In my twitter feed: what is masculinity?

Last updated on: August 3, 2016 at 9:07 pm by Jane the Actuary

In my twitter feed: what is masculinity? 2016-08-03T21:07:55-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Readers will know I’m a mom of three boys. None of them are “typical” boys — none are testosterone-fueled sport-crazy jocks, that is. But they all have their challenges which are, in some ways, “typical boy” challenges, and I worry about their future in an era in which men’s traditional strengths are de-valued and women’s strengths are prized, in which it’s not enough to pull good grades, but you also have to have the right social skills, and where, let’s face it, our policymakers care a heck of a lot more about the success of women than men, whose failures are written off as “their own fault.”

And today there were two links that came across my twitter feed pretty much one right after the other.

First, “Even the Thought of Earning Less than Their Wives Changes How Men Behave,” from Harvard Business Review. Researchers conducted a standard poll with one extra question, asking men if they earned more, or less, or the same as their spouses/partners, and found that where they placed this question — at the beginning, middle, or end of the poll — affected men’s responses.

Merely asking the question about spousal income led to enormous shifts in men’s preferences in the upcoming presidential election. Men who weren’t asked about spousal income until late in the survey preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in a hypothetical general election matchup by a 16-point margin; men who were asked about spousal income only a few questions before being asked about the Clinton-Trump matchup preferred Trump by an eight-point margin — a 24-point shift in preferences. The conclusion that this is about gender is reinforced by the fact that the spousal income question had no effect at all on a matchup between Trump and Bernie Sanders. Men who had been primed to think about a threat to their masculinity preferred Sanders by four points; unprimed men, by three.

In this case, men were responding to a threat to their masculinity by saying they would prefer a man, rather than a woman, in a presidential race.

Other research, they report, says that in cases where women earn more than their husbands, the husbands actually do less housework than in cases where husbands earn more than their wives.

What to do? Their advice:

While there is still a dominant group of behaviors that society considers appropriately masculine — what researchers call “hegemonic” masculinity — there are increasingly other ways for men to “do” masculinity. In the household that may mean redefining masculinity to include being a good father or a great cook. In politics it may mean advocating for equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. It’s not yet clear what these alternative masculinities will look like in the workplace. Perhaps focusing more energy on mentorship or technical skills would give men ways to express their masculinity without excluding or harassing women, creating a workplace that’s healthier for everyone.

Which is a bit flaky. “Let’s tell men that the behaviors we want them to adopt are ‘masculine’ and see if they buy it.”

Second, an article titled, “America’s Lost Boys,” which starts off with two disturbing paragraphs:

Where have America’s young men gone? According to Erik Hurst, an economist from the University of Chicago, they haven’t gone anywhere—they’re just plugged in. In a recent interview, Hurst says that his research indicates that young men with less than a four-year degree (according to virtually all data, that’s an increasing number) are spending their days unemployed and unmarried, but not un-amused. “The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one-for-one with leisure time,” Hurst reports. “Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of twelve, and sometimes upwards of thirty hours per week.”

Hurst goes on: “These individuals are living with parents or relatives, and happiness surveys actually indicate that they [are] quite content compared to their peers, making it hard to argue that some sort of constraint, [such as that] they are miserable because they can’t find a job, is causing them to play video games.” In other words, the time these young men spend on Xbox and Playstation does not offer them relief from the stress of joblessness and existential inertia. On the contrary, for them it’s part of Living the Dream.

The piece isn’t very meaty — these two paragraphs are really the meatiest part, really — and doesn’t ask or answer the question of what happens to these young men when they get older, when they move from their early twenties to their late twenties or older. Is it a delayed adolescence, or is it a perpetual adolescence? And the article doesn’t quantify how many young men fall in this category, either.

But both these articles give images of living out “masculinity” — in the first, it’s tied to a need to outearn a spouse, and in the second, tied to aggressive video games such as Call of Duty.

In the meantime, here’s what happened at the Jane the Actuary household tonight: my sons are mowing an out-of-town neighbor’s lawn for the summer, but the blade got bent (long story). So my husband got out his tools, his clamps, some pieces of wood, a sawhorse, and set about to straightening it out. (Did he succeed? We’ll find out.)

To me, that’s masculinity — working with his hands, fixing things, building things, developing manual skills even though he spends his workday in front of a computer. Maybe it’s just that this is what I grew up with — though with Dad it was auto repair rather than carpentry. Sailing, too, is a recreational activity but with a fair amount of handwork to it. He tries to pass this on to the kids, though with variable success.

But I have the feeling that this is disappearing. Auto repair is done by mechanics. Home repairs by a handyman. And the idea of building something with your hands seems to be fading. Instead we have “feeling masculine” by playing video games, and fanciful suggestions that men can be taught to “feel masculine” by sticking up for transgender causes.

But that’s just an impression. Readers, what do you think?

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