We’re living in transitional times.
LAURA KIPNIS
A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE WORLD—THE SPECTER OF GENDER confusion. It plays out in the tug-of-war between conservative and progressive understandings of gender, of maleness and femaleness and other kinds of genderness. Gender-benders embrace the specter, while fundamentalists attempt exorcisms. All around us, gender confusion incites furious debate and anguished questioning. It offers a good opportunity to take stock of men, to reassess and renegotiate what maleness means, and to examine why our beliefs about biology and masculinity seem to map so neatly onto our social and political credos. We need to be clearer about gender confusion, better at distinguishing anxieties and limitations from expectations and choices, more determined than ever to untangle the fairy tales about men from the bodies and souls of real live men.
Admittedly, gender confusion is a developing phenomenon. We still ask, “Is it a boy or a girl?” But even basic ways of defining gender can easily confound us now. Boy or girl? And later, straight or gay or gender nonconforming? Even distinguishing between “sex” and “gender”—how they are both different and intertwined—has become a constant source of reflection and disagreement. Signaling widespread debate and confusion over gender issues, sociologist Michael Kimmel helped launch contemporary feminist studies of men and masculinities with a provocation: “This, then, is the great secret of American manhood: We are afraid of other men. Homophobia is a central organizing principle of our cultural definition of manhood.”1
When gay marriage was legalized in Mexico City in late 2009 (almost six years before it happened for the United States at the federal level), it represented a sea change in attitudes about men and their sexuality—as well as, of course, women and their sexuality. In households around the country arguments erupted about men, love, sex, parenting, religion, and progress.
When mass murderers in the United States are time and again young, white, and male, we are not certain if the link between maleness and violence should be a central part of the deliberations about causes and solutions.
When women and children are offered separate cars on urban subways around the world, we all know this measure is to protect women from men, but uncertainty remains about whether sexual assaults are acts we can stop or just interrupt.
When transgender politics are front and center on popular television programs, and answers to questions about “gender” on application forms can no longer be contained in neat pairs of two, what makes someone a man is increasingly up for grabs. On college campuses, students meeting for the first time now routinely share their names, years, majors, and preferred pronouns: suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, he/she is too antiquated and restrictive for a younger generation.
As women in the United States recovered after the 2008 Great Recession, landing more jobs more quickly than men, men’s contributions to families and communities got reexamined, and the image of man-the-breadwinner became blurrier.
When women who are unmarried by a certain age in China are publicly shamed, people reasonably ask whether men should be treated the same way and why they are not.
When a woman is gang raped on a moving bus in Delhi, or Muslim women are similarly assaulted by Christian Serbs in Bosnia, or when young women in the United States are sexually attacked by young men on college campuses, we ask why. Maybe we say the men are behaving like most male animals do when they can. When confronted by examples like these, often we ask if there isn’t something basic to maleness that compels men as a category to assault women, especially under certain conditions.
All this leads to confusion, debate, concern, and turmoil. Elementary school children come home for supper and ask what a sex change operation is, and can they have one. Debates unfurl about changing titles from Miss and Mrs. to Ms., and then Ms. and Mr. to Mx. Stores carry “gender-neutral clothing.” Revisions from one edition to another of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders become fodder for arguments among a remarkably broad swath of the population about which gender identities are “normal.” Segregated bathrooms, previously spaces generating little controversy, suddenly become the sites of moral panic and legal battles.
After years of debate, gay marriage and gays in the US military receive state sanction. That might feel like a certain resolution to gender confusion. But before anyone could catch their breath, the US Supreme Court informed the world that gays could not receive the same protections as straights (from cake makers, for example), and the president of the United States announced that transgender men and women were officially unwelcome in the US armed forces after all.2
For many LGBTQ activists and scholars in the United States and elsewhere, discrimination against trans people is projected as the next major domain of erotic life to be questioned. Trans politics has captured the popular imagination, triggered new kinds of gender confusion, and highlighted the ties between life, love, and work. As an indication of just how much has changed in a short period of time, consider that in 1996 I was interviewed for a job that was to be a joint appointment between anthropology and gender studies, and at the end of my interview for the position, the chair of the search committee asked me, “Would you consider a sex change operation?” I would like to think that as a result of significant changes in social mores around transsexuality, no one could get away with such a jest twenty years later.
