Against masculinity

The list of things women are not allowed to do has gotten much shorter over the years. Although lots of good things are still coded masculine, if a woman engages in a masculine-coded activity, she is likely to be praised for it. I have often been praised for drinking whiskey, something which is neither difficult nor particularly praiseworthy. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was criticized for acting like a stereotypical man, except for the occasional creep telling me to smile.

Partly, of course, this is because I am a bachelorette and childless. As soon as a woman starts trying to get pregnant, there are hordes of people eager to tell her what to do. Mothers (or even potential mothers) can’t drink, smoke, eat what they like, exercise, use public transportation, have careers, use formula, use childcare, or pursue their own goals in any way. And there’s no getting out of it: women who allow their children’s fathers to take custody are told they are abandoning them, and if you have a miscarriage or a child dies accidentally, you may be imprisoned. That is terrible and unjust--but I suspect that, comparing childless adult women to childless adult men, the women actually have more freedom from gender roles.

From various sources, we hear that men cannot: eat brunch, talk about feelings or relationships, drink non-whisky-based cocktails, clean up after themselves, go to plays, use certain toiletries, watch TV shows or movies with female characters, be in a committed relationship, wear colors other than black, brown, white, gray or blue, appreciate fiction or poetry, do yoga, care for children, do laundry, be interested in fashion, exercise self-control, do well in school, read between the lines of what people say, or be vegetarian. It sometimes seems like Esquire magazine is solely concerned with telling men what is and is not sufficiently masculine.

Now, different groups have different motivations for furthering this “men can’t” trope. Sellers of consumer goods have an incentive to convince us that men and women can’t possibly use the same products. Gendering clothes, shoes, bags, foods, drinks, cell phone cases, bandaids, shampoos, pens and whatever else you can think of ensures that men and women will buy different ones. Just think about how similar men’s and women’s bodies really are--and how different their clothes are. Or consider the human foot. On average, women have smaller and less hairy feet. Other than that, there is no difference. All feet work the same way. Yet how dramatically different our shoes are! Even those women who have the willpower to avoid wearing heels wear women’s flats. Either the world is sexist, or every Western man other than the ones I have dated is a foot fetishist.)

I often  hear complaints about the unflattering portrayal of men in sitcoms and other comedy. (Solution: don’t watch sitcoms. They are all bad.) But seriously, this happens for a fairly innocuous reason. You have to make fun of someone, and since we are in a weird world which is both sexist and post-feminist, few writers know how to make fun of women without being sexist. That leaves the man, ideally the straight white man, as your figure of fun.

Ordinary men themselves do a lot of the grunt work of spreading the belief that men are incapable. It’s a useful excuse for men who are behaving badly and want to continue doing so without consequences. Their strategy is to try to convince us that asking an individual man to change his behavior amounts to attacking masculinity itself. Is my wife asking me to do the dishes, talk about our relationship, or refrain from cheating on her? Probably because she hates men.

Similarly, the man who thinks men can’t control their sexual impulses is probably a harasser or rapist. The man who thinks that men can never be as good at parenting as women “naturally” are didn’t want to get up for that midnight feeding anyway. Meeting women and asking them out can be stressful, but it gets a lot easier if you can convince them that men can’t be expected to understand the body language, tones of voice, facial expressions and the other types of implicit communication which human beings are constantly engaged in. That way, whenever hard communication is necessary, it’s the woman’s job; and if she has taken too seriously the social belief that women should be passive, quiet and unselfish, she may never successfully get her message across.

These excuses are more palatable since they often come packaged in flattering-sounding essentializing descriptions of women. A woman who knows she hated breastfeeding and had to be taught how to hold a baby still enjoys being told her “maternal instinct” “naturally” makes her a better parent than her husband could ever be. And it would be tactless to question your boyfriend’s belief that women are “naturally” monogamous.

Stephanie Coontz, a scholar of marriage, agrees with me:

One thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood. Men are now experiencing a set of limits — externally enforced as well as self-imposed — strikingly similar to the ones Betty Friedan set out to combat in 1963, when she identified a “feminine mystique” that constrained women’s self-image and options. Although men don’t face the same discriminatory laws as women did 50 years ago, they do face an equally restrictive gender mystique...Now men need to liberate themselves from the pressure to prove their masculinity.

Maybe we should stop asking “is he gay?” every time a man bends the rules of masculinity.