to me is really starting to feel more like a path you take, not a destination. The way we grew up, it just felt like a list of rules. I see our relationship as a kind of protest—both against that idea of what I expected a Muslim marriage to be, and against the anti-Muslim stereotypes in American culture. When I think about what our relationship is, it's already, on its own, a fuck-you to the people who think that Muslim men are violent, possessive, and abusive. The more that I am a caring Muslim husband to you, the more they look stupid.

Mira Abou Elezz: I think in a lot of cases, being yourself is subversive. Being authentic is revolutionary.

Killer Mike & Shana Render

Rapper Killer Mike and his wife, Shana Render, are more than just Atlanta hip-hop royalty: They're a modern-day black superhero duo. Their weapon of choice to fight the white patriarchy? Traditional values mixed with progressive implementation—a recipe that Mike has used for years in his music and his activism, where his ideas often defy easy categorization. (He's a vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders, for instance, but also a staunch gun-rights advocate.) We met the couple at their Batcave, the Blue Flame Lounge, one of Atlanta's iconic strip clubs, to learn how they think about modern gender roles—and how they've built the kind of relationship we can all aspire to.

GQ: How would you describe the sort of partnership you've created? Killer Mike: This is Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Two people who are sharp and together. Mobbing. I open the car door, and usually she cooks. That's more to do with the fact that she's a much better cook than I am. But she's my partner in every aspect of the word.

When it comes to your businesses—your real estate holdings, your barbershops—who is responsible for what?

Shana Render: Mike is the face of the place, but I'm the business of the businesses. I make financial decisions. Any problems at the shop, I know about them first.

Killer Mike: Shana has a masterful business mind. Much better than mine. It's my wife who was smart enough to make these investments.

What's the next investment?

Render: I want to open up a hotel. Hopefully, Georgia will legalize marijuana soon so we can have a smoke room in it.

Why do you spend so much time at the Blue Flame?

Killer Mike: The black strip club is the $25 Soho House. The connections are just as deep.

Render: A lot of the dancers are like, “What should I do with this $10K I have saved?” We give them advice on moves they should make.

Killer Mike: Catering, massage companies, real estate…

Render: Sometimes Mike jokes, “I'm the mastermind behind this shit!” But I quickly remind him that I'm the master behind that mind.

Clint Smith on…What It Takes to Be a Good Dad

An author and poet, Clint Smith is completing his Ph.D. at Harvard.

I grew up thinking a good dad was somebody who did what the mom asked them to do. I saw a tweet a couple of months ago where somebody said that their friend had lived in this house for years, and there was a soap dispenser above the sink in the kitchen. And as they were moving out, the father came in and was like, “Wow, it's amazing that this soap dispenser has never run out of soap in all these years.” The rest is self-explanatory.

It's important that I unlearn the desire to feel that I should be commended for doing things that I should be doing anyway. Recently, I walked into CVS. I was holding my two-year-old's hand and pushing the baby in the stroller, and people literally started applauding. I'm cognizant of the fact that this is wrapped up in a lot of racial and gender politics—what it means for people to see a black man with his kids. But nobody would ever applaud my wife. We also have reams of social science showing that black fathers are far more involved than they are often given credit for. It's important for me not to get caught up in the spectacle of “good black dad”-ness that makes me think I'm doing something special.

I think more men are starting to be more thoughtful about the sacrifices being made for them. It's a process. It's not meant to be easy. But it's worth it. Because you are building a more equitable world that your kids will one day occupy.— As told to Nora Caplan-Bricker

Hannah Gadsby

Hannah Gadsby's stand-up special ‘Nanette’ was the most discussed comedy act of the #MeToo moment. Rooted in the personal trauma of homophobic violence, it used sharp humor to proffer a devastating critique of misogyny. She's now touring with a new show, ‘Douglas,’ that'll hit Netflix next year. GQ asked her what she'd like to see more men understand—and do.

Hello, the men. My advice on modern masculinity would be to look at all those traits you believe are feminine and interrogate why you are so obsessed with being the opposite. Because this idea that to be a man you have to be the furthest away from being a woman that you possibly can is really weird.

Why is everyone so scared of not being masculine? If you consider many of those in power, those who claim to be “leading” the world at the moment, you've got a lot of hypermasculine man-babies, with terrible hair and no ability to compromise. These are the cool guys who are taking us all to hell in a handbasket they didn't pay for.

So here's a thought experiment: What if you, the men, looked to traditional feminine traits and tried incorporating them into your masculinity?

Women are always being encouraged to stir masculine traits into their feminine recipe. We are told to “be bolder!” “Speak up in meetings.” “Exaggerate your skills.” All that Lean In sort of crap. So perhaps it's time for you, the men, to be more ladylike. How about you scale back on your confidence? How about you try not to act in every situation? What if you tried to refrain from sharing your opinions or co-opting other people's ideas? How about yielding to people walking in the opposite direction? Or even just attempting to see them?

How about you try pretending that you're the least powerful person in any room, and that no matter how hard you work you'll never be the most powerful. Walk around like that for a couple weeks. And then call your mother.

This is the first time that straight white cis men have been forced to think of themselves as anything other than human neutral. And that must be a difficult thing. And I don't say that to be sarcastic. I can see how it is a tough spot. It is not your fault. You didn't build this mess. You were born into it, like the rest of us. What I am saying is, I have empathy for you. And empathy, by the way, is one of the traits that women are most famous for. You might know it by its other name: “weakness.” But don't be fooled—empathy is a superpower, and it's the only one that any human has to offer.— As told to Nora Caplan-Bricker

EJ Johnson on…The Joys of the Male Beauty Movement

EJ Johnson is a television personality who, by embracing traditionally feminine clothing and cosmetics, is helping broaden mainstream ideas about style.

GQ: Your father, Magic Johnson, represents a kind of traditional masculinity. How did you navigate your own ideas while having him as a dad? EJ Johnson: I always knew that I was never going to be that type of man in that hypermasculine type of world. That was never going to be the tea for me. My dad is an incredible man, though, and the fact that he put all the comments and judgments aside to be like, I'm going to let this kid be free because I love him —that's the greatest gift he ever gave me.

What's the biggest change in the way we talk about male beauty today? When I started experimenting, in 2010, it wasn't talked about. It's cool to see it become less stigmatized. I've always had an affinity for expressing myself in feminine ways. When I was growing up, it was something I was told to hide. Now I'm a much happier person, and more successful, when I'm expressing myself with my feminine energy.

What would you say to men who've never considered wearing makeup? The takeaway is, if you see someone doing something you've never seen before, that shouldn't be weird. It may not be for you, but don't demonize it. Don't diminish that shine.

A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2019 issue with the title "Voices of the New Masculinity."

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The new crisis of masculinity

What’s the matter with men — and how do we fix it?

by Sean Illing

What’s going on with men?

It’s a strange question, but it’s one people are asking more and more, and for good reasons. Whether you look at education or the labor market or addiction rates or suicide attempts , it’s not a pretty picture for men — especially working-class men.

Normally, more attention on a problem is a precursor to solving it. But in this case, for whatever reason, the added awareness doesn’t seem all that helpful. The “masculinity” conversation feels stuck, rarely moving beyond banal observations or reflexive dismissals.

A recent essay by the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba on this topic was different. It was — apologies for the cliché — one of those pieces that “broke through.” Besides being well done, Emba’s treatment of the topic was uncommonly nuanced, which is increasingly hard to do when tackling “controversial” topics.

So I invited Emba onto The Gray Area to talk about the state of men and what she thinks the way forward might look like. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Spotify , Stitcher , or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Sean Illing

Worrying about the “state of men,” as you say in your piece, is an old American pastime, so what makes this moment different?

Christine Emba

I think that now we have actual data showing that men do seem to be in a real crisis, and we also have data on how the world has changed. We can all see this in our own lives. Our social structure, our work structure, our economy, has changed really significantly over the past 30 to 40 years. And that necessarily changes how people fit into the world.

A lot of the changes have had a direct effect on men specifically. So we can look at the stats that we have right now about how men are doing, and we see that for every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, only 74 are awarded to men . We know that when you’re looking at deaths of despair, which is a more recent phenomenon, 3 out of 4 of those deaths are males .

And then there are social factors, too. There’s been a change in who the high earners in our society are. In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husband or romantic partner. And in 1960, that was fewer than 4 percent of women.

So we’ve seen the economy change in ways that have moved away from the strength jobs, from traditional union jobs and factory and labor jobs that were mostly seen as male jobs and helped promote this idea of the man as the provider who can take care of a whole family on one income. Now it’s more about soft-skilled credentialism and that favors jobs that tend to skew toward women. Because of the feminist movement and women’s advances — which, to be clear, is a great thing — women have entered schools and the economy in force and they’re doing really well. And I think men are beginning to feel a little bit worried and lost in comparison.

Why is this such a difficult problem to talk about, especially for people on the left?

This was actually one of the major inspirations for writing this piece, because I was trying to get at that question, and I even felt as I was working on this piece my own reluctance to attend to it empathetically. I theorize that there are a couple reasons for this.

