The Feminist Masculinity

Forget the title, we should probably just take “masculine” out of the picture just as we take “feminine” out. What female wants to be described as “feminine” (shrinking, timid, ladylike, well-kept), and what male wants to be described as “masculine” (grunty, gruff, muscular, insensitive, sports-watching)? (To be fair, I can think of a few on either side.) But, my guess is that more males prefer the latter than females the former at this point, most likely because “not masculine” is often a euphemism for “gay” in American society, and we all know how dire many males think it is to be thought gay. Gasp! When it comes down to it, though, there is something fundamentally wrong with a culture–a sexist culture–where “femininity” and “masculinity” are considered to the ideal for female or male. While feminism overtly addresses the issue for women, it shouldn’t be forgotten that feminism also has the aim to make men feel more free–and less culturally constrained by a “macho masculinity”. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that we have a culture in which a person confronted by a “sensitive” man will not think that s/he has automatic information on his sexuality

This question came up at the Intergenerational Feminists panel at the New School. At the end of the question and answer session, a young man raised his hand and asked whether the panel thought that patriarchy affected only women, or that men also were adversely affected. And very clearly, as the panel agreed, patriarchy affects men just as it does women. Men are expected to fulfill the “masculine” in society. What happens to men who don’t like watching hard-core porn?: “Dude, man, are you gay?” What happens to men who don’t want to play sports, who like classical music, who become emotional? Stereotypes and placed-upon identifications. To what extent does our culture construct the male who must be the guy’s guy and who can only relate to women through the male/female divide, and how does that constrain/strain heterosexual relationships?

At the Organization of American Historians conference in late March, I went to a panel about alternative visions of motherhood and childrearing in 20th century U.S. where Lori Rotskoff (Barnard Center for Research on Women) gave a talk titled, “Raising Free Children: Feminism, Motherhood, and Nonsexist Childrearing in the 1970s and 1980s,” where she talked about the song/album “Free to be…You and Me.” The song, nearly universally heard by a generation of children raised in more liberal and progressive homes, was part of the “non-sexist” child-rearing movement, which was seen as a part of the larger project of second wave feminism. It was/is children, after all, who would build the future–and so a “fairy tale” feminist future could arise by raising children who were “free to be” who they were–without the fetters of assigned gender roles. Just as in many of the standard feminist texts (Friedan, Beauvoir), it was all about self-actualization. Even then, though, Rotskoff spoke of how one of the creators of “Free to be” still found it necessary to reassure parents something along the lines of: “Don’t worry–this mantra won’t make your son gay.” Which–besides the innate homophobia of the statement–meant that even the creators, the second wave feminists, hadn’t embraced full self-actualization, they were still placing cultural normatives on certain behaviors, still were afraid, in some part, of the de-masculinized male.

The question is: are we any better today?