As some of you may be aware, I’m a sociology major. Sociology majors have a bad habit of using words that make sense to other sociology majors, but make the entire rest of the fucking world tilt their heads and say “buh?” or, in extreme cases coughpatriarchycough, think the sociology majors are saying the exact opposite of what they are actually saying. Some of these words are actually cool and useful for analysis of gender, though, so I’ve decided to do a bit of a series explaining them.
So what is hegemonic masculinity? These dudes right here define it as:
A particular variety of masculinity to which others—among them young and effeminate as well as homosexual men—are subordinated.
Which is nice enough as far as it goes, I guess, but it’s not exactly what one would call specific.
The sociologist Erving Goffman actually tells us what the damn thing is
In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports… Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself—during moments at least—as unworthy, incomplete and inferior.
I’m sure everyone reading this could add a couple of items to the list: cis; having a conventional sexuality (not kinky, asexual, aromantic, interested in fat women, etc.); not physically or mentally disabled; tall; employed in a professional career; not a nerd or a member of any other subculture; not a fan of The Notebook or anything Broadway-related; intelligent but not too intelligent; doesn’t cry. (You could also debate the necessity of being married or a father, but I think that depends on age– twentysomething men are supposed to be more promiscuous, and then around thirty settle down and get married and start reproducing.)
That guy– and there’s about five of him in the entire United States– generally has it pretty good, to be honest. The entirety of the kyriarchy was set up in favor of him, so he’d better. Which is not to say that he has a perfect life– entire issues of the New York Times Book Review have been devoted to ways in which this man, usually in his disguise as an English professor, can be unhappy. (His kids hate him! His wife is getting fat and talking about a divorce! Office politics suck! His career is stalling!)
It’s also not to say that any of this is that guy’s fault. He didn’t choose to be born white, heterosexual, athletic and the rest of it, any more than I chose to be born a white bisexual who couldn’t hit a ball if her life depended on it. He’s just lucky. There is no point in hating someone because of privileges they can’t change.
Besides, it’s not exactly great for him either.
Because the thing about hegemonic masculinity is that it’s a state that can be lost at any time. The second you watch a Twilight movie and say “hey, that wasn’t half-bad, actually,” poof, you are no longer hegemonically masculine. You have to continually be looking over your shoulder. That works out okay for the guy who naturally dislikes Twilight and doesn’t want to cry, in addition to all the rest of it, but how many of that guy are there out there? One?
Having an entire social system set up in favor of one dude in Ohio somewhere seems like a pretty bad plan to me.
And for everyone else, hegemonic masculinity is a cage. It might be a little nicer cage, with some gilding on the bars and better food, but it’s still a cage. Being forced to be strong when you’re actually weak might be slightly better than being forced to be weak when you’re actually strong, but ideally no one would be forced to be anything at all and could be strong or weak as it pleased them.
Thing of Things 
I’m not that guy, and I really don’t want to be that guy, and I don’t view myself as unworthy, incomplete, or inferior because I’m not that guy. This is my major complaint against academic social justice—the tendency towards sweeping generalizations which ignore the reality that there are a lot of different social contexts in this world and they affect people in radically different ways.
LikeLiked by 9 people
In particular, the Blue Tribe exists. 😛
LikeLike
This. Also I feel like these lists of the ideal person can go on for a very long time. To the list already, you could add: has frequent but vanilla sex with his wife, is involved with his kids but only in the “fun” stuff, has no mental illness, is extroverted, owns a house, is the oldest sibling or an only child, isn’t balding, has no major physical health issues, is politically moderate, drinks alcohol, and so on and so on.
But also, I dislike the implication that these guys are actively pushing down other men in competition. Some, yes, but no more than men in non-ideal demographics.
Finally, there’s an implication that there won’t be an ideal masculinity/man/person in the culture at large, which seems naive in my view. I think there may be something in human nature that makes it necessary for there to be an ideal to compare people and masculinities to in order to make sense of the world. Even people who reject the ideal in various subcultures rely on that ideal to construct their alternative masculinity.
I’m not saying the ideal masculinity in the general culture can’t be made more inclusive or involve fewer problematic aspects, but it is not going away.
LikeLiked by 5 people
That Goffman quote seems to be conflating masculinity with “privilege” generally, since none of white, urban (!), northern, or Protestant is in any way necessary to be “unblushing” as a male, and I’m not entirely sure about “college-educated.” In fact, blackness, ruralness, and Southernness are all stereotypically more masculine than whiteness, urbanness, and Northernness, and while Catholicism as such is not viewed as particularly masculine, it is associated with being a white ethnic, which is at often associated with masculinity.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Now, if by Protestant, he really means not Jewish . . . well, that’s another matter entirely!