First of all, justifiably I think, progressives and people on the left want to preserve the gains that have been made for women over the past several decades. The feminist movement and movements for women’s equality are still pretty fragile. We saw during the Covid-19 pandemic that suddenly it was women dropping out of the workforce en masse. It’s really easy, on the left and just in politics generally, to think of things as being zero-sum. So there’s this fear that if we start helping men, then we’ll just have forgotten about women and there won’t be space or time for women anymore. I think that’s a mistake. We should be able to do two things at once. We can recognize that both women and men are members of our society and we should want to help everyone.

I think there’s also something really appealing to someone with a progressive mindset about the idea of gender neutrality, or gender neutrality as an ethos that we should aspire to and avoid making distinctions between men and women or masculine and feminine. We’ve moved in liberal society toward a real ideal of individualization; the idea that there could be one form of masculinity or manhood that’s good risks alienating people who don’t necessarily fit into that box. And then ascribing certain traits to men, especially if they’re positive traits, might create worries that we’re subtracting those traits from women. If we say that men are leaders, does that mean that women are always going to be followers? Or if men are strong, are we actually saying that women are weak? I think there’s a fear of doing that.

Finally, I think there’s a generalized resentment, especially after the Me Too moment — but also after a feminist movement in the 2010s that encouraged a pretty silly and uncritical form of man-hating and misandry where it was cool to be like, Men are trash, men suck. Wouldn’t the world be better without men? What are they even for? It was a feeling that you needed to do this sort of thing to prove your liberal bona fides that you love women enough.

There’s also the fact that because progressives in the mainstream have not really taken up the masculinity question, the people who have taken it up tend to be on the right and often they tend to be problematic figures. You see incels and men’s rights activists and Ben Shapiro burning Barbies, and there’s a fear that if you speak up for men, everyone’s going to be like, You seem too interested in this. Are you one of them? It’s a branding problem.

It’s definitely true that the left, for all of these reasons, has ceded this space to the right and the right has happily filled the vacuum. So what do you see happening with people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate ? These are very different people, I’m not equating them, but they inhabit this space in revealing ways.

It’s a super interesting question. I do think that it’s important to try and draw distinctions here. There’s sort of a spectrum of what I call in the piece “the manfluencers” — a ridiculous word for a ridiculous phenomenon. But there is a range of people who are maybe slightly more benign. I think Jordan Peterson started out as more benign, although he’s gotten fringier since, to people like Andrew Tate, who I think are just straightforwardly bad people. And you have also people like Josh Hawley and Joe Rogan and Bronze Age Pervert and all of these people in between.

I think it’s just factually accurate that conservatives and the right have always been more invested in — and more clear about — gender roles. So it’s almost natural that they have a clearer vision of what manhood is and what men should do. But I think they realize that there was an opening here. Young men especially are looking for role models and realizing that they feel unsure and uncomfortable of their place in the world.

There’s a young man who I interviewed for the piece, who was like, I just want someone to tell me how to be. If the progressive left is like, We’re not going to tell you that, just be a good person, you don’t need rules. And then young men are like, No, I’m really asking you. I really want rules, actually , the right is happy to give them those rules.

If people have an identity as a man or masculine, the right is not going to say it’s toxic and only talk about toxic masculinity. They’re positive about it and they frame it as something that you want to aspire to, that’s actually transgressive and great and historically superior to whatever’s going on today, for better or worse. And being told that your identity is a positive thing, and here’s a road map to how to fulfill it, whether it’s actually good or bad, that something is going to beat out nothing anytime.

I think there’s something earnest about Peterson’s project, or there certainly was, but the Tate phenomenon is different. To me, this is what happens when masculinity becomes steeped in fear and resentment. With Tate, unlike Peterson, there’s no pretension to anything virtuous. It’s just, Hey, the world hates you. The world wants to make you weak, wants to make you soft, so take what you can get, crush your enemies, abuse women, double down on everything they hate about you. It’s the weak person’s vision of a strong person. It’s the 19-year-old Nietzsche reader who didn’t make it past the preface.

But I still don’t think a lot of people quite understand Tate’s reach. Do you see him as a creature of a very particular moment or do you think he represents something bigger and more enduring?

The Tate phenomenon, as you say, isn’t just about Tate. There’s a whole space with very online figures like Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, who wrote this book, Bronze Age Mindset , that’s become a very conservative phenomenon. I think you’re exactly right. This is a vision of masculinity that’s super basic and sort of tailored to a 15-year-old who doesn’t know any better. It’s all about just shouting and showing off your cars and your women and your money, and that’s what being a man is. It’s very clear: just work out and be mean. It’s simple and it’s superficially appealing because there are a lot of fast cars and pretty girls. And I guess that appeals especially to young men who haven’t thought about it very much.

But I do think, in the absence of better road maps, in the absence of other models, people like Tate present a very clear, visible model. He’s everywhere. You see him everywhere if you’re a kid online. I think that’s also part of what has let him be underestimated. His reach is enormous among younger men, like middle school through high school-aged kids. They’ve all heard of Andrew Tate, to the point that, actually, in Britain, where he’s from, there was a campaign last year where teachers in high schools and middle schools were talking amongst themselves about how to combat Tateism in the classroom because these middle schoolers who had watched Andrew Tate videos were getting up in class and telling their female teachers to shut up, because they don’t listen to women, and that’s what Tate taught them.

His videos spread on TikTok and YouTube and Facebook before he was banned from all of those sites. Fifty-five-year-old dads weren’t necessarily on TikTok, and I think didn’t realize how much reach he had and how much of a hold he had. And the same with all of these online figures who are sort of flying under the radar because they’re online. But I do think it’s important what you point out about their immorality.

Jordan Peterson, and even to some extent the Josh Hawley figures, are saying, Well, it’s good to be a man, but also being a man means being responsible in some way, contributing to society in some way. The Tateist version of masculinity is totally divorced from anything positive. It’s just about defining yourself in opposition to women and taking what you can get. But it’s a clear path and it feels almost transgressive, which I think is part of its appeal because he’s like, Call me toxic. I love being toxic. I am toxic masculinity. To a 15-year-old edgelord, that is aspirational, I guess. But it’s really ugly and it’s not good for society in any way.

What do you think a truly healthy masculinity looks like? You identify three traits in the piece — protector, provider, and procreator — and I know a lot of people will hear that and, not without reason, immediately think of the patriarchy of yesterday. Do you think that’s a mistake?

Another great question. Even when I was writing the piece, I was wrestling with my reluctance to try and define masculinity or cheer on masculinity too much and my belief that we actually need to do just that. One of the things about the piece that seemed to strike a lot of people was the fact that I admitted that I like men. I want them to be happy. And I also do think that there is something distinctive that one could call manhood or masculinity that is a different thing than womanhood or femininity.

So you pulled out the concepts of protector, provider, procreator, and I got those from the anthropologist, David Gilmore, who did this cross-country study a couple decades ago looking at what it meant to be a man in all of these different groups across several continents. He found out that almost every society did have a concept of masculinity that was distinctive from just being male. It was something that you earned and was also distinctive from being female. It had to do with being someone who protected the people around you in your community, who provided in some way for your family. That often looked like not just providing, but creating surplus in some ways and sharing that with others. And then there was the idea that procreating, having a family, was what being a successful male looked like.

In our modern moment, I think that can look like a lot of different things. In my essay, there’s a callout where I ask people to write in and tell me about their ideal of masculinity. When I think about masculinity myself, there are a couple of attributes that seem to come up a lot, and it’s stuff like strength used well and responsibility, performing your duties, looking out for people who are weaker than you.

The pushback that I get very often when I talk about this is what I was saying earlier, people are like, Why do you have to say that’s being a good man? Why is leadership or ambition or adventurousness a male trait? Aren’t women leaders? And of course, yes, but I do think that being a good person is not a clear enough road map. It’s not a strong enough, clear enough norm, and that’s what younger people especially are looking for.

I think what it means to be a good person is in some ways tied to your embodiment, to your human form as a male person or a female person. For instance, [younger] men tend to be — though not always — much stronger than the average woman or old person. So being a good person, if that is your embodiment, necessarily means thinking about what that says about your responsibilities. What do you do with that strength?

Richard Reeves, who wrote the book Of Boys and Men , talks about how masculinity and femininity, or male and female, overlap a lot. But on the far ends of the spectrum, there are very big differences, and that tends to be where our definitions of male and female come from.

It’s true that you can’t talk about masculinity and femininity without acknowledging some differences between the sexes. And yet, that acknowledgment is utterly compatible with the reality that much of what we call gender is a performance, is a cultural construct. And I don’t know why we seem unable to avoid this zero-sum trap. You see this in lots of other cultures where there’s a respect for the masculine and feminine ideal. There’s no zero-sum relationship. These are poles at opposite ends of the continuum, and possessing virtues at both ends of the spectrum is seen as wise and healthy. I don’t know why we can’t do that.