Some elements of gender confusion arise from new conditions, and some aspects of gender have always been more complicated than we may have acknowledged. In recent decades, in the United States and throughout the world, the number of women attending universities has surpassed the number of men. The long-term implications of this trend are only just becoming apparent, including employment patterns, wage differentials, and property ownership. The sudden emergence of the #MeToo movement has demanded an end to male sexual harassment and assault and galvanized women across generations, while men in fields from filmmaking to journalism to academia have fallen from positions of authority.
At the same time, some of our confusion about gender stems from superficial thinking in the past. If gender is often invoked as a way to highlight social problems such as bias and abuse against women by men, how can the same term apply just as much to men as women? After all, men don’t generally face the same kinds of gender discrimination or harassment. The reason is that when we note that men have gender it just means we need to stop treating men as the default human, what sociolinguists call the unmarked category, the group that is the stand-in for everyone. We assume so much about men that goes unspecified, or unremarked, as if only women have gender. Despite this failing, both men and women are products of social norms and expectations related to gender; neither is sprung ready-made simply because of the configuration of the body.3
Our tacit beliefs about unmarked male behavior often color our reactions to male misbehavior, from the criminal to the mundane. This is true as a general rule, but that rule can be challenged, especially at pivotal moments in history. Feminist scholar Gayle Rubin’s insights are particularly relevant to understanding what is at stake in reassessing men and masculinities today. In a 1984 essay, she argued that “contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic conduct have much in common with the religious disputes of earlier centuries.” By comparing sexual and religious claims, Rubin sought to elevate sexual politics in the historical record as deserving of recognition and reexamination.
Even more, taking advantage of the widespread understanding that there were defining moments in the history of religious beliefs and practices, Rubin showed that the same could be said for the history of sexuality. By documenting that there are some “historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized” than in others, she concluded that in these moments, “the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.” In other words, during periods of broad social stress, attitudes about sexuality that may have been accepted for centuries can begin to collapse and change.4
Gender is not the same thing as sex or sexuality. These terms are notoriously difficult to define, but at the risk of oversimplifying, let’s say that usually sex relates to certain biological matters, while gender concerns certain social matters. Sexuality’s biological matters are in turn tough to define. Are these always related to reproduction, for example? Not really, because reproduction doesn’t cover oral sex. Regardless, Rubin’s points about sexuality apply to gender, too, because in certain moments in history we find heightened tension and confusion around gender, and it is precisely at those moments that change can occur, particularly change concerning what we take for granted about gender. Take the military, for example, which often offers illustrations of changing social mores about women and men. When recruitment into the US armed forces seriously lagged in the 1970s, suddenly women were called in to fill the ranks. Attitudes about women and about military service had to change.
There is a caveat, however, in that how things change, and in what direction, is never preordained. It is not inconceivable that if at some future date the military was again able to fill its rolls with men alone, a “reassessment” could be made, declaring that women were again by nature unfit or less fit than men for military assignments, including those involving combat. Call it the Handmaid’s Tale Cautionary Principle: the contest over the future of gender will be determined by the people who live it, so presume nothing for sure about what comes next. People advocating either retrenched conservatism or progressive change are at this very moment vying to resolve gender confusion in one direction or another. Central to the struggle to reassess and renegotiate maleness and masculinities is what we make of men and their bodies.
The Handmaid’s Tale scenario can be alarming, because it is not too far-fetched to imagine that there are men who would advocate for the enslavement of women for their own pleasure. Think “incels,” young men who believe they are “involuntarily celibate,” and that women are torturing them by refusing to have sex with them. Many conservatives acknowledge that women have changed what they expect of men in recent decades, but their aversion to gender change has a fatal flaw: it leaves men behind. With the simplistic reasoning that men are just naturally the way they are, these conservatives leave no room for the possibility of male change: in terms of educational and career achievements, for example, they fear that men will never again outshine women, who for their part over the past century have made significant progress toward gender equality and show no signs of ceding this ground. Women will not suddenly acquiesce to sexual assaults. They will not retreat en masse from working outside their homes. They will not give up their positions of power in business, education, the arts, or government to return to the all-male days. Nor will they give up the vote. And why should they? These gains are hard-won and are now part of our culture. So where does this leave men? That’s a big part of what this book aims to address. If past notions of masculinity are no longer working for many women, men themselves need to explore their options. As often as not, the stimulus to change is coming from women, but the resolution, by definition, must involve men as key players. From confusion, resentment, and even anger can come transformation.5
Women are challenging men to change. They are catalysts for gender change overall. But in order to understand what can and should be expected of men, we first need to understand what men are and can be. There is more involved than men doing their share of domestic work, as important as that is. There are lives on the line. For many around the world, this era of gender instability is a confusing and precarious time. But it is also potentially a time of awakening.
