Masculinity is a contradictory mess
There is no ‘essence of man’ writes Michelle Duff so why do we make it so difficult for males to break out of that box?
Ican’t recall if I was in the middle of interviewing a rape victim or writing about the gender pay gap when my son told me he didn’t like girls. He’s 5, and it was on the way home from school. ‘‘Why not?’’ I asked. ‘‘I just don’t like them,’’ he replied.
‘‘I’m a girl,’’ I pointed out. ‘‘What about your cousin? She’s a girl. What about your mates, Evey and Wairere? What about Grandma?’’
There was a silence. The rearview mirror revealed my son, whose long, curly hair his father had tied in a topknot, gazing thoughtfully out the window.
‘‘I only like girls I know,’’ he concluded.
Six months later, ahead of his second year of school, the topknot is gone. He wanted short hair, like the other boys. Everything stick-like is turned into a gun, and favourite topics of conversation include Lego Star Wars and how to kill a zombie.
Despite the fact he came clear last at the school cross-country and the girls ran a better race (one parent timed the girls’ and the boys’ races, inexplicably divided into gender at ages 5 and 6, and found the girls significantly faster), he is convinced he is faster than girls. Over summer, he refused to wear the pink bike helmet he chose last year.
It has taken a frighteningly short length of time for my son to begin working out what kind of behaviour, interests and appearances are socially acceptable for a boy.
It doesn’t matter how often my husband and I challenge the widely held assumption that traits are dictated by gender. The sad fact is what his mates at school think will likely always be more important. Society has begun moulding my boy into a ‘‘man’’ – giving him messages about what’s OK (lightsabers) and what’s not (unicorns), casting femininity as weaker (girls must be slower) and less desirable. Yet I know he also loves playing ‘‘mummies and daddies’’, with his soft toys, quietly reading, baking, and being gentle and loving with his baby brother. He still shows me his emotions. But for how much longer?
Stuff has launched podcast He’ll Be Right, in which hosts John Daniell and Glenn McConnell ask what it means to be a modern man. They explore masculinity, asking whether the traditional model of the hardened Kiwi bloke has served men well.
There are no points for guessing the answer.
New Zealand is often held up as a progressive nation due to having a competent woman as a prime minister while the rest of the world is being run into the ground by a bunch of scoundrels, and being faster to move on women’s suffrage and legalising gay marriage.
This is an absolute fantasy.
If New Zealand is a person, he’s your Stubbies-wearing uncle from Eketa¯ huna who thinks he’s enlightened because he once watched a women’s rugby match and drank a glass of Prosecco by mistake.
In this country, we have never had a meaningful conversation about gender. Sure, every time there’s a particularly hideous example of sexual violence – Roastbusters, the Grace Millane murder – we might talk about ‘‘toxic masculinity’’, or how we live in a culture that is permissive of behaviours that lead to rape. But there is inevitable pushback: not all men are like that; women need to stop being victims.
Basically, as soon as you suggest to the uncle from Eke there might be a fundamental problem with binary gender roles and the way men and women are socialised to act, he gets defensive. Angry, even.
Podcast host John Daniell says he was compelled to confront some of the stereotypical ideas of what it means to be a man after getting feedback to a story he wrote about masculinity. Like many heterosexual, white, middle-class men, he had never really had cause to think about the restrictions of gender, and consider how they might be impacting him. Over the course of the series, he realises he has been shaped, in ways both laughable – for most of his life he cut out an entire food (quiche) as he considered it not ‘‘manly’’ enough – and poignant, like the admission that his go-to emotions are anger and anxiety.
Gender norms act as a form of social control, pushing us into actions, thought patterns, careers, relationships, and lives that we might not even want. Do all men really want to be ‘‘breadwinners?’’ Do they want to leave their kids to go to work every day? Approaching 50, Daniell says he began to question who he was, and if he was even happy. And it’s kind of difficult to know what happiness actually looks like, and if any other men are really feeling it, if you’ve never been encouraged to acknowledge your emotions.
What even is ‘masculinity’?
Ever seen that movie, Look Who’s Talking?
There’s a scene where the sperm are racing to fertilise the egg, possibly the most visceral and earliest biological sign of male competition and dominance. May the strongest sperm win.
Only, this isn’t how it works. Sperm actually get sucked into lockers in the vagina known as crypts, where they are trapped until being released in groups to wander around aimlessly while the duds are filtered out by killer chemicals until the egg chooses the sperm it wants. Despite the ‘‘race for the egg’’ story being disproved by science, and
My Vagina is a Vampire being a great album title, this false tale has entered our cultural psyche. Why? Because it upholds a ‘‘macho’’ myth, and falls neatly into a pattern of behaviour we code as masculine. In fact, an increasing amount of research shows there are far fewer biological differences between the sexes than previously thought.
But since colonisation, stereotypical portraits of the Kiwi male – both Ma¯ ori and Pa¯ keha¯ – have conflated strength with these macho traits, one of which is the suppression of emotion. Men are expected to just get on with it, with the only real ‘‘acceptable’’ emotion considered to be anger. (This is particularly galling when it comes to Ma¯ ori men, who history shows were, in fact, gentle, caring fathers in a society where the ideas of ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ were not set up in opposition to each other – rather, as Ani Mikaere writes, everyone acted and looked after one another as part of a complementary and collective whole.) Historian Jock Phillips, the author of
A Man’s Country, has talked of the cost of men’s expected stoicism – including feelings of alienation, and the pressure to be someone they are not. In episode one of He’ll be Right, he tells of how, as a scholar, he essentially had to hide who he was to fit in. ‘‘I had to show that, despite those ‘effeminate interests’, I was a real bloke underneath,’’ he says. ‘‘I didn’t enjoy rugby at all, I found it scary. I found I got hurt … and I found putting my head into a scrum one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had in my life. I could not understand why anyone would see putting your head between two other men’s buttocks as being the high point of NZ culture, I was staggered by it.’’
Another He’ll Be Right interviewee, a father of two who works to help men control their aggression, talks of the rage he felt in family situations over things as seemingly inconsequential as controlling what his children were eating. He realises now he used to be an abusive partner and father, but could not initially see it as it was not physical. ‘‘I used to yell at my kids and then feel absolutely miserable because I adore my