America really likes extremes. I think we like things that are very clear-cut and we’re used to seeing things that way and seeing them used to marginalize people or somehow denigrate people who don’t fit the exact norms. I think people who think of themselves as good progressives and liberals really don’t want to do that, and so shy away from espousing norms because they might leave someone out. And I understand that. But for the people who are asking for a road map, who want to be told who to be, just saying B e whoever you want to be, but be a good one is just not helpful.

There’s also an age factor here and I noticed this in the responses to the piece. There were older men who would write in and say, What’s the problem? I’m a man, I feel great about it. I don’t see the issue. That’s great for you, but for young people, who don’t have that much life experience, who are trying to figure out who to be, having some kind of norm or ideal, even if it’s loose, can be helpful. And then as you grow older and you get life experience and you figure out how you fit in the world, you make the norm up for yourself. But they’re looking for a starting point.

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here , and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Spotify , Stitcher , or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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It’s a Man’s World: The Effect of Traditional Masculinity on Gender Equality

Public and international discourse on the debate for gender equality focuses on the oppression of women, as it rightly should. However, the influence that traditional male stereotypes have on the perpetuation of gender inequality, at a transnational scale, also needs to be addressed. This essay asks how do male stereotypes affect the manner in which males engage with gender equality? By encouraging males to analyse their socially constructed gender profiles, it is possible to educate them on how their social roles may impact gender equality. This will involve analysing the entrenchment of traditional male stereotypes in society and their consequent impact on women. Firstly, the essay will establish that male stereotypes operate within a larger structure of the gender paradigm. Then, it will define gender equality and its various interpretations. This will then lead the essay to discuss the trajectory of the progress towards gender equality and why males must be viewed as fundamental actors. Certain masculinities preserve and promote the inequalities experienced between men and women, and, in order to achieve gender equality, they must be dismantled.

When analysing male stereotypes, in the context of gender equality, it is important to recognise that they do not operate in isolation. Male stereotypes, or masculinities , function ‘… as an aspect of a larger structure’. [1] This structure is gender . Gender denotes the social phenomenon of distinguishing males and females based on a set of identity traits. The gendering of the sexes produces and sustains socially constructed differences. [2] Men and women are constructed to behave and interact in ways that perpetuate their gendered identities. However, there is a vital distinction at work here, one that will underpin this essay — the difference between sex and gender. Although this difference is highly contentious and widely contested, it will inform the essay’s discussion of gender equality. Sex and gender are classifications for differentiating between men and women. Sex, in contrast to gender, refers to the determination made based upon scientifically accepted biological criteria. The distinction of sex can be made through the classification of ‘… genitalia at birth or chromosomal typing before birth’. [3]

The terms gender and sex are often understood to be the same thing and used interchangeably. [4] However, this only serves to conflate biological anatomy with socially constructed identities. The problem with this misconception is that in societies, such as those in the West, it is assumed that the reproductive function of males and females is a sufficient basis for prescribing psychological and behavioural characteristics onto members of society. [5] In response to this, Peterson and Runyan assert that:

‘… gender should be understood as a social, not physiological, construction: Femininity and masculinity, the terms that denote one’s gender, refer to a complex set of characteristics and behaviours prescribed for a particular sex by society and learned through the socialisation process’. [6]

In other words, society, not biology, confines males and females to particular masculine and feminine character profiles. This means that gender is not fixed. Christian states that ‘… it is perfectly feasible for gender to change while biological sex remains the same’. [7] Gender should be considered an adjustable and fluid concept, as opposed to the more static disposition of biology.

According to Freud, the human subject has always been sexed , and that despite the biological differences, males and females have become particular social subjects. [8] The biological individual can be viewed as a blank canvas upon which gendered identities are projected and performed through socialisation. Therefore, the supposed differences between men and women are accentuated through the legitimisation of social stereotypes. These stereotypes, presented as inherent, are influenced by the social environment to which one is subjected. Male and female gender profiles are normalised to the extent that they appear natural, biological. Freud, who pioneered early psychoanalysis of the unconscious, was able to examine the ‘… continuity between normal and neurotic mental life, the concepts of repression and the unconscious, and the metal process to be ‘read’ through dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue and symptoms’. [9]

His work provided much needed insight into understanding inherent and normative views of gender identities. By definition, psychoanalytic theory aims to deconstruct what is explicitly or unintentionally communicated to illuminate the latent ‘… fantasies, anxieties, and desires of the speaking subject’. [10] In relation to gender, psychoanalysis stresses that our biology is experienced within culture, not nature, and ‘… that the effect of culture is to transform and channel biology and instinct in particular ways’. [11] Thus, the psychological differences between males and females are mostly, if not entirely, socially constructed.

This view, however, is not universally shared. In his paper titled, Feminism Against Science , Goldberg argues that the cognitive and behavioural differences between men and women are established through their respective physiologies, and that society and gender are a reflection of biological realities. [12] Moir and Jessel also advocate for biological determinism, arguing that to proclaim that men and women ‘… are the same in aptitude, skill, or behaviour is to build a society based on a biological and scientific lie’, and that biological reality reveals a comparative relationship of sexual asymmetry. [13] The argument raised by Goldberg, Moir, and Jessel is allegedly based on solid scientific findings. The ethos offered by ‘science’ is easy to succumb to. However, these ‘findings’ and results are often filtered and manipulated to strengthen the author’s argument. In her book, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities , Halpern contends that throughout her study, the most important lesson she learnt was that ‘… researchers, like the rest of us, maintain a particular world view that they use in interpreting research findings’. [14] So when analysis arguments about gender, nothing should be unquestioningly accepts as irrefutable, scientific fact.

Discussions about gender are often adjacent to discussions that attempt to determine the intellectual capacities of either sex. Debates of this nature were generated in the late nineteenth century, when it was determined, with scientific vindication, that the challenges and complexities of academia were deemed too overwhelming for the female mind. [15] This attempt to distinguish sex difference on the basis of physiology is one found in evolutionary theory. The theory argues that men and women ‘… pursue distinctive strategies to achieve reproductive effectiveness, with sometimes significant divergence’. [16] This view reduces human existence to the reproductive function. It supports the idea that the only factor of sexual differentiation that needs to be considered is the reproductive process. [17] The pursuit of survival is thus contingent upon successful reproduction, which creates a lineage of evolution for both men and women. Wilson, a Darwinist evolutionary theorist argues in his book, The Great Sex Divide , that for individuals who ‘… perform their sex role more successfully, their genes would have superior survival value, and so we would expect progressive differentiation of physical and mental equipment as parallel evolutionary developments’. [18] That is to say, human evolution is based on the propensity of an individual to fulfil their biological function. Therefore, sex differences are of vital importance to survival. Wilson also contends that the differences between men and women ‘… are observed, fairly universally, regardless of species or culture, time or place’. [19] This kind of argument lies at the very centre of gender inequality. Differentiation can unintentionally, and intentionally, cultivate a culture of discrimination. In categorising the differences between two subjects, one is automatically participating in a process of judgment. This judgment can manifest as a destructive bias or a positive comparison.

Sex difference has been biologically substantiated, and, in some cases, justified in the development of evolution. However, some argue that males and females are increasingly similar than different. For example, Epstein, in her book Deceptive Distinctions , maintains that distinctions based on gender identities serve more harm than good, and that attempts to divide the sexes based on intelligence present dysfunctional consequences for society. [20] In many ways, the argument returns to the age-old question: Are women mentally inferior to men? Some scholars argue in the affirmative, that men and women exhibit asymmetrical cognitive capabilities. However, scholars such as Seligman answer in the negative: ‘no, [women] are not. Data are now being laid on the table that show that, on average, men and women are equal in mental ability’. [21] Since the late nineteenth-century, research has studied sex difference across a plethora of psychological planes, such as mental abilities, attitudes, interest, personality traits, and emotions. Moreover, Connell, like Seligman, states that ‘… sex differences, on almost every psychological trait measured, are either non-existent or fairly small’. [22]

Across many social and academic spheres, the question of who is the smarter sex is deemed unanswerable. Given the tendency of researchers to favour a sex, most concede then that men and women are ‘even’ [23] Researchers are gendered subjects, conditioned by sociocultural gender constructs. They may support the superiority of a particular sex, which in turn, is deliberately or intuitively reflected in their respective research. This is why psychoanalysis ‘… does not assume the existence of an a priori “self” or “ego”’, but asserts that personal identity is contingent upon social conditioning. [24] Researchers do not operate, nor conduct their research, in isolation of reality. They are thus influenced by universal social discourses such as race, gender, and class. Absolute scientific objectivity is a standard difficult to uphold. Halpern warns of the existence of researchers that allow their bias for either sex to direct their study outcomes, such as Rushton and Jenson who ‘… steadfastly maintain that women are less intelligent than men’. [25] Views such as this intensify the gender divide by supporting the notion of male dominance, which further solidifies gender disparities. As Gaitanidis states, the conditions, which produce gender identities, are not quasi-universal; sociocultural and historical forces intrude in our lives to shape our personal identities. [26] Therefore, favouring certain data can be a symptom of cultural influences, such as gendered sex roles.