How much biology is held responsible for any human attribute, like race or maleness, is conditioned by the social and political landscape in particular periods of time. The assumptions we make about reflexive qualities associated with men and masculinities are also directly shaped by how much we know about men in diverse cultural settings and historical periods quite different from our own.
For much of the twentieth century in the United States, our dialogue on the relationship between biology and gender has been never ending. Scientific racism and its corollaries under eugenics, as well as scientific sexism, taken for granted in the 1910s and 1920s, came under withering attack in the heyday of social unrest in the 1930s, when progressive ideas about practically everything permeated the social fabric. Post–World War II conservatism tried to reestablish women’s intrinsic place in the kitchen and home, but it was then broadly opposed in the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s. A backlash against feminism followed, taking scientific form in the mid-1970s with the proclamation of an all-encompassing sociobiological theory, which exerted tremendous influence in one form or another in subsequent decades. Never without controversy, the Human Genome Project of the 1990s represented, after eugenics, the second major push of the century for what Jonathan Marks calls “hereditarian scientific ideology.” The #MeToo movement of the late 2010s, though not often directly addressing the issue of what is incorrigible in men, heralded a major counteroffensive against the norms of male sexual predation.6
The trend that emerges from this history is that science often amplifies discourse more than it changes it. Science conveys legitimacy on prevailing ideas (for example, about gender) that themselves arise from political viewpoints. Writing about social Darwinism in the early twentieth century, historian Richard Hofstadter noted, “In determining whether such ideas are accepted, truth and logic are less important criteria than suitability to the intellectual needs and preconceptions of social interests.” To determine the truth and logic of ideas about men and maleness, it never hurts to consider whose interests are served by which viewpoints.7
Dominant theories on human nature—especially racialized and sexualized human natures—had already passed through wild swings in the twentieth century. Scientists had alternated between two poles: one emphasizing that it was physiology that determined aptitude, interests, and abilities, and another stressing instead the role of social constraints and opportunities in the expression of our humanity. In periods of significant social ferment, including around gender issues—for example, the 1930s, 1960s, and 2010s in the United States—gender confusion has prevailed, often in dialogue with influential scientific and public opinion about men and women and whether they are meaningfully dissimilar by nature.
In her history of how aggression and animality became inextricably linked in “colloquial science” in the post–World War II United States, for example, Erika Lorraine Milam asks, “How did evolutionists become trusted experts on questions of humanity’s fundamental essence?” She describes a shift away from comparing life to machines: “Evolutionists imagined human nature as continuous with animal behavior,” and thus “evolutionary theory could speak to a more fundamental question—what did it mean to be human?” Evolutionists, geneticists, and endocrinologists today share the rights to scientifically explain maleness. What these approaches all share is the notion of the body at the center of their scientific definitions of humanness.8
In a sense, you could say that 1949 was a turning point in modern debates about whether we are prisoners of our bodies. That year, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published her luminous manifesto The Second Sex. In it, she critiqued assumptions about intrinsic female behavior and the female body, famously writing that biological considerations “are one of the keys to the understanding of woman. But I deny that they establish for her a fixed and inevitable destiny. They are insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes; they fail to explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her to remain in this subordinate role forever.” The Second Sex was a foundational text for feminist movements across the globe, in part because it defied the widely held idea that women’s bodies uniquely constrained their abilities and actions.9
But The Second Sex became a foundational text not in the decade of the 1950s after it was published, but only later, in the 1960s, as part of the political upsurge challenging male domination and all that came with it. The book contributed to that upsurge, but it needed a political movement to achieve its fuller impact.
By the time de Beauvoir’s study appeared, shortly after World War II, tensions between support for women’s fuller economic participation mixed uneasily with a set of retrenched conservative cultural restrictions on women. It was another time of heightened gender confusion and contestation. By the 1960s, inspired in the United States and elsewhere by the civil rights movement, and later, the anti–Vietnam War movement, the feminist wave rose to new heights.
