Hegemonic Masculinity

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Negative Effects of Reality TV In today’s society many television Reality Shows have been geared for total entertainment purposes only, unlike many shows of the past that displayed family values, ethics and morals. For instance, Reality Shows are supposed to be based on real life situations and experiences. Reality Shows are built upon showing and exposing human emotions. In this aspect reality television has successfully portrayed an image that many viewers can now relate to. In reality the characters of reality television are somewhat like celebrities.

There is no doubt, that reality television provides viewers with such entertainment that does not exemplify family values. In fact, reality television has influenced our society in different ways by showing loud and rambunctious behavior. These types of shows exhibit plenty of profanity, sexual content, violence and drugs. In today’s age, nearly every home has at least one television, it is easy imagine how the idea of what is real and what is fiction can become misinterpreted.

The cultivation theory essentially holds that television viewing is a primary factor in cultivating a particular culture’s beliefs about the everyday world (Infante, Rancer, & Womack, 1997). George Gerbner knew that television was becoming an important part of the average citizen’s life and suspected that it was quickly replacing the importance institutions like family, school, and church in the enculturation process (Gerbner & Gross, 1976).

In 1973 PBS released the first reality television show: an unintentionally breathtaking series called An American Family. The show promoted a family, the Louds, who volunteered to let PBS film their lives for seven months. During the time the show was aired the Louds, faced marital breakup of the parents, Bill and Pat and the confession of their son Lance’s sexuality. Many American viewers enjoyed viewing this reality show, in spite of the family falling apart.

Reference

http://www.uky.edu/~drlane/capstone/mass/cultivation.htm

Gender roles have been continually redefined throughout literary history. The evolution of sexuality and gender is presented in Behind The Scenes At The Museum, A Streetcar Named Desire and Tales Of Ovid as driven by context and in particular patriarchal society.

From Hughes’ classical presentation of a ‘human passion in extremis’, so strong that it ‘combusts, levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural’ to Streetcar’s ‘succes de scandale’[3], dealing with sex to an extent, and in a manner not yet encountered on the stage and then Museum’s sterile and comical view of sex, the mutability of sexuality and gender has transcended generations but has been subject to contrasting literary perspectives. The degree of fluidity of gender can be clearly seen to mirror the context of societal and historical change within which the three works were created.

In the introduction of Ovid, Hughes describes the significance of the tales being written at ‘the moment of the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire. The Greek/ Roman pantheon had fallen in on men’s heads’ and Hughes makes a clear attempt to equate Adonis with Jesus Christ, describing him as ‘the miraculous baby’ and ‘perfection. For all its Augustean stability, Rome was at sea in hysteria and despair, caught in a tension between the sufferings of the gladiatorial arena and ‘a searching for spiritual transcendence’.

This era of volatility is reflected in the marked fluidity of sexuality in Hughes’ Ovidian world, where men and women becomes birds and trees. As such, identity itself is problematic; gender can no longer be exclusively prescriptive. According to Leo Curran, Ovid recognised the ‘fluidity, the breaking down of boundaries, due to the uncontrollable variety of nature and the unruliness of human passion. ’Hughes unsettlingly explores this in the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, where the carnal nymph Salmacis rapes the bashful boy Hermaphroditus.

As he continues to struggle, she prays that ‘we never, never/ shall be separated, you and me’. Her plea is hubristically answered and, ‘with a smile’, the gods look on as ‘the two bodies/ melted into a single body/ seamless as the water.  The conjunction of the two sexes seems incompatible as observed in the drowning of what a modern audience would recognise as a hermaphrodite. Hughes’ selection of this myth, with the same destructive conclusion as Ovid’s original, conveys the commingling of the two sexes as resulting in the debilitation of the male qualities, rather than their strengthening, thus presenting effeminacy pejoratively.

