Full Frontal Feminism_ A Young Women's Guide to Why Feminism Matters - Jessica Valenti [60]
But of course, expecting guys to “act” like men isn’t limited to beer commercials—it’s everywhere. How many times have you heard “Boys don’t cry,” or “Be a man”? Or even my personal favorite, especially when it was said to me as a kid, “Don’t be a girl.”
The new trend, however, seems to be deviating from manhood altogether, and instead fetishizing boyhood.
Men Should Act Like Boys
Something kind of new in American masculinity—at least in terms of pop culture—is the resurgence of boyhood as the cool standard. Like, back in the day, being a man meant taking care of your family and having a good job and all that. Now, at least if you look at commercials and television shows and the like, it seems that the ultimate way to be a man is to stay a boy.
You know what I mean—the new cool is this “bros over hos” mentality that seems to be inundating our culture. Just think of all the commercials in which perpetual boyhood is the ultimate—where playing cards, watching football, drinking beer, and picking up chicks is the norm (even for “older” guys), and girlfriends and wives are annoying, nagging, distractions from fun.
In a March 2006 article entitled “Men Growing Up to Be Boys,” Lakshmi Chaudhry says that an “infantilized” version of manhood is making its way to the mainstream:
❂ These grown men act like boys—and are richly rewarded for it. . . . Where traditional masculinity embraced marriage, children, and work as rites of passage into manhood, the twenty-first-century version shuns them as emasculating, with the wife cast in the role of the castrating mother. The result resembles a childlike fantasy of manhood that is endowed with the perks of adulthood—money, sex, freedom—but none of its responsibilities.1
Some say that this goes beyond pop culture silliness where Maxim magazine is king. In 2005, Rebecca Traister wrote about “listless lads,” men who “are commitment-phobic not just about love, but about life. They drink and take drugs, but even their hedonism lacks focus or joy. . . . They exhibit no energy for anyone, any activity, profession, or ideology.”2 Traister theorizes that maybe this is a crisis in masculinity—where men don’t want to be men.
But what does that mean, anyway?
Snips and Snails?
It seems unclear what “being a man” actually is. Is it simply not being a woman? Or is it something more?
According to Michael Kimmel, there are “rules of manhood”:
❂ No sissy stuff, that’s the first rule. You can never do anything that even remotely hints of femininity. The second rule is to be a big wheel. You know, we measure masculinity by the size of your paycheck, wealth, power, status, things like that. The third rule is to be a sturdy oak. You show that you’re a man by never showing your emotions. And the fourth rule is give ’em hell. Always go forward, exude an aura of daring and aggression in everything that you do. And this model of masculinity has been around for an awfully long time.3
Kimmel describes it as “relentless pressure on men.” I would imagine so. I can’t imagine it’s easy living that way. But unfortunately, this limited view of what it means to be a man truly fucks up the way men treat women.
Kimmel says that feminist-hating can be tied to masculinity as well. Because for men who are holding on for dear life to the traditional idea of what it means to be a man, feminism is a real threat—because it asks people to question traditional gender roles. He also believes that “manliness” can be tied to violence against women: “Men tend to be violent against women when they feel that their power is eroding, when it’s slipping.”4 Ugh.
But this seems par for the course in terms of feminist backlash. Feminism changed things around in a lot of ways, and that is scary as hell to a lot of men—because they benefit