Redefining Women'S Struggle In Rebraiding Masculinity

For decades, feminist and masculinities scholarship has sought to parse the many forms of benevolent and harmful masculinity and to find ways to culturally encourage the former and diminish the latter. Masculinities research has therefore examined and re-examined the various constructions, tropes, power dynamics, features, and dominances of various masculinities, and critical scholarship has deeply investigated the co-constituted problems of male privilege and patriarchy in tremendous detail. Masculinities have by this process been unwound and critically examined by feminist and gender scholarship into a stunning array of separate threads. This autoethnographic account chronicles my own reluctant feminist awakening while seeking to identify three essential strands of masculinity, the “Masculinity Trinity, ” and identify theirunderlying similarities. It then (re)braids the many strands of critically examined masculinities tohighlight their inherent similarity and thus expose and potentially disrupt the fundamentallyproblematic nature universal to masculinity itself.

When I reflect critically upon my childhood, it is almost impossible for me to remember whenour culture's hegemonic expectations upon masculinity began to bring particular thoughts to myconsciousness. Particularly, even though she was identified at least nominally as a (liberal) feminist from early in her own life, I do not remember even having heard the words, “masculinity”, “male privilege”, or “patriarchy” in the theoretically relevant way from my mother throughout all the years I lived with my parents. Certainly, our lives were filled with the direct and indirect influences of hegemonic masculinity, but a social, political, and cultural conception of patriarchy remained unacknowledged. In retrospect, as I can now reconsider them via the tools of feminist theory and present them using the methods of autoethnography, hegemonic masculinity was a force ubiquitously present and yet conspicuously absent from my formative experiences.

Within my own home, if “men” or “masculinity” was ever mentioned in a derogatory sense, my mother, who was a staunch supporter of gender equality, would likely have considered those who used it as such as being uneducated, unkind, and even uncouth. In the course of hercareer as a social worker she had witnessed countless incidences of domestic abuse against women, and yet she came to be quite compassionate and mild mannered, even toward men, which had a contagious effect on me. In my schooling I found no reason to alter the picture of our shared cultural reality that I had formed in my home. I grew up in an all-American town called Ottumwa, not far outside of Des Moines, Iowa.

In grade school, while there were many boys in our classes, I knew only one male teacher, asidefrom the principal, Mr. Martin, and the gym teacher, Coach Dobbs, common to the entire primary school. As a teacher, we had no particular problem with Mr. Carlton, but we thought hisemployment as the sole male teacher in our school to be odd, even uncomfortable, so we guarded ourselves from him. What we were ill-equipped to realize at the time is that his unique status inour school, both as the sole male elementary school teacher and specifically as a science teacher within that school, was a toxic offshoot of hegemonic expectations concerning masculinity which were embedded within education, employment, and the broader culture. These forces were, of course, also reflected in Mr. Martin and in Coach Dobbs, given the former'sposition of authority over the school and the latter's occupation as a physical education teacher.

It was therefore a consequence of hegemonic masculinity that certain expectations upon masculinity were perpetuated in us. By its self-reinforcinginfluence, we were prevented from having more exposure to male teachers, thus embedding in us a patriarchal social expectation that women are better suited to being ghettoized in employment, say as (non-science) teachers in primary schools rather than business executives or government officials, than are men. Still, as children, beyond sensing that general strangeness in the example of the maleness of Mr. Carlton (and parallel lack of strangeness in the maleness of Principal Martin and Coach Dobbs), my friends and I (both boysand girls) formed no specific opinions in regard to him personally or to cultural gender expectations more generally.

So, it was not until I was thirteen or fourteen that my encounters with the terms“patriarchy, ” “masculinity, ” and “male privilege” became frequent, mostly in connection with diversity and inclusion initiatives in our high school and in the myriad political controversies and issues of Social Justice (for examples, the wage gap, sexual harassment, rape and rape culture, discriminatory hiring and employment practices, and so forth). These discussions aroused anuncomfortable aversion in me, and I always had a disquieting feeling which descended upon me when listening to Social Justice conversations. During this time in my youth, though awakenings omewhat to the gender binaries defining the fabric of our culture, I had no other feeling about issues surrounding patriarchy, or of masculinity, or of privilege, or of Social Justice. This was partially because there were relatively few feminists in Ottumwa (or DesMoines, for that matter), Iowa, and so sexism, while present and persistent in our lives, was amatter that seemed only to exist in larger, far-away institutions like big-city corporations and theuniversity. Of course, there were always enough adverse effects of hegemonic forms of masculinity to be at least dimly aware of them — men being expected to be dominant, aggressive, “manly, ” taciturn, strong, brash, and so on, even despite the patient joviality of Mr. Carlton andthe apparently nurturing example of my father. These led to theusual manifestations of patriarchy, of which I was also aware, even if I, a child of Ottumwa, accepted them at the time as “normal”: most households were explicitly male-biased and men held nearly all of the positions of power and prestige in the vicinity, while women and girls were valued for being pretty, meek, nice, smiling, and all the rest; that is, inthe usual ways by which male privilege and everyday sexism casually taint the experience of women in contemporary American society.

Masculinity's Trinity

Over the decades, men who lived in and around Des Moines could be qualitatively separated intothree fairly distinct groups: a privileged male elite whose patriarchal disposition and thrall tohegemonic forms of masculinity were apparent when viewed in the right light but incidental tohow they lived their lives; an overtly sexist macho class whosepatriarchy, misogyny, and toxic masculinity all but defined them; and a smaller set who styled themselves as “male feminists”. Respectively, these three groups of men represent patriarchy, toxic masculinity and potential rapists, and performative liberals and false allies, andcollectively, they are ultimately exhaustive of expressions of masculinity, as I came to realizeover the course of my lived experience and feminist education. As many women in Ottumwa, maybe in all of Iowa, would attest, there was a simultaneous awareness of all three groups and their social impacts upon the lived experiences of women; but as a little girl becoming young woman in Ottumwa, because we had normalized hegemonic forms of masculinity as “men being men” and internalized enough patriarchy to expect male-dominated society, these (largely superficial) differences in the varieties of male experience meant very little to us.

Many within this first group, the privileged male elite whose masculinity is ultimately defined by the structural forces known as patriarchy, had such an apparently positive (or at leastneutral) attitude toward women and feminism that I did not have cause to look at them as perpetuating gendered binaries. Because unacknowledged privilege and patriarchy are universally deemed normal outside of feminist scholarship, and because it would be many years before I encountered what Glick and Fiske (1997) had termed “benevolent (or ambivalent) sexism, ” I did not perceive the ridiculousness of my illusion. Instead, the only external impression I recognized as distinguishing men and women was basic chromosomal sex (as, because of entrenched attitudes about gender and transphobia, especially in Iowa, I did not know of the existence of trans* people until I was twelve years old and only learned about gender performativity after I was in college, where I first encountered West and Zimmerman's (1987) landmark paper “Doing Gender”) and the works of Judith Butler.