The dissolution of gender boundaries is reiterated by Hughes in his story of Tiresias. Tiresias’ passage through femininity, ‘having lived and love in a woman’s body…and also in the body of a man’ leaves him with the unique experiences of both sexes. His knowledge about feminine pleasure, that women do, as Jupiter contends ‘end up with nine-tenths of the pleasure’, angers Jupiter and his revelation proves damaging as she blinds him. It takes only one man, formerly a woman, to destroy the reassuring view that placed wives beyond the influence of pleasure.

Social upheaval was also explicit at the beginning of the 20th century. Two World Wars had, temporarily, shifted the gender power balance with women filling vacant male roles only for these to be reassumed in the 50’s. William’ Streetcar is an astute depiction of the continual metamorphosis gender roles were encountering in the struggle for supremacy, both at home and nationally between the Old South and the New America. In Streetcar, Blanche, as a manifestation of the antebellum, is taken away, leaving Stanley holding his new son.

The new decedent acts as a symbol of the end of the decaying Du Bois line and a sort of victory for the new Kowalski family. As the Cambridge Companion To Tennessee Williams states ‘Theatregoers… did not easily shake off lingering apprehensions that were born of the 1930’s depression and nurtured by the 1945 unleashing of nuclear weapons… in this climate, the loose structure and morale ambiguities of Streetcar struck a chord of truth. ’ Furthermore, when Williams describes Stanley shouting ‘Sttellah! in a ‘heaven splitting voice’, we see the further power of the Kowalskis, who have rocked the status quo to the same extent as Venus’ ‘doomed love’ in Ovid, that means she has ‘neglected even Olympus’. Ted Hughes’ exploration of gender fluidity is a more progressive one, in that a 21st century audience is much more open to transgender and sexual deviance than Tennessee Williams’ contemporaries. Williams’ homosexuality was illegal for the greater part of his life, but he found ways, open or oblique, of speaking of them in his plays.

There is, indeed, a real sense in which Williams is a product of his work. When he began to write he was plain Tom. The invention of ‘Tennessee’ was not merely coterminous with the elaboration of theatrical fictions; it was of a piece with it. In that sense it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that he was the product of the discourse of his plays. Indeed he created female alter egos, such as Blanche in Streetcar, before he began, as he did in later life, to dress up as a woman. Where did his work end and his life begin?

The man who consigns Blanche to insanity later found himself in a straitjacket. As critic Hana Sambrook more explicitly notes ‘there are those who believe that the tragic figure of Blanche Dubois is a transsexual presentation of the promiscuity of Williams’ himself’. Certainly, Blanche’s many ‘intimacies with strangers’, her unfeminine like licentiousness and charade of hypocrisy aligns Williams with his protagonist. For a man for whom the concealment of his true sexual identity was for long a necessity, the fragmentation of the self into multiple roles offered a possible refuge.

Blanche enters the play an actress and Williams creates her character as a series of roles, by using structural techniques to focus the audience upon her even when off stage; heard bathing ‘serenely as a bell’ whilst singing obliviously in ‘contrapuntal’ contrast to the lurid revelations of her past being detailed by Stanley in the adjoining room. Blanche’s desire for disguise is a phony pretension, using the smoke and mirrors of her alcoholicism and fine clothing, to concoct an elaborate alternative reality she can abscond to, enabling her to ‘put on soft colours, the colours of butterfly wings, and glow’.

This indirect, dramatic language and vivid imagery is typical of her escapism and her view of herself as ‘delicate’reinforces the image of Blanche as a fragile moth that pervades Williams’ stage directions. Despite this, Williams does not wholly present Blanche as a ‘faded Southern belle’ as some critics claim, but rather sheds a favourable light on Blanche’s attempts to protect and preserve the genteel values of the old Southern civilisation.

Williams’ states that “Blanche was the most rational of all the characters [he’d] created”, evident in her contradictory wilful ignorance of the causes of the loss of Belle Reve, yet her understanding that the root cause was her family’s ‘epic fornications’. Williams also reveres Blanche as his ‘strongest character in many ways’ and her unique internal integrity of ‘Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart’ has seen her resist the brutality and savagery of a relentless modern society. Thus, even to the very end of the play, Blanche has never yielded to any coarse violent actions and rude behaviour, crying “Fire!