Not everyone was happy with feminism. Notable in the backlash against radical social change was a landmark publication in 1975 titled Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by Edward O. Wilson. In this text, Wilson explained the social behavior of humans and other animals as functions of biological evolution, offering a macroscopic view in which “the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology.” Wilson, the chief architect of one of the new biological paradigms of the twentieth century, stands out for what seems to me an explicit distaste for certain progressive social movements—including feminism that seeks to eliminate the “natural” differences between the sexes—and for directly linking sociobiology with his rejection of the social upheavals of the era.10
Sociobiologists have long sought to make all scholarship into branches of biology, reducing most human behavior to narrowly conceived Darwinian rules of evolution. Culture in this scenario remains a formal party to the human enterprise, but one created and governed by natural processes. Relying especially on neuroscience and evolutionary biology, human sociobiology asks, in Wilson’s words, “What might the human instincts be? How do they fit together to compose human nature?” The take-home message is plain: “Human beings are guided by an instinct based on genes.” As we will see, the idea of instinct is central to contemporary notions of male sexuality and aggression and to providing essentialist escapes out of gender confusion.11
When gender confusion brings doubt, the answer for Wilson has been to grasp the power of genes and heredity. Some allege that most of Wilson’s science is solid and revelatory, and that his error is overzealous application in extending his claims. Whether or not this is true, Wilson’s successors are partisans of what Richard Prum calls “bandwagon science.” This history gives us reason to maintain a healthy bioskepticism when thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality.12
Like any important scientific treatise, Wilson’s text was both a product of certain broader politics at play and a producer of them. The rise of sociobiology, as well as the storm of criticism that erupted in opposition to its tenets, and those of its successor, evolutionary psychology, was of a piece with its political times. In addition to Wilson’s unnecessary comments about leftists of various eras, as evidence of the political views involved in his theory we might also consider this circumstantial evidence: the first generation of sociobiologists and its staunchest advocates were white southerners. The first generation of sociobiology’s fiercest critics were northern Jewish leftists.13
We will return to Donald John Trump and the election of 2016 later. Here I want to consider the #MeToo movement and gender confusion, because although it was not simply an outcome of the election, #MeToo was easily among the most positive political developments to follow it. Yet as great an impact as the movement had, there were questions about gender that plagued politically progressive forces, contributing to flabbergasted exasperation and real gender confusion.
One question was: How could tens of millions of women vote for Trump, who on the campaign trail dared women to support him as a man’s man, someone who was subject to no higher law than that shared by all naturally, sexually, and aggressively rapacious men? Some 63 million people chose Trump to lead despite the revelations of crude language and actions because they believed that if you let men off the leash that’s just how they will behave, that it’s in the basic makeup of all men to do so, even if some men are too timid to act on these impulses. For those who didn’t agree with this analysis, well, they were deluding themselves with wishful thinking about men, and no doubt about many other things, too.
In trying to understand why so many women felt this way, it was easy to miss key elements of the particular historical period in which the election took place, especially the level of confusion, crisis, and anxiety with respect to gender that was being experienced broadly in the US population. Most election postmortems focused on economic and class concerns among the Trump electorate, but a major conservative backlash against women and gender progress was also underway, and it found shape as a central feature of Trumpian politics.
#MeToo was a reaction to Trump, but it was far more than that as well. If we recognize that the #MeToo movement happened simultaneously with millions of women voting for Trump, we can better view 2016 as a watershed moment of clash and confusion about boys and girls, men and women. And we can better appreciate why so many women did not recoil from the flagrant pussy-grabber, and in fact elected him to the presidency. At a moment of resurgent gender conservativism, when open hostility toward women is being promoted at the highest levels of society around the world, you might expect misogynist men to openly favor one of their own. But women? It is clear that underlying tenets about men and their sexuality and aggression provided these women with the logical explanation to elect this man: they all think about doing it, so get over it.
This moment has become not only a time of politically sanctioned assaults on women, but also a time of restless genders and shape-shifting men and women. Across the globe, “gender” and even “sex” are less stable terms than ever before. To better grasp the opportunities presented by this moment of gender uncertainty, agitation, and transformation, we need finer filters for our preconceptions about men and genetics, heredity, and bodily legacies. We need to be less surprised when men break an arbitrarily imposed mold.
