Omnivore - A Manhood Problem (and a Rebuttal to Hanna Rosin)

Here is another feast of links form Bookforum's Omnivore blog - this time all of the links are related to men, masculinity, social gender theory, and other related topics - some interesting articles.

One of the articles linked below, by Hanna Rosin (The End of Men) is adapted from her opening statement at the Munk Debate, “Resolved: Men Are Obsolete,” held in Toronto. In it she offers a list of reasons supporting her contention that men are obsolete (not in a biological sense, but in a social constructivist sense).

Here are her five evidence points:

ONE: It’s the end of men because men are failing in the workplace [curator: and in education].
TWO: It’s the end of men because the traditional household, propped up by the male breadwinner, is vanishing.
THREE: It’s the end of men because we can see it in the working and middle class.
FOUR: It’s the end of men because men have lost their monopoly on violence and aggression.
FIVE: It’s the end of men because men, too, are now obsessed with their body hair.

These are weak points aside from number one. Point two is relevant, but not necessarily a bad thing if the men are still involved in raising their kids (but they often aren't).

Once again, as I have argued before, this is not the end of men any more than the 60s and 70s was the end of women. Men are in a transitional space as far as our role in society, and how we navigate this transition will determine whether men evolve into greater care and compassion, or retrench themselves in traditional, domination models of masculinity. How women engage this transition will make all of the difference.

A manhood problem

Apr 21 2014
9:00AM

• The inaugural issue of Violence and Gender is out. 
• Ryan Schacht, Kristin Liv Rauch, and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (UC-Davis): Too Many Men: The Violence Problem? 
• Ying Jie Chen (NTU): Surplus Males and Societal Implications. 
• Deniese Kennedy-Kollar (Molloy) and Christopher A. D. Charles (West Indies): Hegemonic Masculinity and Mass Murderers in the United States. 
• Luke A. Boso (Savannah): Policing Masculinity in Small-Town America. 
• Ann McGinley (UNLV) and William S. Boyd (Suffolk): How Masculinities Distribute Power: The Influence of Ann Scales. 
• Kaitlin Clinnin (OSU): Playing with Masculinity: Gender Bending in Second Life. 
• Michael J. Higdon (Tennessee): Marginalized Fathers and Demonized Mothers: A Feminist Look at the Reproductive Freedom of Unmarried Men. 
• Jonathan Crowe (Queensland): Can Men Be Feminists? 
• Mark Karlin on how America continues to suffer the male rage of the “white wing”. 
• This American Bro: John Saward on a portrait of the worst guy ever. 
• Erin Gloria Ryan on the United States of Bros: A map and field guide. 
• Men, manliness, and being naked around other men: Richard Senelick on a culture that tells people to "man up" when it comes to nudity. 
• Chris Hayes, pro athletes and “being a man”: Elizabeth Stoker on our demented masculinity debate. 
• Does the rise of men’s sexual objectification = equality? 
• Audra Schroeder on what society would look like if men experienced street harassment. 
• Your friends and rapists: Sarah Nicole Prickett on how dick culture permits the crime. 
• Hanna Rosin on why men are obsolete. 
• Lydia DePillis on the end of men, in one chart. 
• Men of the world, lean out! 
• A mere six-pack doesn't cut it in Hollywood anymore; today's male stars need 5 percent body fat, massive pecs, and the much-coveted inguinal crease. 
• David Brooks says Obama has “a manhood problem in the Middle East”.

Alice Dreger - The Social Construction of Sex (via Pacific Standard)

There are two basic camps in the study of sex and gender - social constructionists on one side, who believe that most or all of our conceptions of sex and gender are based in our shared definitions of said realms - often with the intent to eliminate any differences between male and female; and biological determinism on the other side, who tend to believe biology is the only real factor in sexual and gender identity - often with the intention to rigidify biological differences into essential differences. Obviously, these are extremes and most people fall somewhere between these two poles.

This article from Pacific Standard offers a both/and model rather than the usual either/or approach.

The Social Construction of Sex

By Alice Dreger • March 21, 2014


(Photo: bonumopus/Shutterstock)
Many of us probably get our core gender identities as much from our biological origins as we do from our gender educations.
• I keep running into smart people who seem to think I believe that sex “isn’t real” because it is all “socially constructed.” Allow me to correct this erroneous social construction of me by summarizing here what I think about sex and gender. I’m tempted to say “what I know about sex and gender” because there are few things I feel as sure about as this.