Fire! ” during Mitch’s attempted rape and fighting Stanley to her physical limit with a broken bottle when eventually violated. When the big Matron tries to subdue her physically on the floor, she never stops resisting until the Doctor gently offers her his arm like a real gentleman. Blanche’s dignified leaving further indicates her spiritual integrity, as critic Robert James Cardullo claims ‘Blanche’s ascension from crucifix pinioning on the floor and her spirited leading the way out of the hell of her sister’s home creates a moving tragic catharsis for the audience…

Blanche’s defeat has considerable aesthetic dignity’. Williams’ literature was strangely unmoved by the issue of gay rights and the issue of homosexuality that was so prominent in his private life, while clearly a strand in his work, was never a central theme and certainly never defended or promoted, neither publically nor politically. He seems to use Blanche as an expression of a conflict which clearly existed between his morality and sexuality, never to be resolved and never aired fully in his plays, despite its pertinence in the play’s political context.

By contrast, in Behind The Scenes many aspects of life seem constant and the stability of gender roles seems to reflect this. In Museum, the past permeates the present and the present is doomed to replicate the past. The shop ghosts and objects such as the pink glass button that goes rolling down the years act as chronological touchstones and history repeats itself through the lives of successive women. Sophia, Alice, Nell and Bunty all lead lives marred by misery, disappointment and domestic drudgery.

None of these women marry for love and all encounter marital strife. Alice, an impoverished widower marries Frederick in order to give up teaching, Nell marries Frank out of desperation, her two previous fiances having been killed in the war, and Bunty marries George when abandoned by her American fiance Bick. Thwarted in potential, trapped and unhappy, the women share a sense that they are ‘living the wrong life’.

Parallels between past and present create a sense of historical inevitability that is endorsed by a series of echoes between the lives of different women. Nell falls for Jack who has ‘high, sharp cheekbones… like razor clam shells and by the end of the novel, Ruby has fallen for a strikingly similar Italian with cheeks ‘as sharp as knife blades’. Bunty looks like Nell and Ruby looks like Alice. The latter pair both believe in ‘destiny’ and embrace it in the mistaken form of men.

Alice, Bunty and Ruby have all ‘had enough’. With typically perceptive narration for her tender age, Ruby accounts for this hereditarily as ‘one of those curious genetic whispers across time dictates that in moments of stress we will all (Nell, Bunty, my sisters, me) brush our hands across our foreheads in exactly the same way that Alice has just done’. The reference to genes by Atkinson implies that behavioural patters are inherent and inescapable.

Even Adrian, as the sole gay man in the novel, is presented in cliched terms as having an interest in hairdressing, his intimate conversation with a barman prompting a dramatically ironic exclamation of ‘that’s queer’ from the unwitting Uncle Clifford. Gender roles within all three texts are enforced through the sexual dominance of men over their female companions. Critic C. W. E Bigsby noted that ‘the shock of Streetcar…lay in the fact that this was the first American play in which sexuality was patently at the core of the lives of all its characters, a sexuality’.

Williams presents sex as having the power to redeem or destroy, to compound or negate the forces, which bore on those caught in a moment of great social change. The ‘gaudy seed bearer’ Stanley is a bestial representation of the new South and he uses his intense virility and sexual power to great effect. His sexual magnetism is exemplified by the symbolic package of meat thrown to a visibly delighted Stella in the opening scene. The connotations of his sexual proprietorship over Stella and her sexual infatuation with him are not lost on the watching Negro woman.

In stark contrast, Bunty feigns deafness at the butcher’s ‘innuendo laced conversations’, exposing him as a ‘bluff parody of himself’. Her caustic description of him as ‘a pig…smooth shiny skin stretched tightly over his buttery flesh’ is both comical and telling in her uptight rejection of his smutty behaviour. This mordant tone continues into the awkwardly comical depictions of male sexual supremacy in Behind The Scenes’ fornications.