Let’s return to the idea that males of all cultures and species seem to act in remarkably similar ways, and ask if this premise is true. It is possible to come up with strong universal (but wrong) definitions of men and masculinities. In all cultures, men need more sex than women do. We find the equivalents of mansplaining and manspreading throughout history. Human males are generally more irresponsible than females toward their offspring. Men more than women have been in control of politics, economics, and culture throughout history. Even though we find queens leading societies at various times, isn’t it obvious to even the most casual observer that men have always run most institutions, in each and every corner of the globe? Such universal gender definitions must always be interrogated.
Here is the central wager of this book. If we can honestly conclude that men are so similar from one time to another and one place to another, then I am wrong, and some form of biological extremism is warranted. But if I am right, and such thinking is no more than persuasive folk wisdom, then we will need to reassess how we define masculinity and human maleness. I will make this bet because I have two powerful pieces of evidence on my side: variation and malleability.
Gender confusion is historical and cultural: many parts of the world have lived in steady-state confusion around gender and inhabited gender ambiguity with a lot less anxiety. The fact is that extremist claims on gender categories are mostly a matter of a provincial perspective. We in the United States are in some ways just catching up to the rest of the world in acknowledging how complex gender actually is or can be. That’s why it’s high time to get anthropological on the subject of men and masculinities by looking at three remarkable cases.
Flipping through the March 2007 issue of Marie Claire that one of my daughters left on the couch, I came across an article, “Meet Vidal Guerra & His Mother, Antonia: She’s Turning Him into a Girl.” The opening line read: “In Juchitán, Mexico, daughters are more valuable than sons. So mothers are encouraging their boys to become girls.” In southern Mexico, the area known as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec is famous for how openly certain men, known as muxe’, cross-dress as women. They have sex with other like-minded men and also seduce younger men, sometimes for pay. Someone at the fashion magazine was evidently thrilled that a “traditional” indigenous society would host and promote such outré behavior in this mythical queer tropical paradise—How romantic! Erotic indigenes!
A common translation of muxe’ is “transvestite gay man.” But not all muxe’ are gay. And some don’t cross-dress. What the word means in daily life in the town of Juchitán defies this simple label. It refers to a creative form of social organization not found in many other parts of the world. Muxe’ (pronounced moo-SHAY) are people who were born anatomically male, many of whom cross-dress, and, in the context of a fairly well-defined gendered division of labor, most of whom cross-work, too. Muxe’ are not like other men. Some marry women and have children. More have relationships with men, and they sometimes continue to engage in these relationships even if they do marry women. The most common feature is that muxe’ do women’s work, from running the open-air markets to selling goods in the street to doing embroidery to making tortillas or jewelry.14
The intimate relationship between the muxe’ and the women known as Istmeñas (the women of the Isthmus) is at the center of social life. Their role in the community together is legendary in the region, a mix of self-possessed and boisterous public personas. Tourist brochures often go overboard describing Juchitán as a matriarchy and a gay mecca, but the presence of Istmeñas and muxe’ is striking and not found anywhere else in Mexico. Then there’s the popular saying in the Isthmus that mothers favor muxe’ sons, because muxe’ will always be there to help their mothers.
Although the history of the muxe’ is debated, many say this “third gender” long predates the conquest of the area by the Spanish in the early sixteenth century and the rigidly two-gender system the conquistadores brought with them. Though perpetually confusing to outsiders, the muxe’ gender system provides local people of all kinds with a range of ways to embody gender in the world. At the same time, the mythology of the muxe’ as it has been built up around the world has more to do with primordial sensationalism, imaginative sentimentality, and resourceful forms of being anatomical males but acting like females. At least for some muxe’, some of the time.
