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Making sense of being a 21st Century father

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What will fatherhood look like by the end of the 21st Century? In 2013, insideMAN’s news editor, Glen Poole, was invited to join a panel at the Men’s Health Gathering in Australia to discuss the topic “21st Century Man”. Here he provides a summary of some of the key ideas he covered in this talk.

I remember the 21st Century starting. My daughter was two at the time and my immediate family joined us at our home in London to celebrate. It was the last Christmas I spent in my marital home.

Up until then, I’d had the extraordinary privilege of being a full-time “house husband” spending every day with a little girl, watching her grow day by day. But my wife left and soon after I received a letter from her solicitor, which said:

“You made a valid contribution in the first two years of your daughter’s life but it is no longer in her best interest that you look after her.”

That’s when I began to discover the raw deal that separated dads can get in the UK and that’s when I got interested in “men’s work”— which is ultimately, how I ended up, 14 years later, speaking at the National Men’s Health Gathering in Brisbane about “21st Century Man”.

Women and children first 

I started by looking back over 100 years to the sinking of the Titanic, the greatest single symbol of the historic belief that men as protectors should put women and children first:

  • 100% of children in first and second class survived
  • 75% of all women on board survived
  • Only 20% of men on board survived

I considered the deaths of millions of men in the 1914-1918 war, men with no right to vote, many of whom were collectively shamed into dying for their country.

At the time of speaking my daughter was 16 and had just started Sixth Form college next door to where I live. She was popping in and out on a daily basis and I became aware that it was the first time in 14 years that she’d been in my life on a daily basis in this way.

Everyday fatherhood 

It made me realise that when I was looking forward to the 21st Century back in 1999, my expectation was that I would continue to be with her every day—but things change and sometimes we need to stop and reflect and make sense of that change.

My opportunity to be a stay-at-home-dad arose because my wife was a lawyer and earned considerably more than I did. It was 1922 when the very first woman in the UK became a lawyer. I can’t imagine what it was like being the only woman in a profession dominated by men. Whatever the experience was like, it didn’t open the floodgates. Fifty years later in 1972, just 3% of lawyers were women.

But now, another forty-or-so years later, law is a profession that is evenly split between the sexes and two-thirds of people who attend law school, the next generation of lawyers, are now women. So things can and do change very quickly in the world of gender.

Can men’s roles change too?

I wonder what the world would be like if men could undergo such radical change too? Imagine if men could undergo a similar transition in the areas where we are unequal and/or significantly under-represented.

Forty or fifty years ago, gender roles were very clearly divided: broadly speaking, men were the providers and women were the carers

There’s been a huge diversification of roles since then. Women have a greater diversity of choices. They can provide for themselves and others; they can be a full-time carer who’s provided for; or they can combine providing and caring. When you look at the categories that women fall into, there’s a fairly even spread across these different groups.

When you look at men’s experiences, our roles have diversified too, but to a far lesser extent. There seem to be fewer choices for men, fewer ways to be man. Most men who become fathers will still become the main providers in their families and fit in a bit of caring on the side.

Who cares for men? 

Very few men will have the experience of being provided and cared for in our relationships and that unavoidable fact seems to help create the other category of men—the invisible men, the men who are homeless, excluded, isolated, unemployed, imprisoned, suicidal and lonely. The men who, for whatever reason, are unable to care and provide for themselves, let alone others.

These invisible men are generally boys we have failed, collectively, to nurture; boys our society has failed in some way; boys who we have somehow denied the opportunity to grow up to be either a carer or a provider in life.

How different would our world have to be to stop 90% of homeless people being male; 95% of prisoners being male; 78% of suicides being male? How much more care and concern would we all have to give to men and boys to make this happen?

It would take a radical change that matches the rise of women in the professional world. It will take men, en masse, claiming their right to enter the world of care—for masculinity and femininity to evolve in way that it is natural for men and boys to care and be cared for.

Gender isn’t rigid

As I look to the future, as I look ahead a century, I can see that greater choice is slowly becoming available to the next generation of men and boys. History shows us that gender isn’t rigid.