Ruby’s conception by a typically tipsy George and equally typically stoic Bunty who is ‘pretending to be asleep’, summarises well Atkinson’s presentation of a tired female submission to male virility in the repressed society of 40’s England. George’s demise is with his trouser round his ankles, a less than dignified ‘epileptic penguin’, as the World Cup final ‘carries on regardless’ in another typically callous death of Behind The Scenes. This dominance leads to a trapping sexual dependence of women upon men, symbolically reflected by Williams in the eponymous streetcar, ‘bound for Desire, and then for the Cemeteries’.

The streetcar stands for Blanche’s headlong descent into disaster at the hands of her lust. Like the streetcar’s destination, Desire, the stop called Elysian Fields is an obvious symbol; an ironic fantasy however, as the Elysian Fields – the abode of the blessed dead in Greek mythology – turns out to be a rundown street in New Orleans. The very same symbol of the ‘rattle trap streetcar’ is used by both sisters in scene 4, as a euphemism for sexual experience. They speak explicitly of the ‘blunt desire’ that decides their choice. In answer to Stella’s question ‘haven’t you ever ridden on that street-car?  Blanche’s bitter riposte of ‘it brought me here displays both self-knowledge and self-condemnation of her current destitution. Ominously the matter-of-fact Stella offers no words of self-criticism prior to the only fleeting moment that she confronts her guilt; ‘oh god, what have I done to my sister? ’. Moments later, in the middle of her ‘luxurious’ sobbing, she yields to Stanley’s lovemaking, compounding her guilt. This dependence is echoed in ‘Tiresias’ from Ted Hughes’ Ovid where women are said to take “nine tenths of the pleasure” during sex.

Men are vital for women to experience any sexual satisfaction and female desire ultimately renders them reliant and weakened. Their dependence is compounded by a financial reliance. Marxist feminist theory argues an economic dependence on men deprives women of the right to dominate their own fate, reducing them to existence by male affiliation. On “a teacher’s salary…barely sufficient for her living expenses”, Blanche ‘had to come [to New Orleans] for the summer’ as ‘[she] didn’t save a penny last year’.

In the wake of her husband’s suicide and the ‘epic fornications’ of her ‘grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers’, she is forced again to turn to men for financial support, depending, as is her mantra ‘on the kindness of strangers’. Her attempted allurement of Stanley is based on the recognition that ‘maybe he is what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve’. Her spiral of desperation turns to Mitch and finally the nebulous millionaire Shep Huntleigh who comes to stand as a symbol of material strength of dependence and guarantee for women, more exactly for Blanche.

Blanche recognises that Stella could be happier without her physically abusive husband, Stanley, yet her alternative of Shep still involves complete dependence on men. When Stella chooses to remain with Stanley, she chooses to rely on, love, and believe in a man instead of her sister. Williams does not necessarily criticise Stella—he makes it quite clear that Stanley represents a much more secure future than Blanche does. That Shep never materialises strongly suggests that if women place their hope and fortune on men, their oppressed and subordinate status can never be changed.

Bunty, like Stella, who has to request that her husband “better give [her] some money”, confirms her reliance on George in having “no intention of working after her marriage”. Bunty’s quest for stardom and self-discovery conflicts with a mode of motherhood that requires service, sacrifice, and selflessness. As she moves into adulthood during World War II, Bunty tries out a series of different quixotic identities in the search for selfhood; Deanna Durbin, Scarlett O’Hara and Greer Garson.

However, as her family grows, her dreams diminish, and Bunty is forced to forgo a self she has not yet fully realised. The erosion of self is symbolised by the abbreviation of her name for Bernice, to Bunty, which George truncates to ‘Bunt’. Ironically, George marries Bunty only because ‘he thinks she will be a big help in the shop’ and thus Bunty is comically presented as trapped in the role of the ‘Martyred wife’ despite her belief that marriage to George would free her from the graft that she imagines herself to be ‘above’.

