1: the properties characteristic of the male sex [syn: maleness] [ant: femaleness]
2: the trait of behaving in ways considered typical for men [ant: femininity]
Gender differences are making a comeback.
In recent months, media sources ranging from The New Republic to Newsweek to Oprah have begun to increasingly tout the notion that boys will be boys and girls will be, well, successful. The popular press would have us believe that boys are in a state of crisis: less excited about school, less hopeful for the future, and less likely to attend and graduate from four-year colleges than their sisters and girlfriends. The reasons that have been proffered range from excessive time spent playing video games to underdeveloped verbal skills to the adverse effects of feminism. The author of a December 2005 article in the National Review, for example, notes that “radical feminist academics, theorists, and activists” are “to blame for boys’ alienation from our current schooling regime.”
Psychologists, sociologists, and activists have, for decades and even centuries, tried to convince the public that gender disparities were the result of a sexist society and pervasive inequality. But the new century finds us subscribing, once more, to theories of “innate differences” and genetic and biological determinism to explain increasingly evident educational disparities between the genders.
While masculinity has historically been affirmed and celebrated, the emerging trend in some circles is that masculinity is now considered a liability, a biologically determined trait that has led to a societal problem of epidemic proportions. Driven by a combination of evolutionary and hormonal influences, boys’ brains develop later than girls’, leaving them disorganized, inattentive, and plagued by poor verbal skills. These traits are only exacerbated by their unwillingness to ask for help. The irony is that, as the men flounder, women are increasingly likely to become powerful, ambitious, high-earning leaders and realize the formerly masculine ideal of success. By all accounts, masculinity is dooming our boys.
Coverage of the ‘boy crisis,’ presented with a combination of surprise, alarm and foreboding, mirrors Betty Friedan’s 1963 expose of the plight of the 1950s housewife and the “problem that has no name.” That constellation of neuroses, unfulfilled expectations, and boredom experienced by so many women was poised to create a social crisis, yet had been largely unaddressed by the larger society. Along with Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, Friedan’s Feminine Mystique played a critical role in launching the offensive against the concept of femininity in the 1950s and 60s. Social theorists exposed the term ‘femininity’ for what it was: not a description so much as a prescription for how women should be. In doing so, they debunked the myth of the joyous and healthy pursuit of perfect femininity. Later activists like bell hooks argued that the perverse ideal of femininity didn’t just curl up in the laps of armchair academics. Rather, it imprisoned women.
But even as activists launched their attack against femininity, they largely ignored femininity’s partner-in-crime: masculinity. Femininity was rejected because it carried the obviously damaging connotations of weakness, ineptitude, and natural inferiority. But masculinity, with its connotations of strength, aptitude, and natural superiority, appeared to be relatively innocuous, if perhaps somewhat exaggerated. And so it was that even as women were able to slough off what had once been the feminine ideal, the masculine ideal continued to impose its flattering but rigid expectations over men for decades to come.
This neglect of the male situation has become painfully evident as the alarm over male educational attainment forces us to finally think about what it means to be male in our modern society. Maleness, which for so long has been regarded as the default, is now being poked and prodded and examined as never before. To what extent is the masculine ideal still superior, or even relevant, in society today?
What used to be seen as exclusively male traits, like competitiveness, leadership ability, economic success, dominance, and power, are no longer so unambiguously male. Other manly stereotypes, like the stoic, self-reliant, and logical thinker, are no longer so clearly superior to stereotypically feminine emotionality and nurture.
Education is perhaps the one area in which the traditional understanding of masculinity has most been challenged and reevaluated. But evolving norms in the domains of sexual behavior, popular culture, and social structure have also blurred the line between feminine and masculine. Just like femininity, masculinity has progressed from being understood as a dichotomy to a continuum, and from a continuum to continua. As gender becomes increasingly divorced from sex and the hierarchy of gender becomes less rigid we are poised to redefine masculinity. A definition like “the properties characteristic of the male sex” now seems distinctly unilluminating.
In this issue’s cover feature, Diversity & Distinction explores the “Masculine Mystique.”
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