The very impreciseness of what it means to be muxe’ is itself part of what makes the identity dramatically different from two-gender norms in much of the world, where you are either male or female and there is general agreement about how that issue is settled. To be muxe’ does not necessarily mean to be homosexual. But it can mean that, and often does. Moreover, the place of homosexuality in society as well as of men who cross-dress and cross-work is at the center of the social fabric in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. “In Juchitán,” wrote the poet Macario Matus, “homosexuality is regarded as a grace and a virtue that comes from nature.” Although the outside world has overly romanticized Juchitán as a queer wonderland—homophobia there is still apparent, if more muted than in other parts of Mexico—the muxe’ and the shifting relationship they have had for centuries within families and within the broader Isthmus society do indeed provide a clear example of long-term gender-bending ambiguity and indeterminacy.15
Some have called it “prolonged ritualized homosexuality”; others, child abuse. But no one has denied the historical reality of boy-to-man ritual practices among a people known as the Sambia who have long lived in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. As anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, in particular, has documented, boys in the region are initiated as young as seven years old when they are taught, and forced, to perform fellatio on older boys.16
The rationale seems simple: in order to become men, they must have semen, and to get semen of their own they must first ingest the semen of older males, in this case older boys. At least until fairly recently, there were no Sambia men who had not gone through this initiation over a period of years. Otherwise they could not have become men. When they get older, the boys will in turn have younger boys who fellate them, until these boys become young men and old enough to marry women, at which point they will have sex exclusively with their wives.
This cultural pattern is so at odds with gender norms in the rest of the world that it is a very popular example taught in Introduction to Anthropology classes. If Sambia boys must fellate others, then get fellated, and then they stop any sexual contact with other males and devote their sexual energies to only women, what does this say about sexual orientation, identity, and trauma? About childhood and sexual cruelty? About childhood and erotic excitement? About male bodies, erections, semen, and male sexuality?
In one of his ethnographies on the Sambia, Herdt writes that “from such experiences is born a boy’s sense of masculinity. Masculinity is thus a product of a regime of ritualized homosexuality leading into manhood.” But, he points out, there is more than that involved, more than the symbolic transition from boyhood to manhood and the physical ingestion of semen. Indeed, Herdt insists that, “to be effective, male initiation must convert small, puny boys, attached to their mothers, into virile, aggressive warriors who are first erotically excited by boys and then by women.” Herdt connects the underlying concept of gender and maturation among the Sambia to the erotic scripts they use in the process, which form severe demands on every participant at every stage.17
Respect it or despise it, consider it a set of ritual, sadistic, or erotic practices, the way in which Sambia males become men obliges us to reconsider what is natural and what is not about gender and sexuality among the males of any age or locale.
The nature of maleness and the fluidity of gender boundaries are also central to the lives of a group in India known as the hijras. The hijras are people born anatomically male who transition to a state in which they wear jewelry and women’s clothing, remove facial hair, and grow their hair long. The most committed hijras renounce sexual desire. To achieve the highest status within their community, the renunciation must be sealed through castration.
That maleness is associated with sexuality and genitalia is not unusual in the world. That hijras seek to achieve spiritual purity by sacrificing their sex organs to a Hindu goddess, however, is. They take this path in order to gain the power to confer fertility to married couples and newborn babies, for example, and to participate in Muslim purification and burial rituals. Although some scholars have called hijras the “third gender” of India (as the muxe’ of Mexico are sometimes labeled), others reject that notion altogether, arguing that hijras display a multiplicity of differences—sexual, religious, kinship, corporal—that do not fit neatly into a “third gender” category, much less a dualistic male-or-female framework. Though hijras show why pronouns matter, using she/her/hers over all others, even this concept is too limiting to encapsulate the multiple spaces they occupy in Indian society, some pious and some naughty.18
Hijras are known for two particular kinds of public displays: one is a stylized hand clapping, the other a forceful enactment of their ambiguous sexuality—lifting their saris to expose their genitals, or, better still, to show the space where their genitals used to hang. The flagrant exhibitionist act is meant to shock and confuse, to push passersby to question what it means to be a man, whether someone can be neither a man nor a woman nor even anything else quite so fixed and definable. Whether we view these acts of exposure as gender confusion being imposed on an innocent public or as a way of focusing attention on already existing, if rarely confronted, gender ambiguities, we would have to be ingenuous indeed not to see in these variations the kernels of a challenge to prevailing gender attitudes, relations, and practices on the themes of men and masculinities.
We should identify narrowness and naïveté as obstacles to understanding the possibilities of gender and the perils of gender conformity and of not appreciating the cultural phantasmagoria of what it means to be a man in the world. And we should also guard against the smugness of the idea that everyone else is stuck in narrow definitions about men and maleness, too unseeing to grasp that maleness is as much about possibility as about constraint.