Ruby’s mock expression of pity in her narrative gives an account of Bunty’s woes in a sardonic tone; her tranquilisers are ‘Bunty’s little helpers’ and Atkinson’s pathetic portrayal of Bunty as put out but ultimately accepting of her role as a married woman contrasts with Williams’ poignant subdual of Blanche and Stella. Sexual and financial dominance coalesces in another tool for the subjugation of women; rape. Hughes presents his women in terms of capital value; Philomena is a ‘priceless gift’, available to ‘cash in your whole kingdom for’.

As a result of rape in Streetcar and Ovid, the victimised females are presented as devalued and diminished in ‘worth’ in the views of patriarchal society. Myrrha, ‘utterly disgusted with her life’ is described as ‘polluted’ and ‘contaminated’ in the wake of her incestuous act, which ‘removes [her] from life and death… in some nerveless limbo’. Male exploitation of Blanche’s sexuality has left her with an equally poor reputation.

This notoriety makes Blanche an unattractive marriage prospect, but, because she is destitute, Blanche sees marriage as her only possibility for survival, trapping her in the cycle of submission to men. It is telling that Blanche’s rape is not condemned, and it can be argued that Williams portrays her violation as inevitable in patriarchal culture and also self-inflicted by her provocative behaviour, a controversial thought for a modern audience. In her ingratiation of Mitch, she uses all kinds of strategies to “deceive him enough to make him-want” and conceals her true age, because “Men don’t want anything they get too easy.

But men lose interest quickly… when the girl is over-thirty”. This represents the internalisation of patriarchal society that her behaviour has precipitated. Her trunk, symbolic of her own displaced and materialistic identity, is full of the flashy pretension of fake finery that she perceives men to desire, and the Chinese lampshade softens the glare of the Mitch’s gaze on her fading beauty and adds to the ‘magic’ Blanche desires; the dressing up of ugly reality. However, both are ultimately violated with a strong sense of dramatic irony.

When first Mitch and then Stanley tear off the paper lantern, she cries out as in pain. The opening of the trunk becomes a divesture of interiority – Stanley’s question ‘what is them underneath? ’ becomes a central one as the trunk functions as a metonymy for some unchartered territory about to be fundamentally disrupted, but to no condemnation from the playwright. Similarly, even when the male hunter Actaeon is punished upon inadvertently offending the nakedly bathing goddess Diana with his sight, Hughes suggests that Actaeon’s crime was one of fortune: ‘Destiny, not guilt, was enough/For Actaeon.

It is no crime/To lose your way in a dark wood’. Hughes suggests here that Actaeon’s death is the necessary ordeal to lead him through hell to paradise. When sexual aggression or rape is exhibited by females however, the result and portrayal are markedly different. Salmacis and Blanche are remarkably alike in this respect. Salmacis is a naiad (a nymph who presided over springs and brooks) and as such is described in typically natural imagery as ‘perfect / as among damselflies’, ‘gathering lilies for a garland’.

This peaceful language of the natural world is tinged however with a more foreboding aggression in the ‘viper’ like elegance of her ‘sinewy otter’ like body, which portends her sexual experience in contrast to the innocent young boy Hermaphroditus, who blushes at the naming of love. Hughes places the emphasis on the feminine snares of the lascivious water nymph, who is aggressively sexual in a very Blanche like manner. She knows ‘she had to have [Hermaphroditus] and proceeds to unashamedly flirt, ‘checking her girdle… her cleavage’.

Her sensual language is heightened by its inference of a taboo love with the incestuous reference of ‘what a lucky sister! As for the mother/ Who held you, and pushed her nipple between your lips/ I am already sick with envy’, exemplifying her sexual command over the boy, who refuses her advances without really knowing what she wants. He desires only to bathe and his obliviousness to her advances are indicative of his youth and inexperience but also his male gender precluding him from the experience of passion, as echoed in the ‘nine tenths of the pleasure’ that the female takes in Tiresias.