Sex difference has been largely debunked, or at the very least, considered inconclusive. The general consensus is that neither sex is psychologically superior. The emphasis is rather on the socialisation of difference, where the male and female gender constructs are influenced by worldviews, perceived norms and the unconscious. The variation of positions on sex difference indicates how pervasive the gender paradigm is, and how even purportedly objective areas of study, like science, can be skewed to perpetuate the idea of male intellectual dominance. The revolutionary work of feminists and social constructivists over the past four decades has highlighted the impact and influence of gender constructs on sociocultural life and knowledge. [27] Kimmel summarises the scale and influence of gender as an organising principle of society by stating, ‘virtually every society known to us is founded upon assumptions of gender difference and the politics of gender inequality’. [28] This point becomes foundational when answering the question of how traditional masculinity affects the manner in which men engage with gender equality. At this juncture, the essay needs to address this question.

Debates about gender equality refer to the asymmetrical power balance experienced between men and women due to differences in their gendered identities. [29] On this, Peterson and Runyan contend that:

‘… the social construction of gender is actually a system of power that not only divides men and women as masculine and feminine but typically also places men and masculinity above women and femininity and operates to value more highly those institutions and practices that are male dominated and/or representative of masculine traits and styles’. [30]

This is a contemporary analysis of modern gender constructs and the relations between the sexes, yet the idea of gender equality has been a major international principle of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [31] Despite this, Grossman and McClain argue that progress towards achieving gender equality have failed to substantially materialise, and that there still exists ‘… a stark gap between formal commitments to the equal rights and responsibilities of men and women and against discrimination and subordination based on sex the gendered realities of women’s lives’. [32]

The term ‘gender equality’, when deconstructed in isolation, unveils fundamental problems. Some argue the term is a paradox; gender is a system based on difference, and thus could never transform into a state of equivalence. [33] Parvikko frames equality ‘… as a concept which obscures differences’, and states that in contemporary liberal political thought, equality and difference are incommensurate. [34] Such difficulties in the application of the term have resulted in some people proclaiming that gender equality should be considered a discourse rather than a fixed term. This approach is much more constructive, as it recognises gender equality as a fluid concept that responds to the unique requirements of specific contexts. [35] Gender equality has many variants and interpretations, such as formal substantive equality. [36] This essay will consider equality as a system that facilitates equal opportunity. As echoed by men and women across all continents, in the World Development Report conducted by The World Bank, gender equality was seen to encompass three key elements: ‘the accumulation of endowments (education, health, and physical assets); the use of those endowments to take up economic opportunity and generate incomes; and the application of those endowments to take actions, or agency , affecting individual and household well-being’. [37] This is not an exhaustive list of what constitutes gender equality, but it provides a solid foundation for what it should entail. With this in mind, the essay will now discuss the relationship between masculinity and gender equality.

Gender is an organising principle of social life, and change towards equality will require exceptional institutional and gender identity reform. [38] Realising gender equality is strongly weighted on the contribution of males, because ‘… the very gender inequalities in economic assets, political power, cultural authority, and means of coercion that gender reform intend to change (ultimately) mean that men control most of the resources required to implement women’s claims for justice’. [39] In Australia, men make up the overwhelming majority of key decision-makers. In 2012, women comprised only 26.5% of Federal Parliament, and in the private sector constituted approximately 10% of company board members and 24.7% of managers. [40] Thus, men are an essential enabler for gender reform. Masculinities and male stereotypes must be studied and deconstructed in order to effect change in how men relate to women.

Stereotypes, or gender profiles, play an important role in the discussion of gender equality. They attribute certain characteristics to whole segments of society with the intention of presenting perception as truth. [41] In relation to gender, stereotypes form the basis of how society believes men and women should act. The scale to which gender stereotypes impact society is articulated by Epstein who argues:

‘no aspect of social life — whether the gathering of crops, the ritual of religion, the formal dinner party, or the organisation of government — is free from the dichotomous thinking that casts the world in categories of “male” and “female”‘. [42]

Gender stereotypes are inherently political; they can be used as tools for manipulating power relations between men and women. They are naturalised within society through a process of reproduction and maintenance. To this end, gender stereotypes become ‘… self-fulfilling: if we expect certain behaviours, we may act in ways that in fact create and reinforce such behaviours’. [43]

Masculinities, as is the case with femininities for women, are socially constructed gender profiles under which men are categorised. However, they are not created equal. For men, there is ‘… a culturally preferred version that is held up as the model against which we [men] are to measure ourselves’. [44] The dominant model to which men must aspire is what Connell describes as hegemonic masculinity. It is a location within the male gender hierarchy that occupies the hegemonic, or top position. [45] However, hegemonic masculinity is not a fixed position, and occupying the position is contestable. Masculinity can be viewed as a social order that lends analysis and structure from Gramsci’s notion of class relations. As such, hegemonic masculinity retains the dominant position of social life, while other masculinities, such as homosexual masculinity, [46] and women are subordinated. [47] The current, and historical, occupier of this hegemonic position is traditional masculinity, which:

‘… refers to the stereotypical twentieth-century male-chauvinist outlook and activities resulting from the kinds of gender socialisation conventionally seen as appropriate to males in Western societies since at least the late Victorian times’. [48]

An example of how gender stereotypes are cultivated in society, and how hegemonic masculinity is highly valued, is in New Zealand where some schools are pressured to employ male teachers. The rationale for this is to preserve boys’ masculinity through the appointment of ‘real men’ teachers who exhibit characteristics consistent with hegemonic masculinity. [49]

Men who exhibit the traits of traditional masculinity are considered to possess hegemonic masculinity. In order to aspire to this social classification, there is a particular set of core features that a man must demonstrate. These include: power/strength, rationality, heterosexuality, risk-taking, dominance, leadership, control, and repression of emotions. [50] Given that identities, and indeed gender profiles, must be defined, reconstructed, and performed, it is argued that the construction of masculine identities by men is a conscious attempt to maintain their power within the gender hierarchy. [51] This may be true in some cases, however, to apply this universally is problematic. New contends that while ‘men are frequently the agents of the oppression of women, and in many cases benefit from it, their interests in the gender order are not pre-given but constructed by and within it’. [52] To achieve gender equality, it must be recognised that hegemonic masculinities can be altered, or even replaced, through the socialisation process from which they are initially constructed.

Public and private engagement with gender equality is scarce among males, which often obscures the issue and manifests dismissive attitudes. One of the main issues regarding gender equality is that men do not comprehensively understand how traditional masculinities disadvantage women. Many men are unaware they exist within socially constructed gender structures that disenfranchise subordinated gender profiles, and therefore do not recognise a problem. [53] Thus, engaging in discussion about gender equality is often a pointless experience for men who find it challenging to appreciate how entrenched the issue is in society. Fortunately, attitudes, and the gender profiles they are associated with, are subject to social construction and transformation. Christian argues that:

‘sexist attitudes and actions are currently an integral part of the dominant masculinity, but if masculinities are socially constructed by and for each generation of males growing up, rather than genetically inherited, then masculinities can change and sexism can in principle be eradicated’. [54]

However, social construction and indeed, deconstruction, is contingent upon the participation of relevant stakeholders. The supportive involvement of all those affected by gender is required to effect gender equality. In other words, the global community as a whole.

Worldwide, Plan International found three general categories for men’s attitudes towards gender equality: those who recognise gender inequality and seek to address it — the smallest group; those who acknowledge gender inequality but are afraid that empowering girls will come at the expense of boys; and, those who either do not perceive an imbalance, or do not believe in equal rights — the largest group. [55] The significance of this research highlights the overwhelming percentage of men who do not recognise a problem, or do not believe in equal opportunity. These attitudes present a considerable hurdle in reaching gender equality, as they are taught to children and carried on through the generations. A research program commissioned by Plan of over 4,000 adolescent children in different countries including the United Kingdom (UK), Rwanda, and India, found that: 83% of boys and 87% of girls in India and 67% of girls and 71% of boys in Rwanda agree with the statement ‘changing diapers, giving kids a bath and feeding kids are the mother’s responsibility’. More than 60% of participants agreed that ‘if resources are scarce it is better to educate a boy instead of a girl’ and 65% of children in Rwanda and India agreed that ‘a woman should tolerate violence in order to keep her family together’. [56] While this research was conducted among a limited sample, it highlights the startling reality of gender inequality and the continuity of male dominance.

One of the major principles of traditional masculinity that harms gender equality is that women are fundamentally inferior to men. This view can be traced back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who based this claim on the principles of reason. He surmised that ‘masculinity was equated with the human rationality of men, and women were marked by sexuality, emotion, and their bodies’. [57] The notion that men are intellectually superior has already been disproved; however, what Aristotle articulates about women and their bodies remains relevant. According to the French feminist philosopher, Beauvoir, men consider humanity to be constructed in their image: ‘it is clear that in dreaming of himself as donor, liberator, redeemer, man still desires the subjection of women’. [58] This idea of male superiority and female inferiority is one that must be maintained by traditional masculinity if it is to occupy the hegemonic gender identity. Attitudes that stem from traditional masculinity, such as ‘… the notion that “real men” are tough and hard and that the only appropriate emotion for them to display is anger’, [59] present a significant barrier towards gender equality.