Exploring the actual lives of men in places like Mexico, New Guinea, and India, we find so much variation in what it means to be a man, and in how masculinity is regarded, that it becomes far more difficult than we may have expected to offer neatly packaged characterizations of these concepts, and of what people who share male physiologies experience over the course of their lives. By acknowledging this variation, the long-standing and enduring diversity of ways that embody being a man, we can reassess maleness more fully—and more accurately.
Gender confusion can lead to gender distress when old shibboleths about men and women no longer hold: it might seem as if, to quote Karl Marx, “all that is solid melts into air.” For many, religion provides a mooring in times of confusion, which is why Marx noted that “religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress.” In the same way that religion has long offered a solution to real distress, in our day science might seem a good way to think our way out of gender confusion and distress. In science we can find a way to explain and anchor whatever we are being forced to reconsider about men, maleness, and masculinity.
Marx, in discussing the comfort offered by religion, continued his consideration of real distress, writing, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions,” and then concluded with this famous sentence, which is too often detached from the others preceding it: “It is the opium of the people.” Usually this point is quoted to show how insulting Marx was toward religion. And he was quite critical of the role that organized religion, and religious ideas, had played in history. But he also had a deep grasp of why people find illumination and solace in religion; his writings showed an appreciation of the distress and despair of daily life that motivated people to seek insight and relief anywhere they could find them. Put in context, the “opium of the people” phrase shows an understanding of the lengths people go to in order to cope with social confusion and trauma. We should do no less in our quest to take account of extremist biological views on the meaning of men and masculinities: that is, while critiquing the real harm that such views can do, we should remember that they are ways of seeking insight and relief to cope with gender confusion and distress.19
Although, for understandings of maleness, conservatives and progressives do not represent two clear armies arrayed against each other, it is not difficult to discern general differences in how they regard certain issues, especially in terms of the relevance of our bodies (and animality) to the subject. The clearest line of demarcation concerns the extent to which we think gender is malleable, able to change, or, on the contrary, pretty well fixed by evolution and at birth.
A clear illustration of gender and flexibility is the fact that in 1900, in every national governmental body on earth, in nearly every large company, in just about every university, and in almost every other major social institution, men made up the entire leadership. At that time there were plenty of scientific rationales offered as to why this was the case. After all, if women were meant to lead, why couldn’t we find any women leading anywhere at anything other than in a few monarchies here and there? It all seemed perfectly reasonable, rational, explainable, and permanent. The fact that men have continued to predominate in positions of influence in institutions around the world is of vital importance. That women increasingly exercise authority is even more significant, including as a fundamental refutation of naturalized excuses for women being excluded from power.
If the reason we still find far more men than women in positions of power is because it takes time and struggle to undo centuries of ingrained cultural patterns and prejudice, that’s one thing. But if gender equality and getting women into power in essence represents an unwinnable fight against Mother Nature, then supporting women who seek to buck the gender fates is so much fanciful thinking.
Opposition to the notion of gender, gender relations, and gender identities being flexible persists with great acclaim, given the naysayers. In 2002, the best-selling author and psychologist Steven Pinker wrote, “By now many people are happy to say what was unsayable in polite company a few years ago: that males and females do not have interchangeable minds.” Along the same lines, and moving south from the brain, an acquaintance once informed me, “What’s all the gender confusion? If they’d just pull down their pants I could settle the mystery about who’s a man and who’s a woman.”20
Okay, I’ll bite: What difference does it make if you are male or female? Are these male-female categories fixed? In what sense are these categories important to our individual, social, and political lives? And who gets to make these decisions? By insisting that men’s and women’s minds are really quite discrete, Pinker insinuated that fundamental physiological gender differences are once again being well received by scientists and the broader public, and that despite the changes that formerly occurred in people’s thinking and attitudes, we should be happy to be drawn back to the basics. Pinker believed that the latest findings in cognitive science had proved once and for all that men are barely removed from prehistoric animal urges and instincts, and among the implications of this assertion was his vigorous defense of the idea that rape by men is natural.21
Pinker is not confused about gender. His popularity stems partly from the fact that he feeds off stale preconceptions about boy-girl differences and, using the imprimatur of science, feeds things back to a public eager to hear confirmation of what they already suspected about men, women, Mars, and Venus. Pinker is banking on the fact that his ideas give scientific credibility to the prevailing outlook that human societies have evolved according to natural laws.