Thus he becomes an easy prey and ‘Like a snake’ she ‘flings and locks her coils/ around him, a ‘tangle of constrictors, nippled with suckers’ – the disturbing organic metaphors further exemplifying her atypical literary position as the female aggressor of rape. Throughout this scene however, Salmacis is never rendered as in sexual control; Hermaphroditus ‘will not surrender/ or yield the least kindness/ of the pleasure she longs for/ and rages for, and pleads for’. Hughes’ implication of their demise as a result of their unnatural union is clear – the only way in which a woman can rape a man is if he is not clearly male.

To conclude, in the words of an anonymous critic ‘gender roles figure so prominently in literature that they begin to take on a life of their own, whereas to become fluid in the mind of the writer and reader alike… it is evident that when working with ambiguity, man and woman, whose boundaries are few and far between, become locked in a dimension of transmutation’. These words said of Ovid, offer a concise summary of the three works, applicable mainly to Hughes’ characters such as Salmacis and Tiresias, and Williams’ Blanche.

Ultimately however, despite the differing time periods in which they were written the role of gender is an inextricable fibre in ancient, southern and modern literature. The three writers posit sexuality and gender contrastingly; Williams’ uncompromising ‘personally and socially powerful’ play, Hughes’ matter-of-fact narration and Atkinson’s comically cliched bildungsroman. A prominent similarity in the treatment of gender by all three authors is the ability of each to manipulate and intertwine not only their ideas of the gender line but also those of their contextual popular culture in order to effectively and complexly examine its role.

Gender is an factor of an individual’s being that permeates all aspects of his or her life. From the moment a person is born into the world, he or she is classified either as a female or a male. The way society treats and reacts to this person is then treated accordingly to that initial categorization. What is it then that epitomizes the masculinity and the femininity of an individual. How does American society view a feminine individual and how does this differ from how the same society views masculine individuals?

Masculinity refers to a human’s personal level or degree of manliness. Chafetz (35-36) describes masculinity as being distributed over seven areas: physical, functional, sexual, emotional, emotional, intellectual, interpersonal, other personal characteristics.

A masculine individual is said to be virile, strong, able to provide for his family, sexually aggressive and experienced, unemotional, practical, dominating, free, demanding, and success-oriented. Thus an individual who is more able to take risks and who is better able to exhibit a sense of confidence and independence is considered to be more masculine. Physical attributes such as facial hair, toned muscles, and large body frames are also more characteristic of individuals who are considered to be masculine.

Femininity, on the other hand, is directly linked by the 1996 Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language to traits  such as gentleness, kindness, and patience (708). Feminine characteristics are usually associated with nurturing and life-giving characteristics. The woman’s traditional role as a mother and wife are the most emphasized qualities of a feminine individual. Thus a female who is demure, obedient, and able to display physical attributes that are favored in the life-giving process, such as large breasts, wide hips, and full lips, is considered to be more feminine than most.

Studies have shown that a man’s traditional view of a female or feminine individual is based heavily on masculine ideology, which focuses centrally on the sexual aspect of a woman’s breasts and bodies. The propagation of these masculine ideologies were even more stressed by the fact that media continues to portray females as beings whose primarily roles are focused on their sexual bodies. (Ward et al, 712)

Many can see, however, that the barriers of traditional gender roles are being broken by modern American males and females. More and more females are found in the workplace, becoming the breadwinners for their family. Females are also seen engaging in extreme and traditional sports. Women’s roles in American society were seen to drastically change in the late twentieth century as a result of the new opportunities given to them (Mackey & Immerman, 271)

There are also men who have opted to become the stay-at-home parents. It is has become more acceptable for men to show their emotions. And a new breed of men have come to be called metrosexuals, males who indulge in their physical appearance in the same way that was previously only attributed to feminine individuals. The breaking of stereotypes of masculinity and femininity has become rampant in the United States and this may well prove to be the beginning of the end of the reign o traditional views of masculinity and femininity in American society. Even though sex and gender are clear categorical divisions established upon birth, the long-established ramifications of being male or female and the parameters that these traditions set can be overcome.

Works Cited

Chafetz, Janet S. Masculine/feminine or human?:an overview of the sociology of sex roles. IL: F.E. Peacock Publishers, 1974

“Femininity” Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. 1996.