Testes are real. Ovaries are equally real. They sometimes make real gametes. (I don’t mean to imply they sometimes make fantasy gametes—just that they sometimes don’t make gametes.) Chromosomes and genes are also real. As anyone who’s every forgotten to wear a pad on the right day knows, menstrual blood is real. To the delight of this straight woman, penile erections are real. So are clitoral erections. I’m equally delighted about those. When I say these are “real,” what I mean is that these things have a material existence independent of our ability as humans to notice, study, deny, politicize, or categorize them. I can’t believe I even have to assert this claim, but some academics have gone over the deep end and disagree. (I don’t hang out with such people unless there I have some form of pain killer at the ready.)

So why would I write a book with the phrase medical invention of sex in the title?

Because the way we choose to categorize and delineate males and females (and others) is basically a social decision … a decision some would call a social construction. I might even call it that, if it didn’t lead people to believe I am looped. (That’s why I used “invention” in the book’s title and not “construction,” but I guess the subtlety didn’t work.)

Yes, most men have recognizable penises, scrotums, testes, etc. Most women have recognizable clitorises, labia, vaginas, etc. But some people are born with versions of these organs that are in-between. Most people have either XX or XY chromosomes, though (because of genetic variations) some people have the opposite of what you’d guess from the way their bodies look and/or function, and some people have combinations like XXY or XO or XX/XY. Nature doesn’t care that we humans tend to like discrete categories. The real world is messy. To quote a guy who knew a lot about the fictions of sex, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Can you decide what ultimately makes someone male, female, or other? Practically speaking, sure. That is to say, you can go ahead and make a decision. You won’t be the first. Over time, various scientists, doctors, midwives, grandmothers, judges, etc. have in practice decided who will count as male, female, or other. They’ve decided things like how small a penis has to be before the person attached to it counts as “other” (what we might call intersex). Some Texas judges have decided which chromosome (Y) you have to have to count as male and have to lack to count as female.

But such decisions are based on social need. They lack scientific and intellectual vigor—there are always reasonable objections and exceptions to each attempt. In fact, these decisions keep getting revised, over and over and over again, and I suspect they always will. People want their anatomical categories neat, but nature is (in this metaphor) a slob. We’re an odd couple that way.

In short, while lots of aspects of what we call “sex” are real—so real we can truly say they have been discovered and not constructed—the borders human draw on sex categories are … invented. They are invented like other tools, to do a special job. Sometimes that job is to assign a sex to a kid, sometimes that job is to try to prohibit “same-sex” marriage, sometimes that job is to try to keep Japan’s emperor from becoming an empress.

What, then, about gender?

And what is gender? For those of you who haven’t had Sex/Gender-101, “sex” is a term usually used to talk about biological aspects of males and females, and social scientists sensibly break down “gender” into two basic ideas, “gender roles” and “gender identities.”

“Gender roles” are the parts males and females are expected to play in social settings. Are these “socially constructed”? Sure. The expectation that women will perform more housework and childcare and be paid less at work than men is a social construction in the sense that we find constant social reiterations of these gender-based expectations. The expectation that men will be strong, insensitive, and hornier than women could also be described as a social construction.

But—and here’s a big but—social gender roles may very well be fuzzy manifestations of our ontogeny (individual development, from conception onward) and phylogeny (the evolution of our species). In other words, the plasticized gender role expectations we find in the toy aisles of Target may be like the end of a telephone game where the start is our evolutionary history and our genes.

I think there’s good reason to think this is the case. First off, there’s some pretty good evidence that across almost every (if not every) culture, there is some consistency in gender role expectations. Boys across cultures are expected to—and do—play with toys meant to represent weapons. Girls across cultures are expected to—and do—play with toys that represent cooking and parenting. This doesn’t mean all children meet these expectations (we know they don’t), it just means all cultures seem to share some basic gender expectations.

OK, so maybe we could say “weapon” toys are also toys that represent a form of cooking and parenting—after all, weapons can be used to hunt for food and protect the young—but here we’re getting into the reality versus representation problem. And I think the reality is that there are some consistent patterns in male and female behaviors across cultures. Any feminist mother who has ever seen her carefully-raised three-year-old son pick up a stick and pretend to shoot or sword-play with it, or her carefully-raised three-year-old daughter go into full princess mode, will tell you this. Is it possible these kids learned these things from their culture? Sure, but it’s tough not to notice the persistence of the gender/behavior correlations anecdotally and in good studies.