LikeLike
The Goffman quote sounded old to me, and I followed the link and indeed it’s from 1963. I think the situation is not as bad today. Technology has encouraged the flourishing of subcultures, and society seems more tolerant and diverse in general.
I once encountered a PUA article that made a point I liked: there are multiple sexy archetypes. Some that I remember are the athlete, the musician, the mystic, the rebel, and the king. (This was probably true in 1963 too, but they’re probably more pronounced and varied today. For example, we now have a notion of the sexy geek, partly from the Matrix.)
Which isn’t to say that there’s no longer a problem! Instead of one hegemon, we have a few acceptable archetypes. But they’re still too restrictive, e.g. none of them involve wearing pink nail polish.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Your claim seems to be a trivial corrolary of the fact that some function that maps men onto a real number (representing manliness) has a global maximum. (Or is the point that there are no local maxima?)
LikeLiked by 4 people
I don’t think the authors are limiting themselves to a single global maximum. They seem to be pulling traits from a bunch of different (local?) maxes.
Take ‘good at sports’ and ‘featured in the New York Times Book Review’.
An expert bow-hunter (to pick a sport) would defintely be masculine. But he’s a very different kind of masculine from a Harvard English Professor.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Given that women are (a) the gatekeepers to sex and relationships, and to a great extent social acceptance and belonging and (b) the most influential when it comes to early childhood development (when boys’ and girls’ gender identities and expectations are formed), is it fair to say that hegemonic masculinity is women’s benchmark criteria for men so they know what to aim for if they want to get laid/ a GF or wife/ accepted into society?
These criteria just happen to describe a perfect provider and protector of women in the modern age – the perfect husband, or husband in the making. Instead of being a good hunter he now has a decent career and high salary….. but is not so work obsessed he is never around to give a foot massage, or surprise his wife with theatre tickets.
He is happy with his lot in life, but not so happy he doesn’t need to seek out (and thus provide for) a woman to fill the rather large gap in his life which we might call ‘his feminine side’ which he has been trained since birth to completely shut down.
His ‘feminine side’ includes such indulgences as comfort, safety, protection, emotional intimacy, self expression/ individuality, frivolity/ irrationality/ spontaneity etc. Women effectively maintain a monopoly on these kinds of qualities, via upbringing (which is mostly done by mothers) and selection of a mate (in general women select a mate from a variety of male suitors).
And this means the hegemonic male is focused primarily on careers, hierarchy climbing, wealth accumulating etc and is then driven to seek out the love of a good woman to experience and participate in the ‘softer’ and ‘more spontaneous’ side of life … dragging a decent pay check along with him.
This is why as modern technology has made women more financially independent (by creating a bunch of comfortable, safe, ‘indoor’ service industry jobs), we’ve seen the definition of hegemonic masculinity, broaden a little. These days women don’t need a husband to be quite so rugged, strong, aggressive or dominant (thanks to tractors, electricity, hydraulics, modern infrastructure, state funded fire and police services etc etc). The ideal man today is still an alpha warrior in the boardroom, but a bit of a beta washer-of-dishes at home.
michaelkeenan said (above): “Instead of one hegemon, we have a few acceptable archetypes. But they’re still too restrictive, e.g. none of them involve wearing pink nail polish.”
Right. A softer more ‘feminine’ man who is eager to listen to his wife’s problems after getting home, while giving her a foot massage is of utility to women. But a man wearing pink nail varnish is of no utility to her. All he is doing is indulging in beauty/ vanity/ self expression and filling that hole in his life that previously SHE used to fill by being the colourful, expressive one. So her value (and thus leverage) in the relationship has just gone down….. just as his value (and leverage) would go down if she learned how to change the oil in the car, or became the main breadwinner in the relationship.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I would have assumed what is being described here is the stereotype of the ideal father, and the list for the ideal mother would read the same except with fully employed changed to employed part time/on a career break and with the additional attribute of nurturing.
What is being traded isn’t expressiveness for oil changing. It is a division of labour – paid employment, child care hours, unpaid tasks coded as feminine – cooking, cleaning, sewing and unpaid tasks coded as masculine – electrical, plumbing, car maintenance. Traits like expressiveness, social communication, assertiveness and so on may also be traded against each other, but not mostly for the other adult’s benefit, but so that the children have a set of traits to draw upon.