The way men and women live their lives now, would be unrecognisable to our Edwardian ancestors. And the way our descendants will live their lives by the end of the 21st Century will be unrecognisable to men and women today.

If gender isn’t rigid how will it change over the next 100 years? For me, gender is comprised of a diverse range of quality’s and experiences that we call “masculine” and “feminine”. There’s lots of evidence to show women’s experience of gender has diversified much more than men’s, but that masculinity is also diversifying and evolving in a parallel way.

This isn’t simply about women becoming more like men or men becoming more like women—though there may of course be examples we can point to of women being more “masculine” and men becoming more “feminine”—it’s about men becoming more flexible and adaptable and ultimately having more freedom and choice when it comes to being a man.

And there is probably no better place for us to develop that flexibility and adaptability than in our roles as fathers to our sons and daughters who will be the ones to reshape gender in the 21st Century.

—Photo: flickr/CarbonNYC

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

See Also:

In the run up to the launch of a new film on Fatherhood called DOWN DOG, insideMAN will be publishing a series of articles about fatherhood and we’d love you to get involved. You can join the conversation on twitter by using the hashtag #MenBehavingDADly; leave a comment in the section below or email us with your thoughts and ideas for articles to insideMANeditor@gmail.com.  

Down Dog is released in selected cinemas on 14 February 2015. For more information see www.downdogfilm.com

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WWM becomes first men and boys’ charity to win gender prize at Diversity Awards

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Working With Men is a charity doing incredible work engaging with marginalised young men on a range of issues, including violence, fatherhood and education. Here the charity’s Chief Executive, Shane Ryan, discusses why it’s ground-breaking for a men and boys’ charity to win a gender diversity award, their Manifesto for Men and the important work that lays ahead during their 10th Anniversary year.

—This is article #25 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys 

Last month we won the Community Organisation Award for Gender at the National Diversity Awards. I was genuinely surprised when they announced our name.  At that moment I was sitting back in my chair getting ready to applaud the winner, when I realised they were playing our video on screen and saying our name.

It is a significant moment for us in many ways – not only are we getting a clear message from people that what we are doing is recognised and needed – but it means disadvantaged boys and young men have finally made it onto the public agenda.

We are the first ever charity working specifically with helping boys and young men to receive such an award. Previous recipients of this award have all been women’s organisations. This is great, but there is a penny dropping – true equality needs to work both ways for men and women for everyone to move forward together.

Equality for men and women

Families are the perfect example of the place where the two things can go hand in hand, where there is reciprocity between equality for men and equality for women.

Imagine if we offered all fathers the same level of support and services we offer mothers. We have nearly a quarter of a million fathers in the UK that are stay-at-home dads and two million mums. In 1993 there were less than 120,000 dads. Things have changed. Some women are out at work earning more than men. How are we accommodating that change? This is the reality of 21st century Britain.

The more we offer family services for men, the more we make it OK for them, and, for those women, to make conscious decisions on how they are going to live their lives. This removes the shackle, or the onus, that is constantly on mums to look after children.

If we want to reduce the incidence of children’s involvement in social care, if we want to foster more equitable arrangements around child rearing and parental roles and want a more equal society where both women’s and men’s roles in life and wider society are not tied to historic stereotypes and positions, this has to extend to family life as well as work place and public life.  We have quite rightly witnessed the emancipation of women from enforced roles within society and now hope and expect these rights and freedoms will grow and continue.

Everyone of both genders and from whatever cultural or ethnic background need to be afforded the same rights and opportunities including when it comes to children, families and parenting roles; if we set an expectation or precedent that men can and should be involved in all aspects of parenting not just in the financial provider or occasional babysitter role, we make an important statement about equality for all generally.

Breaking down boundaries

 The work we are doing is breaking down boundaries and is forcing a change in mindset. Not only are we truly humbled that so many people would go out of their way to vote for us among such strong competition, we also recognise – as someone said to me the other day – we now “deserve to be in that field”.