Due to the fact that traditional masculinity discourages the expression of emotion, men rarely discuss their feelings. Evidence of this is presented in the positive relationship between traditional masculinity and depression among male university students in the UK and United States. It was ‘… found that conformity to Western masculine norms in and of itself is a risk factor for developing depression’. [60] Men compound the issue of depression by aligning with traditional masculinity. Hanninen and Valkonen argue that the principles of masculinity inhibit the expression of weakness or emotional distress and the seeking of help to remedy it. [61] In addition, analysis into the individual accounts of men’s depression ‘… reveals how depression threatened a man’s masculine identity and how recovery presupposed reconstructing one’s self-image and masculinity’. [62] This identifies a lack of openness to change in traditional masculinity. In other words, traditional masculinity is not equipped to respond to challenges that threaten its integrity, such as depression (perceived as emotional weakness) and gender equality.

Changing or altering traditional masculinity should be more widely recognised as an important step towards realising gender equality. In light of this, some gender equality advocate groups around the world have identified the need to promote masculinities that are more conducive of change. MenEngage is a group for boys and men whose primary function is to advocate for equality between males and females. [63] To this end, they have identified that ‘… questioning men’s and women’s attitudes and expectations about gender roles is crucial to achieving gender equality’. Those who acknowledge the existence of gender equality, and seek to address it, agree that equality cannot progress without the contribution of males. [64] It is increasingly evident that the deconstruction of traditional masculinity presents a primary concern, as its uncompromising nature makes it less responsive to revolution. [65]

By encouraging males to become more open and discuss their masculinities, it is possible to educate them on how their social roles and responsibilities impact women. Developing male attitudes towards open acknowledgement of the gender profiles they operate within is an important step in reaching gender equality. The absence of such progress would only serve to maintain the ‘… disempowerment of girls and young women down the generations — and the restriction of boys and young men to traditional “male roles”’. [66] Efforts in this approach to gender equality have yielded that: according to the United Nations Population Fund, boys that grow up with positive male role models are found to be more critical towards negative gender stereotypes and inequalities; men who maintain a healthy engagement with their children are less inclined to be depressed, suicidal or violent; and, boys that have more engaging fathers are less inclined to exhibit risky sexual behaviour. [67] Latin American NGOs also found similar character traits in young men who supported gender equality. These similarities included: having a peer-group or group of friends that were more accepting of gender-equitable attitudes; having personally suffered the negative impacts of traditional masculinity such as domestic violence; and, having a positive adult role model that represented an alternative to traditional gender roles. [68] This indicates that positive, nurturing, and engaging character traits exhibited by males are constructive towards gender equality. Furthermore, this suggests that gender equality is achievable through the deconstruction of traditional masculinity as the hegemonic masculinity.

Male stereotypes affect the manner in which males engage with gender equality, and traditional masculinity acts as the dominant masculinity for men. Although different masculinities exist for men, the idea of traditional masculinity remains the most influential. Realising gender equality is difficult, because the fundamental characteristics exhibited by traditional masculinity defend against change. For global gender equality to progress, males must recognise themselves as fundamental actors and actively work to change the patriarchal structures, which benefit them to the exclusion of all others. Without the supportive contribution of males, gender equality is doomed to perpetuate existing power imbalances that favour traditional masculinity. To progress towards gender equality, efforts must be made to deconstruct traditional masculinity.

[1] R. W. Connell, Masculinities , 2 nd ed. (Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2005), p. 67.

[2] M. Hughs and P. Paxton, Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective , 2 nd ed. (London: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014), pp. 24-25.

[3] D. Zimmerman and C. West, ‘Doing Gender’, in A. Aronson and M.Kimmel (eds.), The Gendered Society Reader , 5 th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 122.

[4] V. S. Peterson and A. Runyan, Global Gender Issues (Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), p. 17.

[5] Zimmerman and West, op. cit. (2014), p. 122.

[6] Peterson and Runyan, op. cit. (1993), p. 17.

[7] H. Christian, The Making of Anti-Sexist Men (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 6.

[8] M. Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 102.

[9] Connell, op. cit. (2005), pp. 8-9.

[10] D. Britzman, ‘Psychoanalytic Theory’, in Encyclopaedia of Curriculum Studies (Online: Sage Publications, Inc., 2010), p. 693.

[11] Gatens, op. cit. (1991), p. 103.

[12] S. Goldberg, ‘Feminism Against Science’, National Review, vol. 43, no. 21 (1991), p. 30.

[13] A. Moir and D. Jessel, Brain Sex: the real difference between men and women (London: Mandarin, 1997), p. 6.

[14] D. Halpern, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, 4 th ed. (New York: Psychology Press, 2012), pp. 97-98.

[15] Connell, op. cit. (2005), p. 21.

[16] J. Ashfield, The Making of a Man: reclaiming masculinity and manhood in the light of reason, 2 nd ed. (Australia: Peacock Publications, 2004), p. 154.

[17] G. Wilson, The Great Sex Divide (Washington, D.C.: Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1992), p. 20.

[18] Ibid., p. 19.

[20] G. Sharwell, ‘Review of Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order by Cynthia Fuchs Epstein; A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences by Alice Kessler-Harris’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences , vol. 517 (1991), p. 229.

[21] D. Seligman, ‘Gender Mender’, Forbes (41998), available online: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0406/6107072a.html (accessed 22 October 2013).

[22] Connell, op. cit. (2005), p. 21.

[23] Halpern, op. cit. (2012), p. 96.

[24] Gatens, op. cit. (1991), p. 100.

[25] Halpern, op. cit. (2012), p. 96.

[26] N. Gaitanidis, ‘Benign Masculinity and Critical Reason’, Psychotherapy and Politics International , vol. 10, no. 3 (2012), p. 220.

[27] M. Kimmel, ‘Introduction’, in A. Aronson and M. Kimmel (eds.), The Gendered Society Reader, 5 th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 1.

[28] Ibid, p. 2.

[29] World Bank, World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development (Washington D.C.: The World Bank, 2012), p. 4.

[30] Peterson and Runyan, op. cit. (1993), p. 18.

[31] R. Connell, Confronting equality: gender, knowledge and global change (UK: Polity Press, 2011), p. 15.

[32] J. Grossman and L. McClain (eds.), Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women’s Equal Citizenship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 1.

[33] J. Flax, ‘Gender Equality’, in M. Horowitz (ed.), New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005), p. 701.

[34] T. Parvikko, ‘Conceptions of Gender Equality: Similarity and Difference’, in E. Meehan and S. Sevenhuijsen (eds.), Equality Politics and Gender (London: SAGE Publications, Inc., 1991), p. 36.

[35] C. Bacchi, ‘Review of Promblematizing “Gender Equality” by Magnusson, Eva, Malin Ronnblom and Harriet Silius, eds,’ Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research , vol. 17, no. 4 (2009), p. 304.

[36] Parvikko, op. cit. (1991), p. 48.

[37] World Bank, op. cit. (2012), p. 4.

[38] Connell, op. cit. (2011), p. 17.

[40] Department of Social Services, ‘Background Paper: ‘The role of men and boys in gender equality’ (2013), available online: http://www.fahcsia.gov.au/our-responsibilities/women/programs-services/international-engagement/united-nations-commission-on-the-status-of-women/background-paper-the-role-of-men-and-boys-in-gender-equality (accessed 21 October 2013).

[41] Peterson and Runyan, op. cit. (1994), p. 21.

[42] C. Epstein, Deceptive Distinctions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 232.

[43] Peterson and Yunyan, op. cit. (1994), p. 22.

[44] Kimmel, op. cit. (2014), p. 4.

[45] Connell, op. cit. (2005), p. 76.

[46] Homosexual masculinity is considered to be a gender profile that is subordinated in relation to the hegemonic masculinity. — R. Connell, ‘A Very Straight Gay: Masculinity, Homosexual Experience, and the Dynamics of Gender’, American Sociological Review, vol. 57, no. 6 (1992), p. 735-737.

[47] Christian, op. cit. (1994), p. 7; and Connell, op. cit. (2005), p. 77.

[48] Christian, op. cit. (1994), p. 7.

[49] J. Clarke and P. Cushman, ‘Masculinities and Femininities: Student-Teachers Changing Perceptions of Gender Advantages and Disadvantages in the New Zealand Primary School Environment’, in J. Aston and E. Vasquez (eds.), Masculinity and Femininity: Stereotypes/myths, Psychology and Role of Culture (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2013), p. 2.

[50] H. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 23; and Clarke and Cushman, op. cit. (2013), p. 2.

[51] D. Collison and J. Hearn. 1996. ‘”Men” at “work”: multiple masculinities/multiple workplaces’, in M. Mac an Ghaill (ed.), Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural Arenas (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), p. 65.

