The male paradox: Macho is a fragile state
January 12, 2012
Disturbing male-oriented crime stories were all over the news in 2011. So-called honor killings in Ontario. An Edmonton filmmaker convicted of a lethal luring that mimicked his film script. The allegations of torture and sexual assault against Calgary’s Dustin Paxton. And, of course, that testosterone- and alcohol-fueled riot in Vancouver after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup to Boston.
A fascinating article published in 2011 may give us some powerful insights into these tragedies. According to two University of South Florida psychologists, our manhood is actually a very fragile and precarious commodity. When it’s threatened, we’ll go to extreme lengths to defend it.
To explore this concept, Jennifer K. Bosson and Joseph A. Vandello had some college-aged men do “feminine” tasks, such as braiding hair, in a laboratory. Others were allowed to do gender neutral tasks, like braiding rope.
After this, both groups were given the choice of doing a puzzle or punching a bag. The hair braiders overwhelmingly chose the punching bag, according to a release from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), which published the study. They needed to restore their sense of manhood.
Bosson and Vandello say that women have it easier, because womanhood is seen as a set of enduring traits while masculine identity is socially constructed.
“Manhood is widely viewed as a status that is elusive (it must be earned) and tenuous (it must be demonstrated repeatedly through actions),” they write. The authors note that a guy’s manhood is usually not challenged by women, but by other men. They also found that having children, or even having the ability to bear children, was not generally seen as a necessary component of “being a real woman.”
Bosson says this research changed her own personal views. As she explains in the APS release, “when I was younger I felt annoyed by my male friends who would refuse to hold a pocketbook or say whether they thought another man was attractive. I thought it was a personal shortcoming that they were so anxious about their manhood. Now I feel much more sympathy for men.”
Written by Tom Keenan, Men’s Health, For the Calgary Herald. Continue HERE
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source for the awesome picture you included?
uh I wish…unknown photographer…however, you tempted me to find out.