OVERCOMING MACHISMO & OTHER LIES ABOUT MASCULINITY
We’ve all seen vivid examples lately: athletes dying from heat prostration during gratuitously grueling summer practice sessions; bullied students driven to the edge of despair to become mass shooters; cops executing death penalties when the only transgression was at best a feeble and ineffectual challenge to their authority. All of these and many more that come to mind are cases in which notions of masculinity— living up to them, enforcing them and clinging pathetically to them — have played a role, with caustic, costly and destructive end results.
“The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence” by Ronald F. Levant and Shana Pryor argues that masculinity — the impossibility of its attainment, the constant need to defend it, the real and imagined threats posed to it by a modern, progressive and inclusive world — is the root of gun violence, sexual and domestic assault, depression, suicide, and even a generally degraded health and lowered life expectancy for males.
Note in this formulation the absence of the suffix “toxic,” an extraneous adjective the authors view as merely a fashionable media flourish — redundant, since masculinity as traditionally conceived is plenty noxious and deadly already.
Femininity, although imperfect, is in a much better place, the authors argue, owing to half a century of hard-fought debate over gender roles and equal rights. Thanks to feminism, the feminine has undergone reinvention and modernization at least to the point that today’s girls and women realize the absurdity of the Barbie doll-Betty Crocker ideal. Females are aware of the complexities and contradictions contained in the notion of modern womanhood; they embrace the opportunities and advantages of sports, fitness, health. Ready to fight for and take on roles traditionally reserved for men, without any loss of femininity, women and girls don’t feel as much the constraint of outdated assumptions and regressive role models.
Boys on the other hand, still consciously and unconsciously bullied by their fathers and other adult men to “man up,” are still dissuaded from all things girly. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Rambo and Rocky are still the norm; such icons and their heirs still serve as prototypes that haven’t changed significantly since the middle of the past century.
Gender-neutral parenting can still be a bizarre, fearful thing for many, just as transgender bathrooms are for J.K. Rowling
Unlike girls, boys are still taught emotional constraint, anger and lust being the only appropriate behaviors open to them. Many males suffer from alexithymia, the inability to verbalize or constructively express emotion. When the vocabulary to articulate the full range of human experience is lacking, that which craves a healthy outlet is transmuted into aggression, crime, violence and a host of other self-destructive behaviors.
Armed with the book’s ideas, readers will find immediate application to our present pandemic summer: citizens refusing to wear face coverings while clinging to the Confederacy; politicians overestimating their crowd size while impugning the manhood of rivals; law enforcement officers serving and protecting by dispensing pepper spray as though they were taking a nostalgic bath with Mr. Bubble — all manifestations of overgrown boyhood.
“The Tough Standard” is the culmination of main author Ronald F. Levant’s 40-year career as psychologist, professor and editor of the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities. One could ask why graduate student Shana Pryor gets second billing, and how precisely gender roles played out in the division of labor.
Although timely, the book is hardly pleasant or easy summertime reading. Written in an unapologetic academic style, the authors go so far as to warn readers to skip an entire chapter consisting entirely of statistics only a sociologist could parse. And, although the authors are certain of a causal link between masculinity and the mass of social problems on their list, they scrupulously point out time and again that more research is needed, more probing survey questions remain to be asked.
“The Tough Standard” holds out hope for a healthier conception of masculinity in the future. After all, the authors point out, there already exist “multiple masculinities,” differentiated according to culture: African-American, LatinX, gay, even hybrid masculinities. In the meantime, there’s also education, maturity and wisdom. Even without a clear consensus, men may still find their way to a better masculinity.