[52] New as quoted in O. G. Holter, ‘Social Theories for Researching Men and Masculinities: Direct Gender Hierarchy and Structural Inequality’, in R.W. Connell, J. Hearn and M. Kimmel (eds.), Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2005), p. 15.

[53] Department of Social Services, op. cit. (2013).

[54] Christian, op. cit. (1994), pp. 7-8.

[55] IRIN, ‘Gender Equality: Why involving men is crucial’ (2011), available online: http://www.irinnews.org/report/93870/gender-equality-why-involving-men-is-crucial (accessed 18 October 2013).

[56] Plan, Because I am a Girl: The State of the World’s Girls 2011 – So, what about boys? (Plan International, 2011), p. 3.

[57] J. Gardner, ‘Men, Masculinities, and Feminist Theory’, in R.W. Connell, J. Hearn and M. Kimmel (eds.), Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2005), p. 36.

[58] S. de Beauvoir and H. Parshley (trans. ed.), The Second Sex (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p. 172.

[59] Plan, op. cit. (2011), p. 4.

[60] J. Oliffe et al., 2010. ‘Masculinities and college men’s depression: Recursive relationships’, Health Sociology Review, vol. 19, no. 4 (2010), p. 466.

[61] V. Hanninen and J. Valkonen, ‘Narratives of Masculinity and Depression’, Men and Masculinities , vol. 16 (2012), p. 161.

[62] Ibid, pp. 161-162.

[63] MenEngage, ‘What we believe’ (2008), available online: http://www.menengage.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12:what-we-believe&catid=4:about-us&Itemid=10 (accessed 20 October 2013).

[65] Mansfield, op. cit. (2006), pp. 31-32.

[66] IRIN, op. cit. (2011).

[67] Plan, op. cit. (2012), p. 4.

[68] V. Fonseca et al., ‘Program H and Program M: Engaging young men and empowering young women to promote gender equality and health’ (2010), available online: http://www.promundo.org.br/en/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/OPASINGLES_WEB.pdf (accessed 21 October 2013).

— Written by: Aydon Edwards Written at: University of Queensland Written for: Dr. Samid Suliman Date written: November 2013