Are men really swapping oil changing ability for someone who will fill a hole in their soul? I’m asking seriously.
I agree that women are gatekeepers of social acceptance and belonging, but that’s because society includes children and the elderly, who mostly receive direct care from women. And the fear isn’t really nobody will have sex with me/love me in a feminine way, but that nobody will include me in the cradle to grave scenario that is society and life, and I will die alone and unmourned. The solution to that would be a change in social structures that include men in other ways than through romantic relationships.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“any more than I chose to be born a white bisexual who couldn’t hit a ball if her life depended on it.”
I am confused now about what pronouns we are supposed to use for you. I thought you were angry if people called you “her”.
LikeLike
This is (unless I am confused) a repost from Ozy’s old blog, from before they started identifying as genderqueer. Ozy has not been redacting these reposts to fit with changes in their views on the topics covered, nor have they been redacting them to fit with their current gender identity.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Ah, OK, that makes more sense. Thanks.
LikeLike
That quote doesn’t ring true to me at all. Ask me what a “real man” is, and my immediate associations are words like “honest”, “honorable”, “strong”, “dependable”. Loving baseball and hating Twilight are far, far down the list, in fuzzy-descriptor territory; I might tease a man for wearing a Team Edward t-shirt, but I’m not gonna throw him out of the tribe. I, myself, have a lot of traits for which Goffman would probably expect me to feel masculine neurosis — I’m a vegetarian whose favorite show of all time is Buffy the Vampire Slayer — but I’m not looking over my shoulder lest the Hegemonic Masculinity Police take away my man-card. At worst, I feel mildly defensive if someone makes fun of me for them, which is true of a lot of non-gender-related things in a lot of contexts.
Gorfmann isn’t just wildly overstating the case, he’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There’s enormous social value in convincing young men that masculinity entails the things I mentioned in my opening line. Young men are the most dangerous animals on Earth.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Unfortunately, some subcultures (see /r/TheRedPill for a very recent example) use this idea of masculinity to support their model of the world where men are honest, honorable, strong and dependable, and women are (of course) deceitful, self-serving, weak and fickle.
For this reason, I would prefer if we associated unambiguously positive qualities with being a good person, regardless of gender.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, exactly. Why have manly virtues, rather than just virtues?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Simply put, men need it more. As long as masculinity is regarded as aspirational, we want the aspirations to be positive, not “Kill your enemies, drive them before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
I’m on board with the theory that a society without gender roles might be even better, but I’ve no idea how to get there from here. Even when gender itself becomes fully optional, most people will probably stick with one, and have a lot of their self-concept bound up in it.
LikeLike
Why? I hope you don’t think that men are naturally worse at these virtues than women. However, if the reason you have in mind is that men are physically stronger and thus their misbehavior is more dangerous, you need a very different list of virtues. Something like this:
“A real man is kind and patient, never jealous, boastful, proud, or rude. He isn’t selfish or quick tempered. He doesn’t keep a record of wrongs that others do. He rejoices in the truth, but not in evil. He is always supportive, loyal, hopeful, and trusting.”
And definitely no glorifying double-edged qualities like “courage” or “honor”!
Note that your list (“honest, honorable, strong and dependable”) is 100% compatible with aspirations like “kill your enemies, drive them before you, and hear the lamentations of their women”, if we take into account that different cultures have very different ideas of “honorable” behavior.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have more thoughts that I might get around to adding later, but for now, I’ll just say this:
While I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to call it “best in life,” I’d certainly say that “Kill your enemies, drive them before you, and hear the lamentations of their women is a worthy and honorable goal, provided that one exercises good moral judgment in choosing one’s enemies.
LikeLike
Oh, and I think it was “crush”, not “kill”. If you kill them, how are you going to have them driven (i.e., herded, rushed, chased) before you?
LikeLike
I try to steer clear of nature-nurture debates; I doubt the question actually means much, and it’s irrelevant to policy questions anyway. Men need it more because it’s men who commit most crimes, especially violent crimes.
And yeah, it was “crush”, not “kill”. Guess I didn’t sufficiently internalize Conan the Barbarian.
LikeLike
Quoting Jack Donovan (The Way of Men):
“Because masculinity and honor are by nature hierarchical, all men are in some way deficient in masculinity compared to a higher status man. There is always a higher status man, if not in your group, then in another, and if not in this way then in that way, and if not now, then eventually… Masculinity in the perfect ideal is aspirational, not attainable.”