We have really important work ahead of us. For example we want to record the numbers of fathers who are still in school.  Most of the time people don’t acknowledge they are fathers – so understandably they struggle with it. These young men have just been told they are going to be a dad, they can’t get time off to go to the antenatal appointments or the birth. Rather than brand them as boys who need to be punished, we need to keep them involved with the family and support them – the outcomes are better for the whole family, and the young mums we’ve spoken to agree with this as does the associated research. This is why we believe the creation of statutory requirements to capture father’s data where possible by health and children’s services is essential particularly where they may be vulnerable

“An extraordinary 10th anniversary year”

Chief Executive of Working With Men Shane Ryan receives the Community Organisation Award for Gender

We are having an extraordinary 10th anniversary year. It’s snowballing; we have cross-party support for the work we are doing, the next all-parliamentary group on fatherhood is around the corner; press interest is high; we are being asked to speak at  conferences and universities; our fundraising is growing, our profile is stronger, and we are looking forward to marking International Men’s Day on 19 Nov.

And here we are, a small organisation with a funny name!

On a serious note, what is significant is that our national and parliamentary work is growing. Two years ago we took over the secretariat for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood and that added a new dimension to the work.

In this crucial time before the general election we need to show politicians what we have learned in the last decade about how to target marginalised young men and make them feel they have a stake in society. At this point I would like to thank the organisations we also now work with nationally, including Barnardos, Mums Net and the Royal College of Midwifery for their support at the party conferences recently it shows a real shift in mindset. With this in mind our core three-pronged strategy works on a ‘Manifesto for Men’ for the 2015 General Election, developing a robust evidence-based programme that begins to address inequalities in health and education.

We will continue to push the message that there are other paths to walk down – we need to gear up our young men particularly with the tools to do that. Otherwise they can often become lost and unsure what their responsibilities are.

There is more than one way to be male.

Thank you to everyone for your support. We are really proud to have won this award.

To find out more about the great work being done by Working With Men visit their website here and get involved in the discussion on twitter by using #WWM10.

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

 

The views expressed in these articles are not necessarily the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

 

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

Why dads should encourage their sons to play with dolls

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I really thought that I shouldn’t need to write about this. I believed that’s not a topic of the 21st century. And, oh gosh, I was wrong.

I’m talking about the big gender nonsense in our society. It all starts by how we treat our children, putting them into categories of gender: this is what boys do and that’s what girls do, this is what boys wear, this is what girls wear…

When working with families I came across this a lot: Mum thinks it’s a good idea to buy their sons (and daughters of course) a doll to play with. Then dad joins in and says: My son playing with a dolly? No way, he will get a new football, that’s what boys play with!

A quick look into the next best toy shop will just confirm this view. Toys are being categorised – again, girls toys (then they come in pink) and boys toys (blue of course). Girls play with dolls, prams, skipping ropes and pink balls – boys will play with cars, toy guns, pirate outfits and blue balls.

‘He would go with dolly everywhere’

But what would happen if there are no such stereotypes anymore? What would our children choose if media, marketing and shops ignore colour coding and artificial preferences?

My boys are going through different phases of playing with dolls. When my eldest was about 1 1⁄2 we gave him a doll. He took the doll, looked at it and then kissed it. This was followed of a period of time where he would go with dolly everywhere.

After about six months he suddenly lost interest in playing with his doll. We didn’t do anything about it and that’s how it is until now. He’s now nearly six and pays more attention to his soft toy rabbit (well, now he wants a real baby to cuddle and look after, well, I guess he has honed his fathering skills on dolly, now we can move to the next level…). His younger brother has taken over the care for dolly. He is looking after her like a father would care for his child. And that’s exactly what playing with dolls is all about: Caring for someone; social, emotional and communication skills. It’s incredible what children explore and develop when they play with dolls: The list is long.

To check out all benefits on playing with dolls, have a read at MamaOT’s post here. (Just the headline in that post would look so much better without the reference to boys. All kids already includes boys)

What if there were no ‘gendered’ toys?