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on iTunes! . Alternatively, there are direct links to Mp3 files included on the essay's homepage. Just look for the link in the navigation bar! BeyondMasculinity.com! is a groundbreaking collection of 22 provocative essays on sexuality, gender, and politics -- all written by gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer men. Part audiobook, part-blog, and part-anthology,  brings together a smart, diverse group of queer male writers all critically examining maleness and the construction of masculinity and gender norms for men. Contributions focus on five key areas: Desire, Sex and Sexuality; Negotiating Identities; Queer Feminist Politics; Beyond Binary Gender; and Transforming Masculinity. was originally conceived in 2005 as a traditional published anthology featuring essays from queer male writers, activists, and scholars. But we realized that by publishing online, we could reach a much wider audience at a lower cost - all without knocking down any trees! Even better, new technology allows users to interact with online material like never before. You like that essay? Comment on it! Built on the back of MovableType's powerful blogging software, this site makes space for your voice as readers, too. It's called Web 2.0 - make the most of it! Craft and Criticism Fiction and Poetry News and Culture Lit Hub Radio Reading Lists Literary Criticism Craft and Advice In Conversation On Translation Short Story From the Novel Bookstores and Libraries Film and TV Art and Photography Freeman’s The Virtual Book Channel Behind the Mic Beyond the Page The Cosmic Library The Critic and Her Publics Emergence Magazine Fiction/Non/Fiction First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing The History of Literature I’m a Writer But Lit Century Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast Write-minded The Best of the Decade Best Reviewed Books BookMarks Daily Giveaway The Daily Thrill CrimeReads Daily Giveaway Best American Male: An Essay About Masculinity. An Essay About Power. Rebecca hazelton on contemporary templates for public confession. A young boy learns a hard truth about masculinity from a withholding paternal figure while they perform together a male-coded activity. This activity may be fishing or football or basketball or hammering a nail. The withholding paternal figure almost always performs the task successfully, although in rare instances, his failure provides an unsettling moment of uncertainty for the young boy, putting into question all he has learned about being a man from his father and grandfather and older brother and uncle. More often, the father succeeds. The anecdote hinges on the success or failure of the young boy’s completion of the task: his success measures how well he presents masculinity. If the boy sinks the basket, hammers the nail without hitting his thumb, lifts the heavy object while grunting the appropriate amount, then he will receive a coveted nod from the withholding parental figure. He may even (rarely) get praise. If the boy sinks the basket, hammers the nail without hitting his thumb, lifts the heavy object while grunting the appropriate amount, then he is a man. It is, however, possible for him to make the basket, hammer the nail without hitting the thumb, and lift the heavy object while grunting the appropriate amount, and still be seen as lacking by the withholding parental figure. It is the uncertainty of the result that deforms the soul. This leitmotif—uncertainty, not around what counts as masculine, but around how much of it the boy needs—recedes and swells in the background, pulsing and thrumming whenever the fishhook slips into the meat of the young boy’s thumb. Masculinity, the leitmotif reminds us, must be assessed and tested. It is never a given. It must be constantly proven. No one can prove a negative. The essay will explore the ways in which he’s learned and unlearned the lessons of masculinity. Alternatively, the essay begins with a young boy engaging in behavior or play not typically coded as masculine. The boy is then discovered by the withholding parental figure. The boy might be, for example: • dancing with abandon • dressing up in the opposite sex’s clothes unironically • expressing emotion sincerely and deeply • attending to his physical appearance beyond basic hygiene • masturbating to the sight of inappropriate objects of desire such as androgynous bodies, feminine male bodies, masculine male bodies, all male bodies, zaftig women, or butch women • being quiet • being talkative • engaging in painting and/or drawing • expressing an appreciation or desire for necklaces, bracelets, earrings, jeweled hair pins, or other adornments • listening to the wrong music • using a deodorant or cologne that is powdery, floral, or otherwise feminine These behaviors can occur singly or as a cluster. The boy may perform these behaviors—until discovered—without shame. Or, the boy may perform them secretly, having already learned from peers and family members that his pleasures and desires are wrong, bad, or deviant. They do not want him to be teased, they say. If the former, the anecdote lays the groundwork for all the retrograde attitudes about masculinity that will manifest in the author’s grown-up life. The author will disavow these attitudes, and the behaviors that stem from them, later in the essay. (The author may blame these attitudes—or their childhood causes—for his own chauvinistic or misogynistic behavior.) It is very important to show one’s ugliness before revealing one’s triumph. If the latter, this anecdote will provide a foundation for various psychosexual dramas enacted again and again in later relationships. These psychosexual dramas also—according to the essay—explain the author’s internal and/or external homophobia. The author may display discomfort with males exhibiting physical affection, sexual or otherwise. Conversely, the author may frequently hug his male friends and vocalize his platonic love ardently. If the author is not strictly or predominantly heterosexual, this pivotal incident may be used to justify the author staying in the closet for several years past puberty, sometimes even decades. Many formative moments viewed retrospectively take on a linear quality. No matter the truth of the narrative formed later, there’s no doubt that the moment the young boy looks up from his dance, or from carefully painting his toenail (which can be hid in the shoe, a secret slice of glamor known only to him), and sees the withholding parental figure watching him— that moment— is a moment of crisis that is lodged like a shard of glass in the young boy’s heart, in his eye, turning all that he feels cold, turning all the beauty he sees ugly. The essay will demonstrate how he’s learned to see differently, how his heart has opened just enough to thaw. The essay then offers a humorous, self-deprecating aside in case the reader has felt a little overwhelmed with sadness for the young boy, and to reassure them that there is some hope to be had. Before or after the self-deprecating aside, the author will describe a beating. A personal anecdote allows the author to position his experience as comparable to that of the reader, and attempts to bridge whatever gaps of privilege and visibility there may be between the two. Everyone was young once, and everyone remembers moments when we were told to adhere to a standard, when someone moved our bodies—gently or with force—into a new position. We’ve held that position for years. The reader feels a kind of kinship after reading this anecdote, and only rarely thinks about how the author’s essay appeared on a fashionable literary website, went viral after well-placed social media mentions, and later got reprinted, first in a collection of the author’s own essays, and then in a popular anthology regularly selected for classroom use by writing teachers too stressed and overworked to make course packets tailored to their own students’ needs. The essay will distract the reader from this truth: the author is white and male and began writing the essay—even if he did not begin his life—with more resources, more access, and more power than most of us will ever have, although he’ll be the first to tell you he did not have it easy. Sometimes he will tell us how and when he had to root through his car to gather quarters in order to scrape up enough money for rent. That he was so careless with his money as to leave quarters scattered about his car speaks to a certain attitude toward money, an attitude only exhibited by people who know they can go to their parents for help if they cannot scrape up enough quarters from their car. This kind of play-acting poverty is maddening to anyone who has experienced true poverty, but the author’s social circle is unlikely to include anyone who has experienced true poverty. The self-deprecating aside, in which the author shows he is not afraid to make fun of himself, encourages the reader to disregard these economic, social, and racial differences. The author may accomplish a similar outcome by rhetorically lamp-shading his privilege, proving himself to be the kind of white, male writer who acknowledges what being a white male has afforded him. This move shows how an act of speech can be mistaken for action. The essay’s main thrust (a word whose phallic quality the author acknowledges) is to interrogate his own heterosexual masculinity, to expose the cultural standards that acted upon him, to excoriate himself for further enforcing these cultural standards on his peers as well as on his progeny, and finally, to examine how those attitudes (for which he is not at fault, not really, as we are all surely products of our environments) have affected his relationships with women. His relationships are almost always with women. He learned long ago that acting on any other desires had a social cost he was not willing to pay. He may have entirely forgotten the slender young man in a pub bathroom in Glasgow. The essay may be published after a minor scandal involving a woman, or as a pre-emptive strike in anticipation of a scandal not yet public. Even if he publishes excerpts from other people’s letters, from past lovers, this making-public will be seen as a self-flagellating move, and thus as permissible. By sharing material which casts himself in such a bad light, the author proves himself to be brave, honest, and unflinching. These painful moments insulate the author from criticism and suspicion. Such moments can be wrapped around the author like a warm blanket, fresh from the dryer. Some readers may look upon these authorial revelations with a critical eye, mentally posing unpleasant questions, such as, “Did ______ consent to have her emails published?” and “Did _____ wish to read a passage in which she is presented as a sun-dappled nymph stretched across the author’s bed by the open window, her pubic hair catching the window’s light?” Some readers may note that the women’s emails read as pleading, angered, mystified, politely requesting rational and legal behavior from the author. These moments create a feeling of cognitive dissonance in such a critical reader, because the potential privacy violation might feel justified by the author’s greater message, an important message that other men need to hear and consider. This ambivalence is heightened to a dizzying degree if the essay brings in the author’s childhood abuse, drawing a connection between his own experiences as a child, and abuse—emotional, mental, perhaps even physical (but only a little bit)—he’s enacted on others. The reader knows that abuse begets abuse. The reader may even know firsthand the ways that abuse, whether brief or sustained, can alter the way one views the world, the way one responds to minor slights and transgressions, the way anger can erupt, sudden and unstoppable. The reader has also made mistakes. The reader is also flawed. The reader thinks back to that little boy in the beginning of the essay, dancing with abandon, at the moment before his uncle hit him. Does acknowledging wrong undo a wrong? Is context absolution? A reader with a critical eye doesn’t know how to answer these questions. Later, they will push the essay a few inches away from them on the kitchen table, unsure of what to do with what they’ve just read. Here is where the author moves to power, a subject that allows him to reframe his previous confessions. The subject of all these essays is, ultimately, power. Establishing himself as powerless in the past and in the present, acknowledging his own abuses of power, petty or serious, or acknowledging the power bestowed on him by his race and gender, by his gentleman farmer New England heritage, by his blasé assurance in his rare encounters with the police, the author can thereby speak about power with full authority. In the way that someone infected with an illness can best attest to its bodily consequences, to the ravages it inflicts, the author knows how power has aided and abetted him, how even in the act of writing this essay he may be perpetuating the very power structures he desires to disrupt, as the attention generated by this essay might be better focused on a less-heard voice, but what can he do? He can’t stand by anymore. He can no longer be silent to the wrongs he’s witnessed and to the wrongs he’s done. He must speak to power via the power which power grants him. Powerful, the author writes, is what we call a man when he is perfectly complicit in society’s inequities. How does the essay end? A casual reader will find that the essay ends as it began. We return to that primal scene, and the author rewrites it as he wishes it had gone, giving that little boy a fishing trip full of laughter and an empty bucket, or a scene in which the father takes his son’s hand and dances with him to Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” Perhaps he is the father, and comes upon his own son proudly standing in front of the mirror in his mother’s high heels and the author smiles and forces his own feet into his wife’s Manolo’s (she will scold him later for stretching her Manolos out, but she will scold him affectionately). The father stands beside his son and enjoys their mutual beauty. The circular structure combines familiarity and surprise. It works well. It signals the end, and it signals renewal. The reader feels hope. The reader feels inspired to write their own essay about their own childhood struggles. They too have come to a realization of the damaging effects of trauma, of the binary gender paradigm, of compulsive heterosexuality. It is this essay that they bring to the writer’s conference for a manuscript consultation with the author. The ideal reader can be anywhere from sixteen to a sheltered twenty-four. The author is as warm and charming and generous as his essays, as his voice on the radio when interviewed by Terry Gross, as a man can be when he is fully complicit with society’s inequities. The author tells her she has talent. The author encourages her to send out her work. The author suggests she mention his name. The author asks for her email address. Her cheeks flush with delight. What is the reader to think when at the end of the conference the author sits beside her on the brick steps outside the library? He tells her again she is talented. She glows. She is an incandescent bulb thrumming with heat. What is she to think when he leans overs and takes a long, luxurious sniff of her shoulder? When he says, “I wanted to know what you smelled like”? This reader, due to youth or naivete, may not realize the author did anything wrong. When she does come to this realization, years later, she will feel as if everything has moved two inches to the left. She will doubt her own history. She will doubt her own ability to see. This reader, due to the author’s flattery, may like the reflection she sees in his eyes. She will spend years looking into the eyes of other men for validation of her beauty and her talent, which become as conflated for her as