“The men who possess the least of these qualities or suffer from an excessive lack of one in particular are the men who other men don’t want to be. They are furthest from the ideal. So long as they don’t openly despise the ideal… men will tend to include and help members of their gang or tribe who are unusually deficient in strength, courage or mastery.”
In Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man (in which she “passes” as a man for several months as an experiment to understand masculinity better), she describes joining a bowling league – and even though she sucks as bowling, the members of her team are tolerant, and help her practise.
I’m guessing there’s a line for a man where “aspirational” becomes “hegemonic” – where the ideal becomes a cage – but I think I disagree where sociology & Donovan want to draw that line for all men, everywhere.
LikeLiked by 3 people
For me, the major sticking point is the way Sociologists omit — or just talk around — the agents that are behind the effect being discussed.
Definitions like: “A particular variety of masculinity to which others—among them young and effeminate as well as homosexual men—are subordinated” make me feel like I’m being walked into a rhetorical trap.
What kind of thing is a ‘variety of masculity’? And who or what is subordinating it to other varieties?
Is it a pattern of behavior that tends to be especially adaptive? (“Buisness connections often start at sporting events, so people who play sports get promoted.”)
Is it a standard for self-image that has been internalized by men? (“After years of media exposure, most men feel reflexively embarassed about sucking at sports.”)
Or is it a standard that’s being applied to men by thrid parties? If so, which third parties? Why do men care? (“Many women prefer to date men who are good at sports.”)
I can’t even get to the point of agreeing or disagreeing, because I don’t even know which kind of claim a sociologist-author is making. Worse, I’m left with the unsettling feeling like this vagueness was put there intentionally, so the speaker could conflate the various claims, or just switch between them freely.
Even the expanded definition doesn’t help all that much. It talks about a system that was ‘set up to favor’ a handful of people. Set up by who or what? How did they get buy in from everyone else?
I’d be ok with the hidden agents as metaphor (“set up by moloch!”) except that people write as if they’re believed to be literally true. People even continue to use the metaphor when trying to plan solutions. (“We need to change society!”)
This all leaves me with the feeling that these sociological concepts are too vague to be proprely true or false.
LikeLiked by 5 people
is a man’s typical reaction towards a more masculine man admiration or resentment?
the idea of hegemonic masculinity only seems to make sense in the latter view. if we resent men who surpass us in masculinity then a ziggurat of manliness will crush men even a few steps short of the peak. but if we admire and want to emulate more masculine men then the same structure provides opportunity to improve and challenge ourselves even at the highest levels
even if you see it as a false consciousness of patriarchy it is still useful to consider the former mindset. in the same way most americans supposedly see ourselves as ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’ perhaps many if not most of us view ourselves as temporarily emasculated heroes
LikeLiked by 2 people
” People with a major have a bad habit of using words that make sense to other people with the same major, but make the entire rest of the fucking world tilt their heads and say “buh?”
FTFY
LikeLike
The problem with sociology majors in particular is their habit of doing this with words that already have a vernacular meaning, and then insisting that that’s the correct definition of the term for all purposes.
LikeLike
Yes. Jargon is not the problem so long as it is obviously jargon (and used consistently).
Possible ways of indicating this: Using more modifiers (“strict”, “weak”, “proper”, etc)? That one probably wouldn’t work by itself. Proper names? “In the sense of” or “In the ____ sense”? One-letter prefixes?
LikeLike
Even then, it’s more of a general social sciences problem than specifically a sociology problem.
Don’t believe me? Ask a philosopher what they mean by “logic” or a political scientist what they mean by “nation”.
LikeLike
That might fulfill the first half the criterion, but neither of those groups are (in my experience) nearly as bad as sociologists about declaring other people to be wrong when they use a word in the pre-established, vernacular sense, e.g. for talking about how some attitude or policy is “sexist against men.”
LikeLike
I’m not familiar with the political scientists’ use of “nation”, but I really don’t see the problem with the philosophers’ (or mathematicians’, which is the same in this case but I’m more familiar with generally) use of “logic”. In what context would this actually cause confusion?
Now, you could make a better argument about the mathematical use of “imply”. That one has leaked out, causing problems particularly with the statement “Correlation doesn’t imply causation.” But that’s the only one I can really think of. Are there others?
And, yeah, that one’s caused some confusion, but the real big problem is enabling equivocation. Which are often implicit sneaking in of connotations. Using an existing loaded word is distinctly worse than just using an existing word.