And it’s interesting to see, how kids can respond to the artificial advertising of gender roles. When we went out for a small lunch the other day, to a seaside café, there were little flags in the Panini with crossbones and a skull on it. My son asked why and well, what’s the answer to that? So, I just went with the best answer I could think of: adults think children like pirates and so like the café. His response was, “I don’t like pirates”. Yes, why would you?

Sometimes explaining the adult world to children, especially the world adults create for children to enjoy, is extremely difficult.

So what if we didn’t have any “gendered” toys? I believe our kids would just continue playing. They don’t care about gender fake (they will go for the colours THEY like) or appropriate toys. With no interfering from our side they’ll figure out themselves which toy is fun and which isn’t. Some will go through colour phases of liking one and then another.

So, next time I hear a father (or a mother) say that their son(s) shouldn’t play with dolls, I’ll just pick up one, sit on the floor and pretend to feed it. Then I will wait for the boys to join in the game. Kids play with dolls – let them enjoy it!

By Torsten Klaus

Torsten is an Author, Parenting Coach and Stay-at-home Father. He runs the internet platform Dads Talk  and you can connect with him on www.facebook.com/DadsTalk or on Twitter @EmpathicFathers

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Why you must never treat a man with a pram like a lady

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A street encounter with a man with a pram prompted Glen Poole to ask, why do some men and women react differently to the kindness of strangers?

A strange thing happened to me the other morning. I was marching up the hill on the way to a meeting when I spotted a man with a pram coming down the hill towards me. Between us there was an impending bottleneck created by the unlikely triumvirate of a lamp-post, a crash barrier and a wheely bin.

I’m pretty good at spatial awareness (I’d say it’s man thing but I’m sure my partner would say I’m deluded as I am clearly less aware than her of the dust that accumulates in our shared space). By my calculation, even if I increased my acceleration by 23%, I still wouldn’t make it through the gap first without causing pram dad to have to slam on the brakes and risk catapulting his toddler into oncoming traffic.

As I’m always keen to prevent involved dads from needlessly cocking up, I did the gentlemanly thing and I stood to one side to let man, pram and baby go first. I even stared at the ground to make the whole scene a little less awkward for all concerned, but when I looked up, the dad had come to an abrupt halt on the other side of the bottleneck and—in a very erect, gentlemanly fashion—was holding out his hand to allow me to pass by first.

And then I remembered the golden rule for men at the pramface—never treat a man with a pram like a lady!

I grew up at a time when young women were beginning to resist all manner of seemingly innocuous social etiquette such as refusing to walk through a door that a man held open for them out a sense of chivalry. I’d forgotten about these random acts of defiance until last week when my other half got into a bit of a doorway duel with an old gent at a charity shop. He was leaving the store as she was entering, so they both tried to let each other go first and ended up in a temporary state of etiquette impasse, on the threshold of a building full of second-hand tat.

For clarity, my partner doesn’t have an issue with men opening doors but the timing and context was such that it felt entirely appropriate for her to do the kind and polite thing and let the elderly gent go first. But he was having none of it. In fact he became quite agitated:

“No, no, no, no,” he protested “can’t a man be allowed to let a lady go first anymore, chivalry isn’t dead you know, I insist, you go first”. In the end, she did the only thing she could do if she wanted to rifle through dead women’s blouses in search of a bargain, she agreed to play by the old man’s social rules, based on a view of gender that assumes women are the weaker sex and it is men’s role is to protect them.

And this is how the man with a pram probably felt when I stopped to let him pass. In this fleeting social interaction, I unwittingly positioned myself as the chivalrous gent, the protector of women and children and may as well have added the verbal challenge: “you go first because you’re a big girly wimp, Pramboy!”

It’s no wonder he resisted!

In her classic book on gender and communication “You Just Don’t Understand”, the linguist Deborah Tannen presents her theory on the hidden meanings in such gestures. Women, she claims, are more likely to strive for intimacy and use the symmetry of connection to create a sense of community when they communicate. Men, on the other hand, favour the struggle for independence and are more likely to communicate through the asymmetry of contest and one-upmanship.