Let me be clear: I’m not advocating we give up on trying to end oppressive gender norms. Just because something may be natural doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to figure out what might be better.

This, then, brings us to the issue of gender identity. Gender identity can be described as the internal feeling of being a boy, girl, man, woman, or something else. Is gender identity socially constructed—that is, are people taught to feel like one or the other?

When I started doing intersex work, I thought so. I thought we were taught to feel, act, and behave like girls and boys. But I don’t think that anymore. That is to say, sure we’re taught these things, but many of us probably get our core gender identities as much from our biological origins as we do from our gender educations. I’ve met too many people who, in spite of careful gender educations—sometimes even intensive gender educations—just clearly felt the gender assigned to them was the wrong one. I’ve also seen a lot of evidence from intersex that prenatal hormone levels correlate with gender-type behaviors, gender identities, and even sexual orientation. (Correlate, not cause! But correlations can be useful clues to causal factors.) I am not one of the people that flips out when the scientist Mike Bailey points out that, statistically speaking, gay men enter feminine-identified professions more than straight men, any more than I flip out when the scientist Bruce Bagemihl points out the tremendous sexual (and gender!) diversity found in the natural world. I’m fascinated, not infuriated, that the scientist Marc Breedlove has found some evidence that prenatal androgen levels seem to correlate with sexual orientation. Species show patterns in sex and gender diversity; we humans are no different.

It makes me crazy that some of my feminist friends try so hard to stop their kids from being gender-typical. I have one such friend who has a fairy-princess daughter, and my friend keeps trying to keep her daughter butch, as if she owes this to Susan B. Anthony. I asked my friend, “If your son wanted to wear a pretty pink dress, would you let him?” She turned red and said, “Yes.” I answered, “Then why isn’t it gender-based oppression to deny your daughter a pretty pink dress?”

Oy! Is this what we’ve come to?

While on the road a few years back, I met a stridently-feminist soon-to-be mom who pulled me aside to worry aloud about how she was going to raise her child. How was she going to keep this child free from gender expectations? Here’s what I told her: Gender isn’t just about oppression. It’s also about pleasure. We get pleasure from our genders. You will get pleasure from your child’s gender, and will sometimes delight in it the same way you will delight in your child growing and learning how to count. Your child will get pleasure from his or her gender. When we have sex, it is often in gendered ways—we enjoy sex as a woman with a man, or as a woman with a woman. How much more evidence do you need that gender can be joyfully delicious? Why oppress yourself and your child with your expectation that gender is always about oppression?

On this note, let me just say this: People who think gender identities, gender roles, and sexual orientations are all socially constructed are the most naive biological determinists I’ve ever seen. They think all human brains are completely without structure when it comes to these things; we all have empty slates in our skulls at birth. No, we don’t! Really!

In fact, I think we can’t know that much about any individual person’s biology without a huge amount of study on that person—and even then, it’s hard to know much. (I think the same is true about an individual person’s social history.) In this sense, I’m much less of a strict biological determinist than the social constructivists people incorrectly lump me with. I happen to think that, for any given child, we can’t predict with certainty what gender identity or sexual orientation she or he will grow up to have, even if the child is raised in a very sex-role-strict culture. Some will go against our best guesses and educational attempts—we know that again from cross-cultural studies, where transgender, lesbian, bi, and gay children and adults show up again and again.

Should we work to end economic and resource disparities between men and women? Absolutely. Should we press for LBGT rights? I got a big ol’ rainbow flag waving outside my house. But as we do all that good political work, I don’t think we should deny the findings of science. And I also don’t think we should deny pretty pink dresses and dolls to the significant numbers of little girls who want them just because some people wrongly think it profoundly unnatural that a few little boys want pretty pink dresses and dolls, too.

So, please, please don’t say Alice Dreger thinks sex is socially constructed (if what you mean by that is that gonads, gametes, and genes aren’t real) and please don’t say that Alice Dreger thinks we should get rid of gender. That’s not the real me.

This post originally appeared on the author’s personal site.

 
Alice Dreger is a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

More From Alice Dreger

• Why Sex Research Is Worth Funding With Public Money
• What to Wear?
• Why Circumcise Perfectly Healthy Penises?

