I
asked astute_reason about masculinity for
the five-thing meme because it's something I've been thinking about more than a bit myself. As I mentioned
back in December, I've come to think of things more and more in terms of virtue ethics, so for me personally, the question becomes: what must I do to be a good man qua man? Is "masculinity," whatever that might actually be, at all important in figuring out what I ought to do or how I ought to construct myself? I've given it some serious consideration, and I'm honestly not sure there's anything unique to "being a good man" as distinct from "being a good person" other than the responsibility to avoid engaging in misogyny and, when possible, to call out others doing so. (On this last, I do better than some and not as well as I should. An activist urge, even if slight and personal, is...new for me.) Even that isn't absolutely unique--a person can make offensive remarks or object to them regardless of his/her biology or presentation--but there's a responsibility felt by anyone in a privileged group who understands that the privilege is crap that's different from the experience of someone in the accompanying marginalized group. Other than that responsibility, I'm not sure the term has any real content for me. As far as I can tell, it's not one of the ways I define myself (and, being in my head and all, I think I'd know), nor a way that I should.
(Yeah, I know this is Feminism 101-level stuff. I've only started working my way through these things explicitly in the last year or two and I've just recently become kinda-sorta comfortable discussing it with other people sometimes; there's a lot of cultural baggage to unpack, even if I've managed to skip over some of the more overt ugliness involved.)
Maybe one thing influencing me is that as a fat guy and a geek--and, what the hell, as a Jew*--I've always been locked out of the segment of the culture most would think capable of reaching traditional masculine ideals, and who would therefore be under the most pressure to perform that role, so those social pressures sort of left me behind. Or, rather, because I'm already in a couple of privileged groups, and because I live where I do when I do, I don't personally get an unbearable amount of crap for not hewing closely to the stereotype; what crap I do get comes mostly from television and other mass-culture outlets (which, considering the alternative, are pretty easily ignored). Thankfully, due to my luck in unchosen social interactions (work, mainly) and the ways I've chosen my friends, I very rarely get much crap about not involving myself in a lot of social paradigms from other people in my personal life.
I was just reflecting on this with my mom last Friday; because of the way my parents acted when I was growing up, I was never really able to get inculcated with the stereotypical gender roles. My dad was a big, strong, burly carpenter, but he was the kind of carpenter who married a research-chemist Star Trek fan with a dual degree in chemistry and mathematics. I had a stay-at-home mom (until the late 90's forced her back into the workforce to keep the mortgages paid), but she handled the family's finances because, smart as he was, my dad was really, really lousy with money while my mom was practically a wizard. I never got the impression that my dad ever considered my mom Less Than in a sexist way--I mean, my parents were/are certainly no radical egalitarians, but they did their best to stress fairness and respect. "Quietly traditionalist with a bit of a liberal streak" might be a good way to phrase it. So when, growing up, I'd encounter stereotypes like "women are no good with money" or "women are lousy drivers" I'd think "wait, my mom's not like that at all," and when I'd encounter things like "men want unassertive women" I'd think "well, my dad sure didn't." Chalk it up to one more way in which I got pretty lucky.
* Whenever I say something like "as a Jew," I want to go off into another Big Damn Explanation of which specific parts of the traditions I find benign, which I find pleasant and which I find abhorrent, or in which contexts I consider myself a Jew and which I don't. Let's just say it's still fraught. (Plus, as assimilated as most Jews are in the US--and maybe in part because most have assimilated so invisibly--there're still lots of mistaken impressions running rampant. Hell, last week one of my coworkers was talking about how she works on every holiday by telling
cucumberseed and myself that "when you're with your families for [looks at him] Christmas [looks at me] or Hannukah, I'm here." Because, y'know, any other religion's holiday that happens to occur in December is the fill-in-the-blank version of Christmas! Nevermind that it's only considered an important holiday because it's in December, it's not exactly a big get-the-family-together occasion, nobody takes time off of work for it even among the most observant, and I've never indicated in any way that I'm even lightly observant. In the moment, it struck me off-guard in a particularly funny way. Goyim!) But in this context there's an actual related point that leaps to mind: in my experience, gendered stereotypes of Jews (nerdy, nebbishy men; strong, loud, overbearing women) are more or less the exact opposites of stereotypical Western concepts of masculinity and femininity.