AlterNet, USA
http://www.alternet.org/sex/41356/The High Cost of Manliness
Society's toxic view of masculinity isn't just harmful to men.
Everyone pays the price
By Robert Jensen, AlterNet
Posted September 8, 2006
It's hard to be a man; hard to live up to the demands that
come with the dominant conception of masculinity, of the tough
guy.
So, guys, I have an idea -- maybe it's time we stop trying.
Maybe this masculinity thing is a bad deal, not just for women
but for us.
We need to get rid of the whole idea of masculinity. It's
time to abandon the claim that there are certain psychological or
social traits that inherently come with being biologically male.
If we can get past that, we have a chance to create a better
world for men and women.
That dominant conception of masculinity in U.S. culture is
easily summarized: Men are assumed to be naturally competitive
and aggressive, and being a real man is therefore marked by the
struggle for control, conquest and domination. A man looks at
the world, sees what he wants and takes it. Men who don't
measure up are wimps, sissies, fags, girls. The worst insult one
man can hurl at another -- whether it's boys on the playground or
CEOs in the boardroom -- is the accusation that a man is like a
woman. Although the culture acknowledges that men can in some
situations have traits traditionally associated with women
(caring, compassion, tenderness), in the end it is men's
strength-expressed-as-toughness that defines us and must trump
any female-like softness. Those aspects of masculinity must
prevail for a man to be a "real man."
That's not to suggest, of course, that every man adopts that
view of masculinity. But it is endorsed in key institutions and
activities -- most notably in business, the military and
athletics -- and is reinforced through the mass media. It is
particularly expressed in the way men -- straight and gay alike -
- talk about sexuality and act sexually. And our culture's male
heroes reflect those characteristics: They most often are men who
take charge rather than seek consensus, seize power rather than
look for ways to share it and are willing to be violent to
achieve their goals.
That view of masculinity is dangerous for women. It leads
men to seek to control "their" women and define their own
pleasure in that control, which leads to epidemic levels of rape
and battery. But this view of masculinity is toxic for men as
well.
If masculinity is defined as conquest, it means that men
will always struggle with each other for dominance. In a system
premised on hierarchy and power, there can be only one king of
the hill. Every other man must in some way be subordinated to
the king, and the king has to always be nervous about who is
coming up that hill to get him. A friend who once worked on Wall
Street -- one of the preeminent sites of masculine competition --
described coming to work as like walking into a knife fight when
all the good spots along the wall were taken. Masculinity like
this is life lived as endless competition and threat.
No one man created this system, and perhaps none of us, if
given a choice, would choose it. But we live our lives in that
system, and it deforms men, narrowing our emotional range and
depth. It keeps us from the rich connections with others -- not
just with women and children, but other men -- that make life
meaningful but require vulnerability.
This doesn't mean that the negative consequences of this
toxic masculinity are equally dangerous for men and women. As
feminists have long pointed out, there's a big difference between
women dealing with the possibility of being raped, beaten and
killed by the men in their lives, and men not being able to cry.
But we can see that the short-term material gains that men get
are not adequate compensation for what we men give up in the long
haul -- which is to surrender part of our humanity to the project
of dominance.
Of course there are obvious physical differences between men
and women -- average body size, hormones, reproductive organs.
There may be other differences rooted in our biology that we
don't yet understand. Yet it's also true that men and women are
more similar than we are different, and that given the pernicious
effects of centuries of patriarchy and its relentless devaluing
of things female, we should be skeptical of the perceived
differences.
What we know is simple: In any human population, there is
wide individual variation. While there's no doubt that a large
part of our behavior is rooted in our DNA, there's also no doubt
that our genetic endowment is highly influenced by culture.
Beyond that, it's difficult to say much with any certainty. It's
true that only women can bear children and breastfeed. That fact
likely has some bearing on aspects of men's and women's
personalities. But we don't know much about what the effect is,
and given the limits of our tools to understand human behavior,
it's possible we may never know much.
At the moment, the culture seems obsessed with gender
differences, in the context of a recurring intellectual fad
(called "evolutionary psychology" this time around, and
"sociobiology" in a previous incarnation) that wants to explain
all complex behaviors as simple evolutionary adaptations -- if a
pattern of human behavior exists, it must be because it's
adaptive in some ways. In the long run, that's true by
definition. But in the short-term it's hardly a convincing
argument to say, "Look at how men and women behave so
differently; it must be because men and women are fundamentally
different" when a political system has been creating differences
between men and women.
From there, the argument that we need to scrap masculinity
is fairly simple. To illustrate it, remember back to right after
9/11. A number of commentators argued that criticisms of
masculinity should be rethought. Cannot we now see --
recognizing that male firefighters raced into burning buildings,
risking and sometimes sacrificing their lives to save others --
that masculinity can encompass a kind of strength that is rooted
in caring and sacrifice? Of course men often exhibit such
strength, just as do women. So, the obvious question arises:
What makes these distinctly masculine characteristics? Are they
not simply human characteristics?
We identify masculine tendencies toward competition,
domination and violence because we see patterns of differential
behavior; men are more prone to such behavior in our culture. We
can go on to observe and analyze the ways in which men are
socialized to behave in those ways, toward the goal of changing
those destructive behaviors. That analysis is different than
saying that admirable human qualities present in both men and
women are somehow primarily the domain of one gender. To assign
them to a gender is misguided and demeaning to the gender that is
then assumed not to possess them to the same degree. Once we
start saying "strength and courage are masculine traits," it
leads to the conclusion that woman are not as strong or
courageous.
Of course, if we are going to jettison masculinity, we have
to scrap femininity along with it. We have to stop trying to
define what men and women are going to be in the world based on
extrapolations from physical sex differences. That doesn't mean
we ignore those differences when they matter, but we have to stop
assuming they matter everywhere.
I don't think the planet can long survive if the current
conception of masculinity endures. We face political and
ecological challenges that can't be met with this old model of
what it means to be a man. At the more intimate level, the
stakes are just as high. For those of us who are biologically
male, we have a simple choice: We men can settle for being men,
or we can strive to be human beings.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of
Texas at Austin, and the author of, most recently, The Heart of
Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City
Lights Books).
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
): het verlangen dat vaders er gewoon voor hun kinderen ZIJN (op eigen wijze), en dat de maatschappij niet net doet alsof dat nog steeds de opvoedingstaak van moeders is: de vader duidelijk maken dat ie ook iets moet willen. Bedelende moeders, ter compensatie van de emancipatie achterstand van vaders. 
Mannelijk = dat wat mannen mogen zijn.
en 
Goeie, Tiresias. 
. Maar het is een begin.