Departments

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masculinity

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    8/8/2022

    How Toxic is Masculinity, and Whose Job Is it to Fix It?

    Historian Ivan Jablonka's history of the idea of patriarchy suggests that feminists should recognize the current wave of male grievance as an opportunity to renegotiate the entire social compact of gender that has been built up over centuries of male power. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    6/15/2022

    The Right Celebrated Bernhard Goetz as the Kyle Rittenhouse of the 80s

    by Pia Beumer

    In the context of economic turmoil, urban crisis, and racial division, a broad swath of the American public made Goetz a heroic symbol of restored white masculinity after he shot four Black teens who asked him for money on the New York subway.

  • SOURCE: The Bulwark
    4/20/2022

    Tucker Carlson Heralds Yet Another "Crisis of Masculinity"

    by Mona Charen

    Tucker Carlson's recent examination of testicular tanning as a boost to manliness shows the need for societies to support pathways to male expression that don't lead to violence or painful sunburns. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    2/23/2022

    The Sandy Hook Settlement Could Transform the Marketing of Guns

    by Tracy L. Barnett

    The settlement between Remington and the families of victims does not accept fault, but it does establish the dangerous connection between the marketing of guns as totems of masculinity and the damage done by young men who acquire them with ease. 

  • SOURCE: Uncivil Religion
    1/6/2021

    Braveheart: President Donald J. Trump

    by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

    Following the threads of religion and nationalism that form the unlikely comparison between Trump and Mel Gibson's (heavily mythologized) Scottish movie hero. 

  • SOURCE: Public Seminar
    10/6/2021

    Why Hollywood Can't Change a Diaper

    by Janet Golden

    While Hollywood portrayals of motherhood have adapted to incorporate single and working mothers, popular culture images of fatherhood have remained stubbornly stuck in the past. Would supports for child care and parental leave in the budget reconciliation bill help bring movie dads up to date? 

  • SOURCE: JStor Daily
    9/30/2021

    Masculinity, Pacifism and Politics: Abolitionist Parker Pillsbury

    "Pillsbury and other Garrisonians despised the romanticization of male violence, perhaps partly because they were on the receiving end of so much of it. They derided white southern men as drunkards with a tendency to use harsh violence against both enslaved people and white women."

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    8/30/2021

    Daddy Issues

    by Bethany Moreton

    White American Christians have embraced aggressive patriarchy as access to social and economic power has become more concentrated in fewer hands. 

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    2/23/2021

    When Men Started to Obsess Over Six-Packs

    by Conor Heffernan

    Today's culture of Instagrammed abdominal muscles traces back to the time when nineteenth-century physical culture movements converged with the archaeological discovery of ancient Greek statuary (bodybuilders then used the new technology of photography in ways we'd recognize). 

  • SOURCE: The Revealer
    11/12/2020

    On Evangelical Masculinities (Review)

    Journalist Daniel José Camacho reviews Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book "Jesus and John Wayne" and considers the way that masculinities are expressed in non-white evangelical communities. 

  • 10/11/2020

    Fear of the "Pussification" of America: A Short Cultural History

    by Gregory A. Daddis

    The bizarre idea that COVID-19 can be defeated through manliness is one of the stranger cultural themes of our time, but it connects to a long history of anxiety about masculinity in a changing America that encourages violent and even self-destructive actions in the name of proving virility.

  • Chivalry Isn't Dead

    by David Patten

    It’s official; newspapers, TV, radio, and online news reports all announced it; male chivalry is nothing but a myth. Two Swedish economists, Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson, exposed the reality of male selfishness in their study, “Every Man for Himself, Gender, Norms, and Survival in Maritime Disasters”, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The authors claimed to have studied three centuries of shipwrecks, culling statistical data and quantitative research in the process. Their conclusions: men, utilizing their generally superior strength, selfishly disregard the plight of the women and children in order to save themselves. They point to the statistical survival rates of women and children in the shipwrecks included in their work. The results are very discouraging for women and children and completely destroy the concept of the chivalrous male. Rather than “women and children first,” the prevailing sentiment in such disasters is truly, “every man for himself,” with the emphasis on men.