A State of Affairs

Masc Off is our week dedicated to expressions of masculinity as a quality. Has there ever been a better time to ask the big questions? Like: What, exactly, is a man? What was masculinity, and what could it become? In this series, our contributors pull apart the tenuously constructed structure of masculinity to unearth what lies beneath the masc. 

And so we find ourselves, as we do every couple of years, thinking about masculinity. Since one of the defining culture wars of our generation peaked with #MeToo in 2017, we have been living with the aftereffects of this movement. Another wave of gender panic, another election year—how could we not be drawn to look again at the issue? The majority of Americans believe that gender is inherent, but there are genderqueer people living a different reality, while fringe activist groups continue to devote their time to the cause of men’s rights. In creepy corners of the Internet, men diminish women in every way you can think of, while mainstream podcasts project a sanitized version of the same thing for their audiences of millions. A whole political party upholds the idea that men are, by their nature, the strongest leaders—and part of that strength is arming yourself to the teeth.

#MeToo may have started 7 years ago, but we haven’t necessarily reached some safe haven “on the other side” of it. With so many recent opportunities for reassessing and reframing our sense of it: Has culture moved the needle on what masculinity means to gender?

In some ways, yes. A 2022 Pew poll found that 70% of people believe bad actors in the workplace are likely to be held responsible for their actions. But, in late May, former president Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 counts of felony business fraud involving giving hush money to an adult film star. The irony is that half the country doesn’t care about his conviction. In order to address where we find ourselves with respect to the question of masculinity, in terms of its meaning, its adherents, and its detractors, let’s tip our hat to history. The formation of masculinity helps us to understand how its influences are being both felt and opposed today.

The word “masculinity” can be traced back hundreds of years. In the western world, boys were taught that masculinity—a set of behaviors and physical attributes—would make you a superior man. Superior men will garner more power and privilege than those who do not subscribe to the behaviors or maintain the physical attributes of masculine men: strength, valor, leadership, assertiveness. 

A cursory glance at the past would have you believe that masculinity has always been celebrated as the essence of being a man, a preternatural instinct, an inevitability. But this is not the case. The term “masculine” and “masculinity” doesn’t even make it into the western lexicon until the Enlightenment period. How, then, did it become so ingrained?

In 2018 I wrote a response to a New York Times piece in which actor Michael Ian Black decried mass gun violence and proclaimed America’s boys were “not all right.” Curious about Black’s promise to readers that we don’t have to forgo masculinity to diminish gun violence, I asked the question: Why not get rid of masculinity altogether? 

In her book, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 Gail Bederman writes: “I don’t see manhood as either an intrinsic essence or a collection of traits, attributes, or sex roles. Manhood—or ‘masculinity,’ as it is commonly termed today—is a continual, dynamic process.” As I wrote then, paraphrasing Bederman: The first thing we need to do is to stop arguing that masculinity’s traits are inherent. “Gender,” she writes, “is dynamic and always changing.”

What happened, according to Bederman, was that during the Victorian era, there was an economic shift that created an entirely new class of westerners which included entrepreneurs, professionals, and managers. And the emergence of that class led to the creation of a new social identity for men that centered around civility. It was an about-face from the cultural belief that men were meant to be brutish. She argues that being “manly” had a “moral dimension” more aligned with being proper and large-minded—strong and brave, sure, but not violent. This was an upper-class identity. But with the economic collapse of 1879-96, the idea of a civilized white male identity shifted once again, to consolidate power: “The adjective ‘masculine’ was used to refer to any characteristics, good or bad, that all men had,” she writes. No longer was masculinity a classed identity, and the element of morality had been left behind. “Make masculinity great again” was back with a vengeance. 

By the turn of the twentieth century, America had sunk its teeth into masculinity. It was institutional: The YMCA promoted male aggression and dominance as part of its programming. It was imperial: The cowboy and frontier became American symbols of bravery and expansion. It was social: Masculinity was no longer for just one class or another, every white man was told he had the opportunity to dominate. Intrinsic to the success of these rugged individualists, of owning a piece of the American pie, was the fact that the more masculine you were, the more you could conquer. Nevermind that there were people already living on the land, and that expanding America meant violently wrestling it away from them. 

As America ages, the frontiersman takes on different shapes, but never disappears completely. Every time American women advance—the right to vote, the right to work, the right to be safe in the workplace—a countermovement led by new generations of cowboys crops up to try and flatten progress. In the 1970s and ’80s, when women entered and climbed the workforce ladder for the first time in huge numbers, there was yet another backlash. This was the first iteration of the men's rights movement as we now know it. 

It is no surprise then, that as soon as #MeToo swept the nation, Jordan Peterson, an explicit men’s rights activist who believes that men are “symbolically, archetypally, mythically male,” rose to prominence. Podcast personality Joe Rogan, who talks to an overwhelmingly white-cis male crowd about things like the meat diet for an optimal male body and how men are cultivated to feel about being men, became the most popular podcast host in America. 

Once #MeToo took off, so too did the reactionary movement against it. Since then, men's rights adherents have only become more entrenched in their views. And yet, progress has been made. Even though half of America does not care that Donald Trump was found guilty for trying to silence a sex worker, he was still found guilty. And that’s a bit how progress goes, isn’t it? Women’s rights movements sweep the nation and those movements lead to laws passing and culture changing, and, then, we backslide. Not totally, but somewhat. Those who benefit from toxic masculinity will hold onto it for dear life, try to resuscitate it when it’s already been pronounced dead. It will always be there, threatening to take us back hundreds of years. It is up to the rest of us to see it for what it is—and to ask ourselves: Is the tough guy brand worth it?