One Class, One Day: Are You Man Enough? (And What Does That Mean?)
American Masculinities probes a fluid concept
Illustration by CSA Images/ B&W Archive Collection/ iStock
Class by class, lecture by lecture, question asked by question answered, an education is built. This is one of a series of visits to one class, on one day, in search of those building blocks at BU.
Being masculine means more than owning a penis.
That’s among the takeaways in Barbara Gottfried’s American Masculinities class, a sociological exploration of the nature of masculinity, or as the plural name suggests, our many different notions of masculinity.
“We argue exactly that it’s not at all biological, that it’s a social construct, and that you are constantly learning gender from practically day one of being born,” says Gottfried (CAS’74), a College of Arts & Sciences instructor and codirector of undergraduate studies in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Notions of masculinity are fluid, she adds, and what’s seen as the ideal male in America has changed over time and varies between regions of the country.
During one class in the WGS course, Gottfried leads a discussion of evolving views of that infamous brand of male, the nerd. Once a pejorative, the word has become, in our internet-dominated era, something of a badge of masculine competence and success. The change can be seen as Gottfried goes around the room, asking students for adjectives describing nerds.
“I date a lot of nerds,” one woman says. “They’re very willing to let someone else take control.” Another agrees, using the descriptor “insecure.” But a third disagrees, arguing alpha males’ bluster can be a cover for insecurity, too. Gottfried reminds her students that one academic article on the syllabus argues that nerds are redefining “hegemonic masculinity,” the culture’s idea of the dominant form of manhood.
While New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is no one’s notion of nerdy, Gottfried suggests that his idiosyncratic, largely vegetarian diet would have raised eyebrows in previous times: “If food has a gender, Brady is not eating in a masculine way. He doesn’t eat steak.”
Students disagree, citing Brady’s strong-and-silent-type discipline—“the ultimate masculine male,” one says—and the fact that his diet is designed to further athletic excellence, a very masculine pursuit.
“OK, he’s the ultimate alpha,” Gottfried cheerfully concedes.
The most noticeable thing in this class on masculinity is that of the two dozen students, only three are men. “There are just not a lot of guys in the gender studies program in general,” says Sage Russell (CAS’17), one of the three. “A lot of people associate it as women’s studies, and so a lot of guys don’t feel like that’s either a thing for them or a thing that they’re interested in.”
He and Safi Aziz (Questrom’17) are perfectly comfortable being isolated representatives of their gender in the class. Gottfried “does a really, really good job of making us feel included,” Aziz says. “We’ll often point out that we are the only men, but ask us about our experience in a certain subject we might be studying, and we might have a take on it in a way one of our female classmates can’t.”
Gottfried’s class “was the main reason why I came to BU on exchange,” says Hannah Haw, a junior exchange student. In her home country of Singapore, “you don’t hear of a masculinities class,” she says, noting that gender studies there are confined to feminism.
Anushka Pinto (CGS’15, CAS’17) took a fall class on gender and war that focused on how some male soldiers use rape to oppress women. When she heard about Gottfried’s course, she thought it would be a perfect follow-up, answering the question of “where masculinity kind of stems from, and the idea of it in society.” The class has led her to shed her biology-only definition of maleness, leading her to see “that masculinity is a performance…from males that they do to other males, to kind of compete with each other.…Whether conscious or subconscious, it’s almost like they’re wearing a mask.”
Men say the class teaches them a thing or two about themselves. “I always thought I knew what masculinity was,” says Russell. Pushed to define it academically, he admits, “I don’t know. It’s so vast and changing.…That’s one of the harder questions I’ve had to answer in my time at BU.”
The traditional American notion of masculinity, Gottfried says, is that “a guy has to be strong, he has to be autonomous, he can’t cry, you have to repress your emotions.”
She says the stereotype exalts positive traits, too, in “that sense of doing right by others, of taking care of others, of being a respected person, of following a certain ethic.…The problem is that the dark underside of masculinity is this repression of emotion, this constant policing of oneself and others to perform an appropriate masculinity, and so on. It’s just very—suffocating.”
And it reverberates in our politics. Last year, 63 million Americans installed as president a man who had boasted about sexually assaulting women, claims he later dismissed as “locker room talk.” While some male voters in interviews decried Donald Trump’s comments, the returns showed “traditional masculinity persists and is a major motivating factor for some guys,” Gottfried says.
Indeed, Americans’ view of masculinity is more inflexible than norms for women, the variations on masculinity notwithstanding, she says. “When guys are younger…they’re constantly trying to figure out where they can fit. And there’s more pressure to be masculine than for women to be feminine these days, in my opinion.
“Nobody even knows what being feminine means anymore.”
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