Hmmm . . . There were some things I liked about the original Tough Guise, and there were some things that really bothered me about that film. It felt to me that Jackson Katz fails to understand the complexity of the issue he was addressing. I wrote this back in 2009:

I have my issues with Jackson Katz’s “Tough Guise” video - it feels to me like the pathological side of the postmodern, relativist developmental stage, otherwise known as the Mean Green Meme in integral circles. I'm not sure such a beast actually exists (see here), but there does seem to be a tendency in this developmental stage - which is focused on group harmony, expression of emotion, and other communal manifestations of development - to reject any and all expressions of violence. I'm not sure this is realistic.

While as a Buddhist I reject violence, this is not necessarily a universal belief, even among Buddhists. Many hundreds of years have shown that Buddhists will take violent action in order to protect the weak and the dharma - the killing of a few to save the many has been the argument.

When the Chinese invaded Tibet, the few "soldiers" that existed tried in vain to fight off the invaders. This might be seen as the dark side of the complete opposition to violence and force. If they had taken seriously the realities of a world in which not everyone shares their values of peace and compassion, they might have been more prepared to defend those values by whatever means necessary.

Perhaps this is not good Buddhist doctrine. Or perhaps this is a more integral understanding of the need for right use of force. The "right use" part is crucial - I am not for the glorification of violence in film and TV. I do not think that boys should be taught that violence is how to resolve issues. I do not think that the military should be deployed unless our borders are threatened or unless we can protect the weak from genocide by the few who are ignorant and violent.

But I do know that we should be able to defend ourselves and those we love if there is no other option. Is there ever a time when there is no other option? I'm not sure.

So I'm not sure how I feel about his making of a sequel, from which there is a short clip below. Maybe over the past 14 years he has become more accepting that there are some masculine traits that are results of our biology and hormones . . . and evolution. That we still have these traits when they have ceased be relevant does not mean that they are wrong.

Whether violence is wrong or necessary depends on the context.

'Tough Guise 2': The Ongoing Crisis of Violent Masculinity

In a follow-up to his powerful 1999 documentary, Jackson Katz argues that men are actively taught to be violent creatures.

October 24, 2013 • By Lisa Wade

A still from Tough Guise 2. (PHOTO: COURTESY OF JACKSON KATZ)

In 1999 Jackson Katz headlined a documentary that powerfully revealed the mask of masculinity, a pretense of stoicism and readiness for violence that many men feel compelled to put on, at least part of the time. The film, Tough Guise: Violence, Manhood, and American Culture, became a staple in classes on gender across the country.

It’s no use arguing whether the media, the military, or the gun industry are responsible for rates of violence, he observes, since they’re in cahoots.

Last week marked the release of Tough Guise 2 and SocImages was given the honor of debuting an exclusive clip from the new film. In the segment below, Katz explains that men aren’t naturally violent but, instead, often learn how to be so. Focusing on socialization, however, threatens to make invisible the socialization agents. In other words, Katz argues, men don’t just learn to be more violent than they otherwise would be—they are actively taught.

He begins with the fact that the video game and film industries both take money from companies that make firearms to feature their products. The U.S. military then uses the video game Call of Duty for recruitment and training. It’s no use arguing whether the media, the military, or the gun industry are responsible for rates of violence, he observes, since they’re in cahoots. These extreme examples intersect with the everyday, mundane lessons about the importance of being “real men” that boys and men receive from the media and their peers, parents, coaches, and more.

This update of the original will tell the compelling story about manhood and violence to a new generation and remind older ones of the ongoing crisis of masculinity in America.



This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site.

Peter Wicks - The End of Gender? - A Reply

A post-gender world where we can choose not only the social expression of gender, but also the biological aspects, even down to manipulating DNA. Sounds great in theory, at least to those who have a libertarian bent in social maters.

Maybe this will happen to some degree . . . but only within the mostly white, affluent (although this is the loosest aspect), educated, Western developed world with more liberal beliefs about gender and sexuality. People who make these kinds of proclamations tend to forget that much of the world does not fall into that socially and culturally advantaged group.

What we might be able to hope for, of the three reasons he gives for why the "end of gender" might happen, is that the "increasing insistence on choosing the socially-constructed aspects of one’s gender—whether it concerns sexual orientation, how to dress, what kind of roles to play in society, how we refer to ourselves" or whatever . . . will continue to spread - but again this is, again, an element of the white, generally affluent, educated, developed world.

[When I include affluent here, I am referring more to the culture than to the individuals. Most of those who transgress gender norms are not affluent, but living in an affluent culture offers more freedoms to push boundaries than living in a poor culture where social norms are more strictly enforced.]

The end of gender?

Peter Wicks

Peter WicksEthical Technology

Posted: Mar 15, 2012

It has been suggested by Peg Tittle in her recent article that the prefixes Ms. and Mr. be abandoned, on the grounds that they reinforce discrimination between sexes. What this and most other contemporary debates about gender might be missing, however, is that the whole concept of gender may be about to go the way of the dodo.

Contrary to what some like to claim, the basic male-female divide is not in the first place a social construct that humans have invented. Opposition and dichotomy is built into the fabric of the universe, and is fundamental to sexual reproduction. Long before homo sapiens the vast majority of animal species were divided cleanly into male and female, with females hosting and gestating their offspring through the initial stages of its developments, while the direct male role reproduction was limited to providing the fertilizing agent, together with its payload of DNA. As with all things biological there are exceptions to confirm the rule, but they are rare enough not to disrupt the overall picture.


In addition to the direct roles in reproduction, gender has also been correlated with other roles, in ways that differ from species to species. In the case of humans, the classic model for understanding this division of roles within stone age communities is the hunter-gatherer paradigm, and while this theory can be questioned, for the moment it seems to be the best guess as to how the roles between men and women were divided at this stage.

With homo sapiens came both technology and language, and eventually civilization. This resulted in a huge complexification of social structures, and thus of gender-correlated roles. There is plenty of evidence that the first civilizations were matriarchal in their structure, but at some point—possibly associated with the invention of the wheel and the taming of the horse—men came to dominate the public sphere, and patriarchal civilizations were born.

By then we were a long way from a simple hunter-gatherer division of roles, and indeed one’s role in society depended on much more than one’s biological gender. Furthermore, in addition to the two biological genders there was a third, socially-constructed gender, namely the eunuch. Thus not only did societal role started to become decoupled from biological gender, but even one’s sexual identity started to become decoupled from one’s at-birth biological gender. For the most part, however, men continued to be men, and women continued to be women.


This started to change during the 20th century when gender started to be seen as something that was entirely socially-constructed. This was a false belief, of course, but also an influential one. In particular, an increasingly vociferous number of women were no longer willing to associated in any sense with the traditional female gender. It was no longer just a question of demanding the vote, or equal pay for equal work. Instead, the whole concept of what it meant to be female—and by extension what it meant to be male—was now up for grabs. In parallel to this, people who had other reasons to be dissatisfied either with their biological gender or with the social baggage that accompanied it increasingly found a voice, and demanded the right to forge a sexual identity of their own choosing. The ladyboys of Thailand are just one example of a “third gender”—which, unlike the eunuchs of yesteryear, is largely the result of choice and tolerance rather than of oppression—that is complicating the traditional male-female divide.

The question that this article seeks to raise is whether this trend will eventually annihilate the whole concept of gender, at least in humans, and if so how long this will take. There are at least three reasons to suspect that gender is on its way out.

Firstly, the trend towards increasing insistence on choosing the socially-constructed aspects of one’s gender—whether it concerns sexual orientation, how to dress, what kind of roles to play in society, how we refer to ourselves (and insist on being referred to by others, or whatever—seems set to continue, at least in the developed world.

Secondly, surgical techniques enabling de facto alteration of our biological gender, at least at the macroscopic level, are becoming increasingly sophisticated and are thus enabling increasing alignment of our (apparent) biological gender with our wishes.

Thirdly, and most radically, we may be on the verge of being able to tinker massively with our DNA, with the result that even at the genetic level we might find ourselves able to blur the boundaries between male (XY) and female (XX), to a far greater extent than nature has done for us.

And once gender becomes a matter of choice, rather than of nature’s providence, there is no reason why there should be only two, three or even four of them. And once gender splinters, like political parties and religious denominations, into categories that are limited only by the human imagination, the term “gender” seems likely to become increasingly inappropriate as a description of reality.

---

Peter Wicks has been employed for 16 years at the European Commission, working mainly on environmental policy.