And you could go and state more guidelines. But like osberend said, the bigger problem is reaction to the existence of other senses. Yeah, bad choice of terminology can enable equivocations. But what enables equivocations way more is not being on the lookout for them. Taking an attitude of “That’s not what the word means!” Rather than, say, “Let’s call this one [term] in the first sense, and that one [term] in the second sense.”
Like, I expect any mathematician encountering someone misusing “Correlation doesn’t imply causation” would not respond “That’s not what ‘imply’ means!” but rather “Ah, I see your confusion. In the phrase ‘correlation doesn’t imply causation’, the word ‘imply’ is being used in a technical sense, which differs from the ordinary sense.” Which is the right thing to do!
If you notice and act to resolve confusion, you may resolve confusion. If you do not notice or do not act to resolve confusion, you encourage confusion and you encourage equivocation.
LikeLike
@osberend, we philosophers certainly declare people to be wrong when they use the word “logic” in any sense other than ours (though I’m a little less convinced than in the other examples that there really is a pre-established vernacular sense there anyway).
LikeLike
I’ve tried this with the sociological definition of racism. It generally doesn’t resolve confusion, in my experience. At this point I’ve just settled for a quick explanation for why I’m making the distinction I am, or just ignoring the person.
LikeLike
@Protagoras
Would you please give the philosophical and vernacular definitions of “logic”? As far as I can tell, they’re the same, it’s just that most people are really bad at making inferences and so call logical things illogical (and vice versa).
LikeLiked by 2 people
Indeed, that is my intuition as well. Of course, I was a math major as an undergrad, so it’s possible that I’m coming at this from a somewhat unusual perspective.
LikeLike
So you want me to explain the vernacular sense that I said I didn’t think existed? I guess people sometimes seem to use logical to mean Spock-like, or sometimes instead to mean selfish; I don’t think those are necessarily common or standard enough to deserve to be called the pre-established vernacular sense.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think that some of the confusing and overstated things in this post stem from the gradual meaning-slippage of “hegemonic” in the academy over the many years since Antonio Gramsci introduced the concept of hegemony. The way the word is used has changed a lot, but academics have kept a lot of the conceptual apparatus which went along with it, even when that apparatus didn’t fit well with how the word’s meaning changed.
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci makes it pretty clear that hegemonic ideologies are normative ideologies which support and legitimize current social structures and the power of the current ruling class. He notes that the ruling class usually promulgate these norms themselves. (This isn’t necessarily a cynical project– it’s just true because of something like the anthropic principle– any elite which promoted ideologies which deligitimized its power would likely not last very long). Through this process, they attain “hegemony”– rule over the people with their consent.
Importantly, in Gramsci’s conception, a hegemonic idea had to be normative, but not all normative ideas were hegemonic. In fact, working-class people (Gramsci’s archetypal underclass– he was a Marxist, after all) sometimes had their own counterhegemonic social norms.
In the sphere of idealized male-ness, you could see a clash between hegemonic and counterhegemonic norms in early 20th century America. “Manliness” was the bourgeois conception that a true man was moral, dependable, knowledge-seeking, rational, courteous, productive and capable of great self-control. “Masculinity” was a more working-class conception, whose holders believed that a “real” man was vital, physically strong, aggressive, and willing to use violence to get what he wanted. Some people, like Theodore Roosevelt, successfully bridged these two norms, but doing so required a lot of effort and careful self-presentation.
Anyway, though, people in the academy have misused “hegemony” to the point where it’s lost a lot of its conceptual distinvtiveness. A lot of people just use it to mean “normative.”* Unfortunately, they keep the old assumptions that what’s hegemonic is unitary and necessarily supports the interests of ruling groups. But it’s really important to remember that different social groups do have different norms about things like gender performance (the John Updike Northeastern WASP aristocrat type of idealized manliness is quite different from “American Sniper”-style lower class Red Tribe idealized manliness), and that they often serve different sets of interests.
*This might be a product of the ’50s and early ’60s, when, at least among white people in the US, social conformity was high and most people shared similar values, so there were fewer competing social norms to consider.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Can you recommend anything to read about this?
LikeLike
Totally! The best book about this is Gail Bederman’s “Manliness and Civilization” (a very insightful and very funny book, in a dry academic sort of way).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, an important part of that story which I kind of left out– in that period, a lot of upper-class men were starting to think that the lower-class men were right about what it meant to be a real man, and some intellectuals started making arguments for it.
LikeLike