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
two children, and I would be angry and frustrated at life, at everything not going my way, so the cruel twist of domestic violence is that you hurt the ones you love. You put on the face at work, you put on the face with friends, and as soon as you get home … you attack the ones that you love the most.’’
Now, he sees that barely repressed rage and desire to control in men everywhere.
‘‘I see it when I’m in the park … I can hear it in the playground, I see it with extended family. I strongly feel we as men have no idea of the emotions happening within us, and we kind of have this default of just being angry because that’s what we’re good at, and dismissive, and we bulldoze our way through life until all the wheels fall off and our life falls apart.’’
There is no essence of man. You can’t bottle it up and spray it all over yourself like a 15-year-old with a can of Lynx. Instead, being a man, like being a woman, is a contradictory mess of likes, dislikes, and personality traits. Yet even as some gender constraints have loosened – as a woman,
I can wear pants, I can take up a trade, I can play rugby, and these ‘‘manly’’ traits are considered acceptable within reason – the same boundaries have not been pushed for boys.
As Dr Pani Farvid says in He’ll be Right, when boys or men take up behaviours coded ‘‘feminine’’ they’re considered to be trading down. Recently, Stuff ran a story with the headline: ‘‘‘Just go for it’: The women
smashing stereotypes and career goals in once male-dominated industries.’’ Can you imagine this being framed in the same warlike way for, say, men training to become nurses, or early childcare teachers? Would they be ‘‘smashing’’ stereotypes, or gently pushing them?
Breaking the chains
As far back as 1995, a Department of Justice research project identified talking about men as key to preventing intimate partner violence. ‘‘If there is any one message from this research, it is that we, individually and as a society, have to be responsible for changing our expectations of ‘what it is to be a man’ in order to reduce the abuse of women,’’ it wrote.
Yet in the years since, we have revisited this hardly at all.
Globally, including from the United Nations and the World Health Organisation, there has been increasing awareness that rigid and outdated gender roles contribute towards inequality and have health and social repercussions. A cursory glance at our appalling statistics when it comes to violence against women and children, the national shame that is the male youth suicide rate, the mass incarceration of Ma¯ ori men, and the continued victimisation of LGBQ+ people show there are underlying issues related to gender and race that need to be tackled.
But while we acknowledge these
problems, we hardly ever stop to think about the factors that might interact to cause them. As researcher Jess Berentson-Shaw says in her excellent piece ’’We Need To Talk About Men’’, we need to identify the systems that work to oppress men, too. ‘‘Rather than centring men’s current way of life and upholding that, we need to talk more about how the issues and problems men experience intersect and interconnect with gender inequality more widely,’’ she says. For example: ‘‘We talk about the problem of male suicide, but hardly ever talk about why men are lonely, experience isolation from each other, their partners, their children, or others in their lives.’’
In New Zealand, we are falling behind. A request from then minister for women Julie Anne Genter to Treasury to cast a gender lens over last year’s Budget was rejected. While other countries have adopted feminist foreign policies or, like Australia, use a ‘‘gender transformative’’ approach to sexual and domestic violence prevention – that is, actively acknowledge that the issue is gendered and act to address this – we have preferred to keep doing things the way we always have, which is to say, not very well. We continue to talk about the victims, not the perpetrators. Once, at a conference about rape prevention attended by hundreds, I counted two men. Two.
We are attached to the conventions of gender, even the seemingly uncontroversial ones. A couple of years ago I wrote a column about body hair. I said its removal was a societal expectation that’s time-consuming, expensive and boring but also difficult to escape as, even if women don’t want to, they find their choices policed by partners, other women, strangers, and even themselves.
Hundreds of readers emailed or commented to express their disgust at women’s body hair, or refused to acknowledge there was any double standard.
The mere thought of a woman pushing back against this entirely arbitrary convention enraged some people, women included. It was considered too transgressive.
It’s time we started to notice gender, not to reinforce differences but to identify the restrictions it places on us and how we can act.
Ultimately, it’s not about defining or even
redefining masculinity, or asking what it means to be a real man, or a good man.
Who gets to say what is ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ anyway? And who really cares? What we need to be asking is what makes a good, ethical person. There’s no point just moving the corners of the ‘‘man box’’ a bit, to let in a few more positive traits.
We need to tear the whole thing down. Compared to girls, boys are increasingly underperforming at school, and being incarcerated, and killing themselves in greater numbers. We have been moulding generations of men who struggle to adapt, to process emotions, and to escape the shackles of cultural expectations.
Once we really start to see that anyone can do anything, then a whole new world opens up. And it’s one that’s far better for everyone.
I used body hair as an example earlier, but maybe you want to try something else. Wear makeup, or don’t. Take up knitting. Hell, wear a pink shirt. The next time someone says ‘‘boys will be boys’’, ask them what they actually mean.
Do they mean boys will be kind, courteous, empathetic, warm and loving humans? Because I know plenty who are. And it’s time we made more room for them.
‘‘I had to show that, despite those ‘effeminate interests’, I was a real bloke underneath.’’
JOCK PHILLIPS
He’ll Be Right the podcast is on stuff.co.nz