The Performance of Masculinity.

[seabeyond]

(i love this man in the video)


One of the primary reasons that boys and men gay bash and bully queers is that they need to perform masculinity in order to show the world that they’re in the Box. And since very few guys can always be in the Box for their entire lives, the trick is to act like you are in order to cover for any lapses. In effect, the performance of masculinity requires constant vigilance to make sure that nobody sees any missteps. Since the logic of the box is an either/or, you’re either all the way in or you’re all the way out. On the other hand, all of the words on the outside fit into one of three groups: gay, female, loser. I think that says pretty interesting things about homophobia and sexism. The way I think of it, those are the bricks that make up the Box and shame is the mortar that holds it together. The Box is one of main reasons why men harass women on the street and why catcalling and violence tends to escalate when men are in groups. Since the Box is hierarchical as well as performative, the guy at the bottom of the heap is at risk of being cast out. So each guy has to compete with the others in order to not be the one who’s outside the Box. And as each one’s performance becomes more vigorous, it forces the others to do the same.

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So the notion that masculinity is fleeting and requires vigilant reinforcement isn’t new to me, but there’s some new research to back it up. Time Magazine has an article about a new paper, Precarious Manhood and Its Links to Action and Aggression, in which the researchers looked at the ways that men deal with the fleeting nature of manhood. Men have to constantly prove and re-prove their status, as they showed in three experiments. In the first, participants finished 25 sentences that began “A real man…” or “A real woman…” and they reported that:

Findings revealed that men, but not women, described “a real man” with more fleeting actions than enduring adjectives, and they described “a real woman” with more enduring adjectives than fleeting actions. Notably, this pattern emerged when we controlled for the gender-stereotypical content of the sentence completions. When men completed “real man” sentences with gender atypical content (e.g., “A real man cooks dinner”), they still used action language to do so. Thus, men define their own gender status in terms of the active things that men do rather than the ways that men are.

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There’s a difference between having understanding and compassion for the men who are trapped in the Box and cutting them slack. After all, it isn’t as if the dude in the Box is giving any slack to women, queers, transgender or genderqueer folks, or for that matter, heterosexual cisgender men who refuse to pretend to be Real Men. And cutting men slack is another way of coddling them instead of helping them learn to let go of the Box and discover the freedom that comes from being who you are. Having compassion without coddling people is fierce. It’s powerful. And it requires the ability to hold onto both the fact that the Box hurts us all and that it gives heterosexual cisgender men privilege. It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the effect of gender. It’s the effect of a limited and limiting ideas of what gender means. It’s the result of rigid rules of masculinity, of fag bashing, of homophobia and sexism and gender-based violence. It’s the result of kyriarchy. And yes, it’s the result of how we’ve created gender, but it isn’t the effect of gender.

As this blogger said,

I don’t have slack to offer men. What I have is the alternative to a life spent swallowing one’s emotions and feeling a constant anxious insecurity where one’s contended self-esteem should be—and that seems a lot more valuable to me than “slack.”

http://www.charlieglickman.com/2011/05/the-performance-of-masculinty/

[ismnotwasm]

1. Interesting phases in this paragraph

Unfortunately, while masculinity is pretty delicate, the construct of Box is quite resilient. When I get up in front of a group and start talking about it, I immediately put myself outside of the Box because the guy in the Box doesn’t talk about it. The difference, of course, is that I reject the entire notion of the Box. I’ve learned to pick and choose what aspects of masculinity work for me and which ones don’t, since some of the things in the box are positive or at least dependent on one’s relationship to them. In effect, I’ve queered the Box but to the guy who’s stuck in it, the only place he can imagine me being is outside the Box. And he’s so used to not listening to those men that it’s hard for my message to get across. That makes the task of helping get rid of the Box really difficult.

Feminists have been saying similar things for years, it's very, very good to hear this from a male POV

[seabeyond]

2. i agree. more and more men are speaking otu against this restriction understanding it is as

detrimental to their health and authenticity as well as women.

i know that is how my boys see it.

i know my hubby, two brothers and father have not been able to get out of that box.

but, it is all interesting.

what i really like is:

Well, it helps explain why so many men resort to violence when they think that their masculinity is threatened- it’s an easy way to demonstrate that they’re in the Box. And it also shows how delicate masculinity can be. If all it takes to hurt it is braiding someone’s hair, it has to be pretty fragile.

i do not understand why men have such a tough time understanding this. that in their mind it is a definition of strong, masculine, but the reality that we all see is weak and fragile.