The simple act of allowing someone to go first, says Tannen, can imply status. It can send the metamessage “I am one up for you and I grant your permission to go first”.

When a man makes a protective gesture, it can communicate the traditional alignment of men protecting women and children. When women make a protective gesture it suggests a different scenario, because women traditionally, protect and nurture children.

This is why some women resist men’s chivalry as the metamessage they receive is that women are the weaker sex and need protecting by men. This is also why old men in charity shops resist being allowed to go first by a woman, because they don’t want to accept the metamessage that they are treated like children. And this is also what you should be mindful of when you  let a man with a pram go first.

If you’re a woman, you’re unwittingly sending the message “I’m treating you like a child” and if you’re a man you’re unwittingly telling him that he is a woman with a child who needs your manly protection.

And no man with a pram needs to be treated like a child or offered your manly protection, because any man who is macho enough to impregnate a woman and then push the resulting offspring around town with him is all the man he ever needs to be (and he’s certainly no lady)!

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—Photo credit: Flickr/Nicolas Raymond

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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Are you a masculine or feminine father—and which one is best?

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Here’s an interesting question for fathers to ask themselves — are you a masculine father or a feminine father?

If we asked a typical 1950s dad this question the answer would have be more obvious. In an era when most parents operated on the man-work-women-cook model of family life, mums did feminine mum things and dad did masculine dad things.

In the intervening decades the roles of mums and dads have diversified somewhat and become more blurred — mums can win bread and raise children while dads can share the housework with the paid work.

If you’re a modern dad there’s a good chance that you’ll be doing some combination of what used to be considered men’s work and women’s work. So does that make you masculine dad or feminine dad?

Are you a systemizer or an empathizer?

One to find out is to examine your parenting style. Are you more of a typically male systematic father or a typically female empathetic dad?

The systematic approach is more masculine and at its most positive it is a style of parenting that brings order and structure into a child’s life. The negative side of the masculine approach to fathering is that it can become critical or controlling when order and structure is challenged. Is this tendency to control or criticize your children a trait you recognize in yourself?

The empathetic approach is more feminine and at its best it is nurturing and loving but at its worst it can mean spoiling the child and pandering to its tantrums and bad behaviour. Does this sound a bit like you with your children?

If you’re still not sure if you tend more towards masculine or feminine parenting styles then try observing how your children respond to you. A nurturing, positive feminine parent will tend to have children who are free and spontaneous. By contrast a spoiling feminine parent will have an unruly, immature child.

If you’re a masculine, structuring parent you may find your child is co-operative whereas if you have a masculine approach that tips over into being critical and controlling then you generally find your children respond by being resistant or resentfully compliant.

Are you a bit of both?

As men and women can embody both masculine and feminine qualities, it is possible for a dad to be both structured and nurturing (or critical and spoiling even). In fact, it’s not unusual for modern dads to see themselves in all of these descriptions.

By becoming aware of these masculine qualities, in both their positive and negative manifestations, you can honour the qualities you already have and work on developing the areas where there is room for improvement.

Maybe you bring great systemic thinking and order to your parenting, but struggle to respond to the emotional needs of your children? If so then becoming mindful of developing your empathy and your nurturing side, could be a positive way forward for you.

Maybe your nurturing and empathetic side is already well developed, but you struggle to create order and structure for your children? If so then becoming mindful of developing your masculine, systemic side could help you become an even better dad.

How to be an even better dad

So now you’ve had time to consider your parenting style, would you describe yourself as a masculine dad or a feminine father? Or are you a combination of both?

If you want to develop your masculine side you could try a sport, game or activity with your child that requires you to provide the structure and the rules. If it’s your nurturing, feminine side that needs developing, try a creative activity like role play or crafts where you child can express themselves freely and have periods of leading the activity if they want to.