they are to the men. This reader may mistake the moment the author smelled her shoulder for a kind of power. But that is because she has misread his work. This reader may question her actions. Why did she wear a tank top? It was hot that afternoon in Savannah, but she has shirts with sleeves. She will question the talent that he praised because his praise is tainted. Incandescent bulbs have short lifespans. When they pop and go dark, they are easily replaced. The cost is negligible. The essay circulates among readers and the author circulates among readers. The essay will always be able to find new readers. Readers are easily replaced. The essay was never just about critiquing masculinity. The little boy was not a fiction. But the little boy was fictionalized. The essay was always about power. The essay doesn’t end. Rebecca Hazelton Previous article, next article. RSS - Posts Literary Hub Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature Sign Up For Our Newsletters How to Pitch Lit Hub Advertisers: Contact Us Privacy Policy Support Lit Hub - Become A Member Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet. Become a member for as low as $5/month site categories Cbs, nbc announce special sunday coverage following trump shooting in pennsylvania, breaking news. Donald Trump Slams George Clooney For New York Times Essay Urging Joe Biden To Exit Presidential Race By Ted Johnson Ted Johnson Political Editor More Stories By Ted Joe Biden Calls Shooting At Donald Trump Event “Sick”: “We Cannot Be Like This. We Cannot Condone This” Who’s Speaking At Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention: Tucker Carlson And Amber Rose Among Celebrities; Melania Trump Not On List Showbiz Figures Counter Hollywood Calls For Joe Biden To Drop Out; Octavia Spencer Appears At Rally, Kim Novak Says It’s Time To “Stand With Him” Donald Trump chastised George Clooney as a “fake movie” actor and said that he should “get out of politics,” following Clooney’s bombshell op-ed in the New York Times urging Joe Biden to exit the presidential race. It may seem like a curious position for Trump to take, given Clooney’s questioning of Biden’s age, but the former president’s campaign is set up to run against the current president, not some other rival. Related Stories George Clooney Calls For New Democratic Nominee In Latest Hollywood Plea For Joe Biden To Step Aside Damon lindelof says joe biden has to go & dems need to wake up; “stop giving” money, top donor insists – guest column. Trump also posted a mock video of Clooney in conversation with Biden. Clooney’s op-ed helped reignite calls for Biden to step aside or reconsider his decision to stay in the race, as it seemed earlier in the week that the president’s campaign was making progress in tempering a revolt within the party. Clooney’s op-ed, though, raised questions of Biden’s fitness by pointing not just to the president’s debate performance but his appearance at a Hollywood-filled fundraiser on June 15. Biden traveled from Europe to the Los Angeles event, and appeared tired at times in his conversation with Barack Obama and Jimmy Kimmel. Politico reported Thursday that Clooney reached out to Obama to give him a heads up about the op-ed, but the former president did not advise him or object to it. Must Read Stories Tv fitness guru dies at 76; pauly shore among first reactions. ‘Rust’ Case Dismissed Over “Critical” Bullet Evidence; He Speaks Out Fall premiere dates for ‘blue bloods’ final episodes & more; tca day news, ‘longlegs’ slicing off neon-record $20-$23m bow; ‘fly me to the moon’ $10m. Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy. Read More About: 27 comments. Deadline is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Deadline Hollywood, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Bernie Sanders backs Biden in New York Times essay: ‘He must win’ WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Saturday that he will back President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential campaign , bucking the growing number of leaders in the Democratic Party who say the president should step aside. “I will do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected,” Sanders, I-Vt., wrote in an op-ed published in the New York Times .  “Why?” the senator continued. “Despite my disagreements with him on particular issues, he has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country and is the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump — a demagogue and pathological liar.” Biden has been facing pressure from members of his own party to no longer run for re-election in the 2024 presidential race following a disastrous performance at the June 27 CNN debate. Since then, more than a dozen lawmakers have openly called on Biden to step aside out of fear that he could not beat former President Donald Trump. Sanders, who is a registered Independent but often votes with the Democratic Party, wrote in the op-ed that he has disagreed on a number of issues with Biden, including how the president has handled the conflict between Israel and Palestine. But the Vermont Senator criticized the media for focusing on Biden’s cognitive capabilities and criticized Democrats who “have joined that circular firing squad.” “Yes. I know: Mr. Biden is old, is prone to gaffes, walks stiffly and had a disastrous debate with Mr. Trump,” Sanders wrote. “But this I also know: A presidential election is not an entertainment contest. It does not begin or end with a 90-minute debate.” Biden has pushed back against his detractors, repeatedly saying he will continue in the race. “I am running and we're gonna win! I'm not going to change that,” Biden said at a rally in Detroit on Friday, where he was greeted by supporters chanting “Don't you quit.” Members of the president’s team also met with lawmakers on Thursday to soothe worries of Biden’s chances in the 2024 election, which Sanders was a part of. At the time, Sanders called on the Biden campaign to be "stronger and clearer in defending their own record" as they try to win voters back. Sanders underscored that sentiment in his op-ed, saying that Biden and his supporters should “focus on these issues.” “Let me say this as emphatically as I can: For the sake of our kids and future generations, he must win,” Sanders said. Advertisement George Clooney, a Major Biden Fund-Raiser, Urges Him to Drop Out Mr. Clooney, who co-hosted a lavish fund-raiser for President Biden last month, wrote in a guest essay in The New York Times that Democrats “are not going to win in November with this president.” Share full article By Reid J. Epstein Reporting from Washington July 10, 2024 George Clooney, the Hollywood actor and Democratic financial powerhouse who co-hosted a major fund-raiser for President Biden last month, wrote in a New York Times guest essay on Wednesday that Mr. Biden was too old to seek re-election and should end his campaign. “The one battle he cannot win is the fight against time,” Mr. Clooney wrote. “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘ big F-ing deal ’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” Mr. Clooney, who last month hosted a $28 million fund-raiser in Hollywood for Mr. Biden that his campaign said was the largest ever for a Democratic candidate, is by far the highest-profile figure in the party to call for the president to end his campaign. The Biden campaign planned the Hollywood fund-raiser around Mr. Clooney’s schedule, according to two people familiar with the preparations who insisted on anonymity to discuss the deliberations. The event required Mr. Biden to fly from a Group of 7 gathering in Italy to California and back to Washington in a short period. Mr. Biden later blamed jet lag from that trip for his lethargy in the days leading up to the first debate and his weak performance during it. Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for the Biden campaign, referred questions about Mr. Clooney’s essay to the president’s letter to congressional Democrats on Monday , which reiterated that he would stay in the race. On Tuesday, as the Biden campaign learned that Mr. Clooney was preparing his opinion essay, campaign aides began what three people familiar with the effort described as a full-court press to persuade the actor not to publish it. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the movie mogul who is a co-chairman of the Biden campaign and its chief ambassador to Hollywood donors , led the effort to convince Mr. Clooney that he should stick with Mr. Biden, the three people said. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber?  Log in . Want all of The Times?  Subscribe . 350 IMAGES Masculinity In Popular Culture Free Essay Example Macbeth essay about masculinity masculinity essay Stanley.pdf PPT 📗 Masculinity Hegemonic Masculinity Essay Example VIDEO This new generation is sassy and effeminate 🤦🏿‍♂️ Challenging Masculinity: Society's New Norms ManPower: The NEW Masculinity for the 21st Century Episode 120 Shang Tsung Is Feminine New Girl & Positive Masculinity Video Essay COMMENTS Boys to Men: Teaching and Learning About Masculinity in an Age of In 2015, Michael Kimmel, a leading scholar on masculinity and the director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, helped start the nation's first master's degree program in ... 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Coined in late 20th-century men's movements, "toxic masculinity" spread to therapeutic and social policy settings in the early 21st century. Since 2013, feminists began attributing misogyny, homophobia, and men's violence to toxic masculinity. Around the same time, feminism enjoyed renewed popularization. While some feminist scholars ... Rethinking Masculinities Studies This review essay examines three new books in masculinities studies. It also provides a mapping of the field as it has changed over the past twenty years, exploring how our understanding of masculinity has changed with recent developments in trans, intersex, and queer theory and activism. How does the field change in response to changing ... 'Inoculate Boys Against Toxic Masculinity': Exploring Discourses of Men This article examines what discourses and assumed subject positions have emerged about men and masculinity in #MeToo debates. Using feminist critical discourse analysis and an exploratory approach to analyze 163 media articles, five key framings are noted: men are victims of masculinity requiring intervention, men are positioned as inherently 'good' or 'bad', boys and men are lost and ... What Is Toxic Masculinity? Suppressing emotions or masking distress. Maintaining an appearance of hardness. Violence as an indicator of power (think: "tough-guy" behavior) In other words: Toxic masculinity is what can ... Changing men, changing masculinities Segal's ( 1993) Slow Motion: Changing Men, Changing Masculinities was already raising the issue of change in relation to men and masculinities over thirty years ago. Interest in the subject, however has intensified since the early 2000s, with hooks' ( 2004) The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, Hidaka's ( 2010) Salaryman ... Full article: Introduction: Masculinities Building from R. W. Connell's ground-breaking conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity, this collection of essays considers masculinity relationally and discursively. We understand that masculinity is not synonymous with patriarchy and nor is it simply a corollary to femininity. Rather, it emerges at the intersection of caste, religion, class, sexuality, gender and other constructs, and it ... Voices of the New Masculinity How masculinity is morphing and modernizing, according to 18 influential people who are shaping our culture now. Welcome to GQ's New Masculinity issue, an exploration of the ways that traditional ... The masculinity crisis Reeves' book is one of a flurry of new titles exploring what it is sometimes fashionable to call the "crisis of masculinity": one, it must be said, that is largely confined to the west. It ... Understanding Men and Masculinity in Modern Society The purpose of this writing is to understand men and masculinity in the modern world putting into consideration the sociology of masculinity, the social construction of masculinity, the crisis ... Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies This essay provides a conceptual history of the study of masculinity in the English-speaking academy from the birth of "men's studies" in the 1980s to current work on global masculinities. Masculinities Studies This chapter applies a social constructivist, feminist lens to examining masculinity as a multiple concept detached from biology and marked by uncertainty. It claims that masculinities resist fixed definitions and universal traits, posing more questions than providing answers. The development, politics, and history of men's and masculinities studies are outlined in relation to feminism, women ... How to fix toxic masculinity This is a vision of masculinity that's super basic and sort of tailored to a 15-year-old who doesn't know any better. It's all about just shouting and showing off your cars and your women ... It's a Man's World: The Effect of Traditional Masculinity on Gender This will involve analysing the entrenchment of traditional male stereotypes in society and their consequent impact on women. Firstly, the essay will establish that male stereotypes operate within a larger structure of the gender paradigm. Then, it will define gender equality and its various interpretations. Beyond Masculinity: Essays by Queer Men on Gender and Politics Beyond Masculinity is a groundbreaking collection of 22 provocative essays on sexuality, gender, and politics -- all written by gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer men. Part audiobook, part-blog, and part-anthology, brings together a smart, diverse group of queer male writers all critically examining maleness and the construction of ... Best American Male: An Essay About Masculinity. An Essay About Power A young boy learns a hard truth about masculinity from a withholding paternal figure while they perform together a male-coded activity. Article continues below. This activity may be fishing or football or basketball or hammering a nail. The withholding paternal figure almost always performs the task successfully, although in rare instances, his ... Past, Present (and Future) of Studies of Literary Masculinities: A Case This article offers an overview of studies of literary masculinities. After tracing their origins and development within the broader field of masculinity studies, it continues by illustrating the present applications of masculinity studies to literary criticism, ranging from studies of female to "ethnic" (i.e., both white and non-white) masculinities in literature, among others. This ... Donald Trump Slams George Clooney For New York Times Essay ... Donald Trump chastised George Clooney as a "fake movie" actor and said that he should "get out of politics," following Clooney's bombshell op-ed in the New York Times urging Joe Biden to ... Donald Trump Is Unfit for a Second Term whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom. Next week, for the third time in eight years, Donald Trump will be ... Clooney argues Biden should leave the race and Dems have a new nominee American actor George Clooney argued in an op-ed that the Democratic party needs a new nominee. Opinion The party needs a new presidential nominee and can't rig things for any one candidate. Bernie Sanders backs Biden in New York Times essay: 'He must win' Biden has faced pressure from those within his party to step aside in the 2024 presidential election. George Clooney, a Major Biden Fund-Raiser, Urges Him to Drop Out George Clooney, the Hollywood actor and Democratic financial powerhouse who co-hosted a major fund-raiser for President Biden last month, wrote in a New York Times guest essay on Wednesday that Mr ... assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis