The Fictions that Shape Men's Lives

Christopher Kilmartin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367421144
• eBook ISBN: 9781000375473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Fictions that Shape Men's Lives is structured around a number of key 'fictions' of masculinity, such as beliefs in biological determinism, the inevitability of men's violence and the opposition of the sexes, and proceeds to expose them to be wholly or partially unfounded.

Examining the social pressure to behave and experience the self in ways that culture prescribes for the bodies we are perceived as having, this book provides an awareness of widely-held but distorted assumptions of gender. It also seeks to put men into the position to resist masculine social pressures when conforming to it conflicts with important life goals or values and/or causes harm. Making use of an informal, storytelling style provides an accessibility to those interested in breaking down their preconceptions of gender and masculinity, as well making links to key theories and concepts.

This is a lively and engaging book for undergraduates studying introduction to Gender, Sexuality and Masculinity courses.

1
FRAMEWORKS

What is gender, and why does it matter?

Gender is a social pressure to behave and experience ourselves in concert with the cultural expectations for the body we are perceived as inhabiting. It is critical for students to understand that gender is not wholly contained within each individual. Rather it is, in a sense, “in the air” in the form of cultural expectations. It is also critical for students to understand that individual responses to these expectations are widely variable. We all know men who are emotional and women who are not, women who love sports and men who do not, men (like me) who are fairly inept with repairing things and women who are quite good at it, etc. Moreover, cultures and situations change and therefore so do cultural expectations. In the first half of twentieth-century United States mainstream culture, young men experienced strong social expectations to perform military service. By the 1960s there came a cultural shift in which military service became largely elective. In fact, there has been no mandatory conscription (draft) in the last 50 years in the United States, although laws still allow for it and males are still required to register for the draft at age 18.

Notice that I define gender as expectations for the body one is perceived as inhabiting. I once had a student who was assigned female at birth but who experienced persistent identification as a male. He transitioned to a male identity with the help of hormones and noted in his journals that once he looked like a man, others seemed to react to him much differently. For instance, a woman in one of his classes began to flirt with him in the hope that he would help her with an assignment. There are many transgender people who make such transitions and for those who do not know them beforehand, what sex they are is unquestioned.

When I first started studying men and masculinity in graduate school, I was focused on the childhood socialization of boys. Parents and other socializing agents are more likely to ignore boys’ feelings than those of girls, more likely to punish them physically, more likely to encourage them to fight, and place a variety of different expectations on girls and boys. I had a great professor at the time, social developmental psychologist John Hill, who possessed a remarkable intellect and exceptional research skills. One day, as I was talking about differential child rearing practices, Dr. Hill said, “Well, once you get beyond this `turkey theory’ you will really be on to something.”

“Turkey theory?,” I asked, and he said, “Yes—The assumption that we get `stuffed’ with characteristics as children like the dressing in a Thanksgiving turkey, and then when we become adults, we come out of the oven tasting like what we’ve been stuffed with.” His point was that, of course, we were all “stuffed” with things as children, but the social pressures we experience in different situations also have great effects on our behavior. So great, in fact, that the power of these situations can almost completely wash out the differences among the people present. My shorthand for illustrating this very important point is this “formula.”

The “B” stands for behavior—the actions of individuals that we are seeking to explain. The “f’ is function, the “P” personality—the characteristics of individuals that account for differences in behavioral tendencies among people. The “×” stands for the interaction (like the use of “×” as a symbol in mathematical multiplication) and the “S” stands for situation. Putting them together: behavior is a function of personality interacting with situation. If someone has a very unusual personality, they may behave very differently from others across many situations. If the situational pressure is very strong, we will see nearly everyone behaving in the same way. See Chapter 3 for a story about my experience of masculine social pressure and my subsequent gendered performance at my local gymnasium.

Here is the first of many of my own stories I will tell throughout—this one to illustrate the power of the situation in a case when it all but washes out individual differences. In my years as a college professor, once the class begins, nearly all students are sitting quietly and taking notes unless and until I invite them to ask questions or make comments. I ask them, “If I were to talk with someone who knows you well, for how many of you would that person not describe you as `quiet?”’ Many hands are raised, usually more than are not. I follow up with, “Then why are you being quiet right now?” The answer is quite obvious: people are responding to a situation where it is clear that they are expected to remain quiet. The students are all different, but the relatively strong situation obscures these differences. Likewise, it would be ludicrous to describe the students as “note-taking” kind of people even though nearly all of them are taking notes in the moment. This descriptor would only be apt if they took notes while speaking to their parents on the phone, interacting with their roommates, introducing themselves to other people, et cetera, in other words, across a wide variety of situations.

Situations vary tremendously and we often fail to take them into account in judging the causes of people’s actions. Some men may perceive crying at a funeral to be socially acceptable but may avoid it in their workplaces. In the world of organized sports, we often see men hugging and displaying other forms of physical affection with their teammates but they may eschew these behaviors elsewhere. Each man constantly comes to points in their everyday experiences where they must decide what levels of conformity and resistance to masculine expectations they will perform. Some seem like walking stereotypes; others like the epitomes of anti-stereotypes.

Is it always bad to conform and always good to resist? No, and no. The consequences of conforming to masculine social pressure or resisting it run the entire continuum from positive to innocuous to downright fatal, depending on the situation. For example, men are often expected to “get the job done” regardless of how they feel. At times, conforming to this pressure can help them be effective workers; at others it may involve unethical behavior in the service of task completion, such as sabotaging a competitor’s work. Extreme compliance to this expectation could result in “workaholism” in which men neglect their families and their physical and mental health by focusing solely on work.

There has been a good deal of recent discourse suggesting that, when we engage in a critical examination of masculinity around its sometimes negative effects, we are implying that men themselves are toxic and damaged. Michael Addis and Ethan Hoffman (2020) eloquently sum up the reason for studying masculinity:

taking a critical stance toward the effects of masculinity in men’s lives is not the same as criticizing men; the point is not that men are bad. The point is that masculinity can have detrimental and sometimes deadly effects when it is consumed rigidly and uncritically.

(pp. 11-12, emphasis original)

What follows is the story of how I began to learn to be critical of gendered social pressure.

When I was a second-year Counseling Psychology graduate student in the mid-1980s, I was approached by a fourth-year student, Hope Hills, who was teaching a Psychology of Women course. She said to me, “it seems to me that something ought to be said about the men, but I don’t know what it is and I’m not sure it should come from me. Would you be interested in doing some research and putting together a guest lecture on the Psychology of Men?”

My advice for graduate students in similar situations: when someone says, “Can you do [this]?,” and you are not sure whether or not you can, you say, “Yes. I can,” and then you go and figure out how to do it. It is a very important way in which you grow as a professional. And so indeed I said yes and hustled off to the library, where I checked out all of the gender-aware books on men that were available at the time (both of them). Little did I know that preparing this guest lecture would set me on to a path that would consume my career for decades.

I loved psychology (and still do) but I had never been as enthralled with a subject matter as this one. The first fact that amazed me (and still does) was that men in the United States died an average of about seven years younger than women. (At present this “mortality gap” is around 5.5 years in the United States; in Russia it is an astounding 13 years!) Part of men’s relative longevity disadvantage was (and is) due to physiological factors but most of it was (and is) due to behavioral differences. Men are more likely than women to take physical risks, work in hazardous environments, smoke heavily, not wear sunscreen or seat belts, complete suicide, and the list goes on and on. And I realized that behavioral also means preventable. I came to believe that my father’s death at age 50 and my brother’s at age 41 were not, and should not have been, inevitable.

I had discovered that the negative side of masculine social pressure was quite literally killing men. Later I learned that not only was it causing harm to men themselves but it was also having ill effects on those around them. Physical violence, the subject of a chapter to come, is the most important and longstanding difference between the sexes. Most men are not violent, but most violent people are men. Learning to mitigate the effects of men’s violence has profound implications for social justice and people’s quality of life.

Following my guest lecture experience, I decided in very short order that the Psychology of Men would be my specialty. I am grateful to (now Dr.) Hope Hills for helping me find that path. And then three days before I was scheduled to deliver this guest lecture, I was knocked unconscious in a basketball game, and so I did my inaugural Psychology of Men lecture with a black eye and a large cut under my chin, which also meant that I had not shaved for several days, which added to the look. I appeared to be a man who had been in a street fight standing in the classroom to say, “Maybe we need to rethink this masculine thing.”

In the ensuing years, I came to understand that the field of psychology was inadequate for fully understanding something as complex as gender, and that indeed, no single scholarly discipline could completely cover the territory. There-fore, I broadened my outlooks to include the study of history, economics, law, sociology, anthropology, art, and other fields. Men’s Studies is an interdisciplinary enterprise in which scholars take a critical look at masculinity from a variety of perspectives and scholarly traditions.

Men’s Studies owes a tremendous debt to Women’s Studies, another interdisciplinary field in which scholars asserted that circumstances and cultural gender arrangements have profound effects on the lived experiences of women, in contrast to the dominant analysis at the time, in which traditional scholars argued that these experiences and identities merely emerged as a consequence of biological sex. These transformative Women’s Studies scholars also began to bring analyses of power imbalances between men-as-a-group and women-as-a-group and the effects of such inequality. In addition, they called greater attention to the performative aspects of gender, shifting the focus of gender from something that people are to something that people do. Inherent in these analyses is the hope that things can change for the better if we rectify power imbalances and give people the tools to resist gendered social pressures when conforming to them causes harm and/or conflicts with important goals and values.

Inherent with the analysis of structural inequalities is an analysis of privilege: unearned social advantages that accrue to members of some groups more often than those of other groups. Peggy McIntosh (1988/2009) published a groundbreaking essay on the topic of White privilege that is easily applicable to gendered arrangements. She described privilege as “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks” (2009, p. 12).

In practice, people from privileged groups can move about in public and private spaces without having to pay attention to the many things that people from subordinated groups must negotiate in their daily lives. For instance, as a middle-aged man who is widely perceived as White (I am actually part Asian but few would guess so from my appearance), I can see people who look like me disproportionately represented among politicians, corporate leaders, and wealthy people. As a heterosexual and conventionally-gendered person, I do not have to worry that I might be terminated from a job if someone discovers my sexual orientation or finds that I am transgender. Both of these practices are legal in much of the United States and throughout many other countries. If I advocate for gender equality, I am not seen as acting from some special interest point of view, and my challenges to the status quo are not seen as nearly the threat that some perceive from people from subordinated statuses.

Case in point: in 2003, a young woman reported that professional basketball player Kobe Bryant had raped her at a Colorado hotel, and prosecutors decided that there was enough evidence of the crime to take the case to trial. Bryant’s contacts illegally leaked the name of the woman who reported the crime, and she received more than 100 death threats (Munch, 2013). She then became reluctant to cooperate with the legal process and prosecutors had no choice but to drop the charges. Bryant’s privilege as an elite athlete and media star, along with the support of his followers, thus operated to preclude the possibility that he might be held accountable for his actions, either in the court of law or the court of public opinion. He returned to his endorsement work with the sportswear corporation Nike after a short hiatus and his reputation seemed fully rehabilitated. After his tragic death from a helicopter accident in 2020, people who brought up the rape charge as a complication to his legacy were excoriated.

There are many outspoken feminist women who receive messages from people threatening to rape or kill them, and some have ceased their public activism due to fears that someone might follow through on these threats. Thus, their voices have been silenced through a kind of psychological terrorism. As someone who also challenges widely accepted and unfair gender arrangements, I get the occasional hate mail, but nobody has ever threatened me with physical harm. This email message with sarcastic tone that I received in 2014 is typical of what I experience: “Dear Mr. Kilmartin, I have been a fan for a long time but I have a problem I hope you can help me with. My wife and I have just given birth to a child but unfortunately, it is a boy, which means that he is destined to grow up dysfunctional and destructive. What do you recommend that we do? Is it possible that we can trade him in for a girl?” The message was signed “Andrew Dworkin,” most likely a reference to feminist scholar Andrea Dworkin.

I have learned the hard way not to engage with the writers of hate mail. I am quite certain that doing so will not change their minds and will only result in my becoming more upset and escalating the conflict. But I will tell people about it on social media and post a hypothetical response, because I know that many people who read it may be influenced. In this case, the response was, “Dear Mr. Dworkin, raise him to be a respectful human being, as most boys and men are, and maybe when he comes of age you won’t be too old and he can teach you. P.S.: It’s Doctor Kilmartin.”

A few ways that privilege operates: first, it is often invisible to the person who has it. For example, if you are in the first class section of an airplane, you can remain unaware that there are others on the plane who are cramped, uncomfortable, and getting no food. But you can become aware of them merely by turning around and working to understand what they are experiencing.

Second, privilege is always relative. Your experience or non-experience of privilege depends on with whom you are comparing yourself. Extrapolating the above example in both directions, the people in the coach section of an airplane have a level of privilege relative to most people in the world, who cannot afford a plane ticket. Those in first class have a lower level of privilege than those who are able to afford private jets. It is hard for most people to be aware that having water that comes directly into your house indicates a level of privilege unless you are aware of and think about those who do not.

In a very well-known photograph from 1940 (”Austrian boy overjoyed with new shoes,” 1940/2020), a young Austrian boy is seen with a look of extreme delight because the Red Cross had given him a new pair of shoes. He seems to feel like he is completely fulfilled now that he has something to put on his feet. In contrast, former professional basketball player Latrell Sprewell, when asked why he refused a $21 million dollar contract when he believed that he deserved even more, remarked “I have a family to feed” (2020).

When we become aware of the relativity of privilege, we can understand how people are astonished both at the feeling of being privileged by the mere acquisition of what many would consider to be the most basic of creature comforts (e.g., shoes or indoor plumbing) and the feeling of deprivation that comes from comparing oneself with people at the extremes of privilege (”only” 21 million dollars) .

It is also important to understand that privilege or disadvantage does not apply in equal measure to all members of a group. Certainly, there are women with remarkable privilege and men with very little. But when you consider men or women in the aggregate, it is clear that systemic sexism exists and wields considerable power. As an illustration, see the video “Life of privilege explained in a $100 race” (youtube.com, 2020) in which a group of people are given st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Frameworks: What is gender, and why does it matter?
• 2 “Opposite sex”: The fiction of difference
• 3 Blue genes: The fiction of biological determinism
• 4 Mirrors of the soul: The fiction that appearance is reality
• 5 Good old days: The fiction of the bygone romantic era
• 6 A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do: The fiction of violence
• 7 The last action hero: The fiction of masculine mystique
• 8 Onward through the gog: The future of masculinities
• References
• Index