One simple way to remember the difference between masculine and feminine fathering is to consider the difference between masculine play fighting, where you lay down the rules and make sure they are followed—and feminine play acting where you create the rules together by tuning in and responding to each other’s needs.

Remember, developing a new side of your character can be like exercising a muscle you’ve never used before—it may not be easy at first, it may even hurt a little but the rewards can be magnificent so why not give your children an unexpected treat and let them experience a more masculine or more feminine side of your character today?

—Photo: flickr/the_moment

Is your masculinity a product of nature or nurture?

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Photo courtesy: sdminor81

What is it that makes a man masculine asks Glen Poole?

Last week we explored the Seven Stages of Masculinity that men experience at different stages of life and history. But what creates these different stages of masculinity? Is it good old mother nature or the nurture of the “man’s world” we live in?

If you view masculinity from an integral perspective then there a four distinct forces that shape your masculinity:

  • Your biology
  • Your psychology
  • The cultures you inhabit
  • The society you live in

These four distinct forces interact at every stage of masculinity to shape your experience of being a man. In simple terms biology and psychology represent the forces of nature while society and culture represent the forces of nurture. The importance your place on each of these four forces will be governed by the side you take in the nature vs nurture debate? Or maybe you don’t take sides, maybe you believe that masculinity is a bio-psycho-socio-cultural construct…….!?

THE BIOLOGY OF MASCULINITY

Maleness is formed at a biological level in the XY sex chromosomes found in every cell of our bodies. The small proportion of men born with an XXY chromosome are less masculine in a variety of ways—they have less testosterone, smaller testes, less public hair, less facial hair, a lower sex drive, are less muscular, may have man boobs and can be shy and lack confidence in childhood.

By contrast, children with the condition congenital adrenal hyperplasia are exposed to higher levels of male sex hormones such as testosterone. Boys with the condition can enter puberty early leading to increased body hair and an enlarged penis at an early age, while girls with the condition may have unusual looking genitalia (such as an enlarged clitoris) and a tendency towards more masculine behaviours such as a preference for playing with “boys’ toys”.

The impact of biological factors like chromosomes and hormones on our masculinity has been observed by researchers studying the journals of men undergoing testosterone replacement. What they discovered was that as men’s testosterone levels rose they used fewer words in their journals and wrote less about people and more about objects.

The apparent masculine interest in objects, more than people, has also been observed at a neurological level. According to Simon Baron-Cohen’s Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) Theory the female brain is more often hard-wired for empathy while the male brain is more often hard-wired for understanding and building systems.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY

The nature of masculinity changes over time in parallel with the common social systems that define a culture or historical era. In the agricultural age, for example, the invention of the plough revolutionized food production. The plough relied heavily on male upper body strength and required men to work away from their family while women stayed close to home. To this day the hard-working dad and the stay-at-home are still recognized as archetypal masculine and feminine roles.

As countries evolve from agrarian to industrial to post-industrial systems of economic production, the nature of masculinity and femininity also evolves. In modern industrial nations, women can reach the top of their field by adopting masculine traits. As post-modern, post-industrial nations emerge, feminine skills become more valued as we explored in our post: 10 reasons more male graduates end up jobless.

It is no coincidence that the UK’s modernist, industrial Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was considered to be the “best man” in her Government while the U.S.A.’s post-modernist, post-industrial leader, Barack Obama, has been repeatedly described as the country’s first female president.

The laws that govern sex and gender are also part of the social systems that shape our masculinity. In countries where men and women have generous and equal parental leave rights, women earn more and men do more childcare.

Is this because the men in these countries are more feminine, nurturing and caring naturally, or is their masculinity being nurtured in a new direction by the country’s parental leave laws?

THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY

The values and beliefs of the communities we are born into play a huge role in defining our masculinity. Last week we talked about the Seven Types of Masculinity. These stages can be observed at a collective level as cultures progress through seven distinct stages of development as follows:

  • Cavemen and Cavewomen
  • Tribes
  • Warriors
  • Rules and Roles
  • Explorers
  • Peacemakers
  • Integral Men and Women

Each stage brings a new set of values and beliefs. For traditional “rules and roles” cultures, social order is preserved by men and women conforming to set norms that restrict expressions of masculinity and femininity within limited confines. In simple terms men (and their masculinity) rule the public realm and women (and their femininity) rule the private realm.

