Masculinity/Masculinities

  Masculinity and Masculinities

To define masculinity, we have to determine whether to concern the cultural and the historical circumstance. Masculinity is a unitary conception determined by the biological. However, with the culture and the historical period in which a man lived, various masculinities emerge.

The biologically determined masculinity is the sex. It’s founded on DNA structure and the level of testosterone. And it serves an essentializing function that ignores the factors such as culture and history which also form the masculine (Oxford dictionary online).On this side, masculinity is innate. The different of the masculine and the feminine is the different of the body. It’s the instinct of males direct them to act manly. For example, in 1984, even though Winston is married, and to be caught with a prostitute means “five years in a forced-labor camp (George Orwell, 68)”, he still go with the party woman (66-72). The strong desire of sex is one of the qualities of masculinity as a product of biology. Besides this, the masculine traits include strength, competency and self-centeredness, which is distinguish from that of women: “love, communication, beauty and relationships” (Gray, 18).

     As we all know, most of the blue collars are male. That is because men are stronger than women. They have muscles, and can do harder work. We can see that sports and other magazines with a large male readership are filled with ads for muscle-enhancing products - often equating muscles with violent power. Because this power, they are also aggressive and dominant. From the time of hunting societies, men have competed with each other for women, wealth and fame. Women are only the reward of the man who wins the competition, so that when it comes to the relationship between them and females, males are hegemonic. For instance, the novel 1984 is on the social problem caused by big brother, and since that male is the major group of the society, the main character, Winston, is a man. And in the ads for beers, the major roles are always males.

But, once the impact of history and culture are taken into account, the biology is less important. Masculinities are plural, specific with each culture and historical period. As an example, in Medieval Europe, masculinity is chivalrous and Christian. It lead to a brief that “a man's body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of Men” (Hughes, p.99). This can be seen in the novels describing the spirit of knights such as King Arthur and knight of the round table. While nowadays, this kind of masculinity doesn’t dominate pop culture. It may still contain the compassion of the weak, but it’s quite different. For example, in some extent, the booming sex tourism is caused by males desire to prove their masculinity on the women and the children from undeveloped countries. This is no longer masculinity in medieval era.

All in all, masculinity determined by biological is the instinct of males. But standards of masculinity vary from time to time, from culture to culture, which result in masculinity.

                                                            Reference

Oxford dictionaries online. Oxford University Press,2011. Retrieved from:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/masculinity

Gray, John, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus New York: HarperCollins, 1992

Owell, George,1984. London:Penguin,2008

Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown at Oxford. London: MacMillan,1889