The Masculine Protest

I am a man in a different way than my father. I always understood that. What it took me a while to understand was that the difference has nothing to do with being a better person (if I even am one). It also has nothing to do with being trans.

Masculinity Discourse has been in the air, lately, because of the election. It’s been said, though not by me, that the whole race is a battle to define masculinity — a contest between “positive masculinity” of the Tim Walz variety and “toxic masculinity” of the sort exemplified by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. 

How we managed to make this entire election about the need for good white dudes, given that a Black woman is on top of the ticket for the first time ever, is a mystery to me. So is the idea that the entire spectrum of male gender presentation comes down to “healthy” and “toxic” (a dichotomy that always reminds me, obscurely but unhappily, of tampons). I could go on — I have, in fact, gone on elsewhere — but that’s not the point. What I’m here to tell you is that I finally read a book on Masculinity that did not make me want to tear my own hair out or throw it at the wall: The unpromisingly named Masculinities, by Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell. 

A reader recommended Connell’s work to me after I wrote this piece on Jonah Hill and the New Masculinity. (I love it when people do this!) What that reader told me is true: Connell gets at everything I was trying to say in that piece, and everything I’ve been trying to say when I complain about Masculinity Discourse — which she calls “Books About Men,” with eye-rolling capitalization — with more nuance and clarity than I ever have. 

Also: Connell is trans. This probably shouldn’t be the determining factor in how you read her, especially since Masculinities was published before she came out, but it endears her work to me. I remember someone asking, after I came out, why someone whose work was “dedicated to exploring the feminine experience” would identify as transmasculine, and it feels oddly validating that the world’s foremost proponent of Masculinity Theory eventually came out as a woman. 

There is, probably, something about experiencing the world as a trans person that makes you likely to resist to pat narratives about gender, and this is Connell’s strong suit. There is not one stable, transhistorical phenomenon that we can call “masculinity,” writes Connell. There are masculinities — endless ways of marking oneself as legibly male, or masculine, or a man, all of which are heavily context-dependent and constantly being negotiated. “Hegemonic masculinity,” the white cishet masculinity of the ruling class, is an abstract ideal, a standard, a yardstick by which men are measured and usually fall short, but everyone outside of the ruling class has a masculinity, too. 

To explain what I mean, I have to take you to another book, Gregg Bordowitz’s Some Styles of Masculinity, in which Bordowitz riffs on different models of Jewish masculinity that were important to him: Comedians (Lenny Bruce, Jon Stewart), rock stars (Lou Reed, Bob Dylan) and so on. It is important, Bordowitz says, that these were specifically Jewish masculinities, because “being a man,” in a Jewish context, is traditionally governed by different rules and standards than it is for white Christians. 

“Historically, the ideal for Orthodox Jews is that men study all the time and women work,” Bordowitz says. “Men handle the spiritual aspects of life; women handle the material aspects of life. Men stay at home and go to yeshiva; women deal with money, which means they travel for business, meet people beyond the community, and see the world.” 

There might be all sorts of qualities that marked someone as especially manly, in that context: Being erudite, eloquent, funny, a good arguer, and so on. None of those qualities translate as “masculine” according to the stoic, musclebound, taciturn Clint Eastwood definition, but you can’t call them “feminine,” either. You also can’t call them “feminist” just because the women worked. The spiritual sphere is privileged above the material sphere; what men do is still seen as more important than what women do, even if the women are doing what men would do in a different setting. These patterns are simply masculine, and even patriarchal, in a different way than white Christians are used to. 

The dominant culture typically refuses to recognize these distinctions — rather than try to understand culturally specific masculinity on its own terms, we conclude that the Other is Doing Gender Wrong, giving rise to, say, stereotypes of Jewish men as nerdy or wimpy. That dominant culture also tends to project its own definitions of gender onto contexts where they don’t apply, warping history in the process. 

Another example: The Invention of Women, by Yoruba scholar Oyeronke Oyewumi. Yoruba language utilizes one gender-neutral pronoun, Oyewumi says, and most names are gender-neutral. So are most titles: “There are no gender-specific terms denoting son, daughter, brother or sister,” and even “oko and awa — two categories translated into English as husband and wife, respectively,” in fact refer to living arrangements and not gender. Yet, when English-speaking scholars wrote Yoruba history, they translated the gender-neutral terms oba and alaafin, both of which mean “leader,” as “king,” a male title. From there, they seem to have simply assumed that the long lists of historical leaders — with their gender-neutral pronouns and gender-neutral names — were all men, despite centuries of oral history that said otherwise. 

This example fascinates me because there’s no evidence of conscious malice. The European historians didn’t set out to erase women from history; leadership was just so decisively associated with masculinity in their culture that they couldn't imagine non-men doing it. Yet, by rewriting the past, they reshaped the present: The idea that Yoruba society had always been led by men was taught to colonized Yoruba people, thereby priming them to accept Western-style patriarchy as natural and inevitable. 

What counts as “masculine” depends on who you are and where you are, but also on when you are, because definitions change over time. This last example comes from Connell herself: There’s nothing implicitly masculine about computers, she says. Spending all day at a desk, pressing buttons on a little box, is far removed from the sort of rugged physical labor we think of as macho. Computer programming was originally a woman’s profession. But marketers came up with a way to define computer culture as masculine — entrepreneurial, risk-taking, innovative, etc. — and ads started to link personal computers with race cars and rockets, big, tough machines that only a big, tough man would know how to handle. Thus, knowing a lot about computers became a specifically, nerdily masculine thing to do. 

The openly fashy, masculinity-obsessed techbros we have today — your Marcs Andreessen, your Elons Musk — might not exist at all, had a Madison Avenue firm not been assigned the task of making sure computers weren’t just for girls any more. Definitions of masculinity may seem vaporous or silly, but they exist within history, and carry real social and political force. When we shift the definitions, the balance of power in the world shifts as well.