At the “explorer” stage of cultural evolution women are usually granted equal rights and equal opportunities with men in the public realm. As high-flying women like Margaret Thatcher show, women who learn to play by masculine rules can reach the very top, but for most women equality of outcome is not possible.

Explorer societies tend to be competitive and individualistic and are divided into the “haves” and the “have nots”. When “peacemaker” societies emerge, they have a strong focus on the “have nots” and the pursuit of equal outcomes. The public realm becomes increasingly less masculine (as do men and boys) and the social shift towards a post-industrial economy sees a rise in the value of feminine qualities like empathy. The “peacemaker” wave of cultural evolution also sees men having a greater role in the private realm with the emergence of the “househusband” and the “stay-at-home-dad”.

The dominant values and norms of the cultures we live in have a strong influence on our masculinity. It’s hard to imagine young men today, who are mostly at the explorer and peacemaker stages of masculinity, accepting mass conscription in the way millions of men did in 1914-1918, when most men and women were operating at the “rules and roles” stage of their masculinity and femininity.

Similarly, in peacemaker Scandanavian countries it has become the norm for men to share in the feminine, nurturing role of raising children and women to share in the masculine, provider role of providing a household income. It’s difficult to image men and women in 1914 sharing the roles of nurturer and provider. Of course many women did take on “men’s work” at home while men went to war, but when those men returned, men and women generally returned to their distinct nurturer and provider roles.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MASCULINITY

The psychology of masculinity is perhaps the most interesting aspect to explore as it is in our own psychological world that we experience being a man, being manly and being masculine. Our psychological world is where our gender identity is formed and where we personally experience the influence that biology, society and culture have in shaping our masculinity.

Some biological determinists see gender differences in society as being the result of men’s and women’s psychological preferences and choices. For social and cultural determinists, the choices and preferences men and women express at the micro level are the result of coercion at a macro level. For example, If we don’t give fathers equal rights and opportunities as parents through laws and policies at a macro level, then this will effect the preferences and choices that individual fathers make at the micro level.

So is our masculinity shaped entirely from the outside by the social norms and cultural values that surround us? Or is it our nature that makes us masculine with our male hormones and choromosomes and neuro-biology simply triggering characteristics that have evolved over millennia and are now deeply embedded in the male psyche?

According to the Psychologist Martin Seager who chaired the UK’s first male psychology conference last month, there are three ancient rules of masculinity that create the “male script” that shapes and informs our experience of being a man. These rules are:

  • Men should be fighters and winners
  • Men should be protectors and providers
  • Men should retain mastery and control

It has also been argued that men and women evolve psychologically through three similar stages of development (ie egocentric, ethnocentric and worldcentric),  albeit in a different masculine or feminine voice.

Masculine psychological development is driven by rights: i.e. my rights, our rights, everyone’s rights. Feminine psychological development is driven by care: i.e. my care, our care, everyone’s care.

As you consider whether your masculinity is shaped by nature or nurture you may also reflect on your own masculine and feminine development.

From a masculine perspective do you assert your own rights? Do you take a stand for the rights of people in the groups you belong to, e.g. your family, your country, your gender? Do you recognize the rights of all human beings?

From a feminine perspective do you make sure your needs are taken care of? Are you mindful of the needs of people in groups you belong to, e.g. your family, your country, your gender? Do you recognize the value in taking care of the needs of all human beings?

Finally, what do you think shapes masculinity? Is it the biological differences that make us male? Is it the social systems like technology, the economy and the laws that affect men’s lives? Is it the gender norms and values of the cultures we live in? Or is it all down to male psychology? We’d love to hear your experiences and beliefs about masculinity so please leave us a comment.

Written by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men