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there's a paradox at the root of all this: that to sufficiently pursue "manliness" is to more or less call your own manliness into question. I think advertisers get around that by knowingly ironizing masculinity (like those diet dr. pepper commercials) so that your investment/detachment from notions of masculinity can always be subject to a kind of plausible deniability. hence you can enjoy your constructed "manliness" as derived from consumer choices while also being so manly as to know that your manliness is a real inherent quality not affected by consumer choices etc.
Yeah, this is a thing with hegemonic masculinity that's discussed a lot in gender studies and critical men's studies: that one of the basic tenets of the hegemonic ideal masculinity is that a "real man" is self-sufficient, but another equally important tenet is that his masculinity needs to be constantly reaffirmed by other men. This is identified as the driving force beneath such masculine phenomena as bragging about your sexual conquests; it isn't enough to just know you've had sex with such and such beautiful women, other men need to know about it too, so that they can reaffirm your masculinity.
So stereotypical masculinity, which is often thought to be "innate" and "natural", is just as performative as stereotypical femininity, which is sometimes derided as "artificial" because of its use of make-up, clothes and other such signifiers. The masculine performance just requires other kinds of building blocks, but it's no more "natural" than performing any other social position.
I wrote my gender studies thesis on masculinity in Finnish rap music, and I had to think a lot about all this stuff, about how masculinity is performed, particularly with all the sex stories that are as common in the local rap music here as they are in its American counterpart. I included this joke to my text, because I think it's a nice summation of how hegemonic masculinity requires constant affirmation to work:
A cruise ship founders on a reef, and a man just manages to swim some miles and crawl up on a desert island. After recovering from the ordeal, he begins to explore and finds to his great surprise (and pleasure) that the only other survivor of this terrible tragedy is Cindy Crawford.
They build a lean-to and find some food and water. After a few weeks, it becomes clear that help is not on the way, so they start to get intimate. The guy is clearly ecstatic for a couple of weeks, but one morning she awakes to find him moping under a tree.
"What's the matter?" Cindy says: "Is there anything I can do?"
"Well, I am a little shy about asking you," he replies: "But could you take some of that charcoal from the fire and paint a mustache on your face?"
"A mustache? Well... I... I suppose so", and she does it.
"Now, there's just one other thing. Can I call you Bob... like my friend?"
"Bob? Well... if it will make you feel better... all right."
"Great!" he cries, looks at her and says: "Bob! You're never gonna believe who I'm fucking!"
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 13 April 2016 11:23 (eight years ago) link
Can we get into the cultural connotations of "peacocking" and how that factors into masculinity for a second? Because ryan's explanation doesn't make any sense to me in the context of why African-American men would wear brightly-colored clothing.
Critical men's studies writers like R.W. Connell would say that, at least in larger societies, there isn't just one form of hegemonic masculinity; different social groups and subcultures can have their own variations of "real" masculinity. So in mainstream African-American culture "peacocking" may be a way of performing hegemonic masculinity, even if it isn't so in mainstream WASP culture. Though obviously ideals of masculinity vary not just within different social groups but within history too: in 18th century Europe, for example, something similar to "peacocking" was a part of hegemonic masculinity, at least among the upper classes.
And you don't even necessarily have to belong to the hegemonic group of straight white men to come up with your own pecking order of masculinities. For example, I've noticed that some gay men who identify as bears deride more feminine gay men for being "twinks", i.e. for not being "real" men like they themselves feel they are.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 13 April 2016 11:36 (eight years ago) link
four years pass...
i get irrationally annoyed at the "i can't stop thinking about..." framework, but for the first time in forever, i read that and now i really can't stop thinking about that part at the end where one of the guys is lamenting that they didn't use cups instead
― The GOAT Harold Land (Karl Malone), Monday, 20 July 2020 03:39 (three years ago) link
two years pass...