Conservative thinking about men and their nature is capacious enough to incorporate not only scientists like Pinker but also a range of religious groups who do not suffer from any confusion about men and masculinity. Far from representing some relics from the past, in the United States key religious groups are imposing increasingly rigid gender demarcations in their canon. Some called it getting back to basics when, for example, the Southern Baptists changed their rules in 2000 to bring them more into sync with how God made men and women differently. Prior to 2000, there were no explicit restrictions on women holding the office of pastor. But that year, in the 18th Article of Baptist Faith and Message, the elders ruled, “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.” Biblical verses were invoked, including 1 Corinthians 14:34: “Let your women keep silence in the churches.”22
The cause of these changes lay less with some new theological revelation and more with the church’s mandated response to an increasing unease and confusion about gender, control, and decision making. The doctrinal changes reflected in good measure how the church was—and is—coping with pervasive gender confusion and distress: with a resounding call to tighten up definitions and regulations for living life in a neatly binary, hierarchical gender world.
The fact that these Bible verses have been around for some two millennia, and presumably the church leadership had read them before, was never explained when the recent changes were made. Something in 2000 compelled these gentlemen to buttress the church’s recognition of gender differences and hierarchies, and that something was a backlash against perceived challenges to the gender dimension of God’s grand design. In no way have the Southern Baptists shown any compunction in answering the gender confusion of followers with anything other than an absolutist credo relegating women further under the authority of their husbands and church elders.23
Neither Pinker and his like-minded scientists nor Southern Baptist patriarchs and their like-minded brethren have taken a liking to the renegotiation of gender categories. They have insisted instead that we renew our commitment and belief that biology and/or God can better extricate us from all such muddle and angst. Some atheists and nonreligious conservatives sound a lot like the religious right when they talk about gender, substituting DNA for God as a way to explain the mysteries of life. They insist that deviation from a “traditional” understanding of gender is ridiculous. These versions of biology (and the Bible) assert you are male or female, and ambiguity is a delusion.
We could dismiss all this as the fringe views of marginal commentators, especially when we hear the even more lunatic warnings among certain of this ilk that transgender children are part of Satan’s plan and that same-sex marriage will lead inevitably to bestiality. We need to take notice of these ideas because they have millions of believers; moreover, we may share some of the premises about stubborn underpinnings, such as begrudging appreciation that there is really something physically compulsory and universal about men’s bad behavior.
Perhaps we just get lazy with our language, not fully realizing the implications of our metaphors. Unwitting assumptions about core differences between males and females are prevalent both in the inferences we make and in the way we conduct our daily lives. You may have heard (or thought), “Like it or not, I have to admit my boy and girl seem to be just so different by nature.” Nonetheless, recent studies show that from birth parents treat newborn boys and girls differently—for example, in how we hold them, how much we hold them, how we manipulate their arms and legs, and how we talk with them.24
If the gender world appears simplistically binary, radical correction may be required for our cross-eyed disorder, to overcome our double vision. Gender confusion is not something to fear. We need to wrestle with it, not quixotically hope it will disappear. Welcoming new ways of thinking and talking about masculinity is possible and especially urgent in times of widespread uncertainty about what it means to be a man. We should be more skeptical of conventional narratives about men and masculinities.
There is nothing necessarily lazy about language that labels men and masculinity. Depending on what is meant, the term “toxic masculinity,” for example, can be a useful way of talking about pernicious forms of acting like a man. But expressions that naturalize masculinity are problematic and often contribute to further confusing what men are and can be. These phrases are often tongue-in-cheek, though never entirely so: “Be a man!” “Take it like a man!” “Grow a pair!” “Man up!” They convey a gap between the target of the injunction and some fetishized version of a man.
Yet there is more at play than phrases. The real problem is thinking that maleness is something instinctive, inherent, natural, essential, built in, and intrinsic to men. We reassess men and masculinities not mainly because men have been mistreated and maligned, or targeted unfairly. We do it because in times of gender confusion if the renegotiation of maleness and gender overall is premised on rooting maleness in extremist versions of the natural gender order of things, our mission is doomed from the beginning.
Continuing to act as if men’s biology is their destiny is the problem. Renegotiating what it means to be men is the answer.