Mackey, Wade, C., & Immerman, Ronald S “The fertility paradox: gender roles, fertility and cultural evolution” Mankind Quarterly 45(2005):271-

Ward, Monique L., Merriwether, Ann, & Caruthers, Allison. “Breasts are for men: media, masculinity ideologies, and men’s beliefs about women’s bodies.” Sex Roles 55(2006): 703-714

University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts – Papers Faculty of Arts 1993 What Is Hegemonic Masculinity? Mike Donaldson University of Wollongong, miked@uow. edu. au Publication Details Donaldson, M, What Is Hegemonic Masculinity? , Theory and Society, Special Issue: Masculinities, October 1993, 22(5), 643-657. Copyright 1993 Springer. The original publication is available here at www. springerlink. com. Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: research-pubs@uow. edu. au Theory and Society, Vol. 22, No. 5,

Special Issue: Masculinities, Oct. , 1993, pp. 643-657. What Is Hegemonic Masculinity? Mike Donaldson Sociology, University of Wollongong, Australia Structures of oppression, forces for change A developing debate within the growing theoretical literature on men and masculinity concerns the relationship of gender systems to the social formation. Crucially at issue is the question of the autonomy of the gender order. Some, in particular Waters, are of the opinion that change in masculine gender systems historically has been caused exogenously and that, without those external factors, the systems would stably reproduce. 1) For Hochschild, the “motor” of this social change is the economy, particularly and currently, the decline in the purchasing power of the male wage, the decline in the number and proportion of “male” skilled and unskilled jobs, and the rise in “female” jobs in the growing services sector. (2) I have argued that gender relations themselves are bisected by class relations and vice-versa, and that the salient moment for analysis is the relation between the two. (3) On the other side of the argument, others have been trying to establish “the laws of motion” of gender systems.

Connell, for instance, has insisted on the independence of their structures, patterns of movement. and determinations, most notably in his devastating critiques of sexrole theory. “Change is always something that happens to sex roles, that impinges on them. It comes from outside, as in discussions of how technological and economic changes demand a shift to a ‘modern’ male role for men. Or it comes from inside the person, from the ‘real self’ that protests against the artificial restrictions of constraining roles.

Sex role theory has no way of grasping change as a dialectic arising within gender relations themselves. ” It has no way of grasping social dynamics that can only be seriously considered when the historicity of the structure of gender relations, the gender order of the society, is the point of departure. (4) This concern with broad, historical movement is linked to the question of male sexual politics. Clearly, if men wish to challenge patriarchy and win, the central question must be, who and where are the “army of redressers? (5) But “the political project of rooting out the sexism in masculinity has proved intensely difficult” because “the difficulty of constructing a movement of men to dismantle hegemonic masculinity is that its logic is not the articulation of collective interest but the attempt to dismantle that interest. (6) It is this concept of “hegemonic masculinity” on which the argument for autonomy of the gender structures turns, for it is this that links their broader historical sweep to lived experience.

Put simply, if the gender system has an independence of structure, movement, and determinations, then we should be able to identify counter-hegemonic forces within it; if these are not identifiable, then we must question the autonomy of the gender system and the existence of hegemonic masculinity as central and specific to it. On the other hand, if gender systems are not autonomous, then the question “why, in specific social formations, do certain ways of being male predominate, and particular sorts of men rule? ” remains to be answered and the resistances to that order still remain to be identified.

The political implications of the issue are clear. If there is an independent structure of masculinity, then it should produce counter-hegemonic movements of men, and all good blokes should get involved in them. If the structure is not independent, or the movements not counterhegemonic, or the counter-hegemony not moving, then political practice will not be centred on masculinity … and what do we men do then, about the masculine images in and through which we have shaped a world so cruel to most of its inhabitants?

Hegemony and masculinity Twenty years ago, Patricia Sexton suggested that “male norms stress values such as courage, inner direction, certain forms of aggression, autonomy. mastery, technological skill, group solidarity, adventure and considerable amounts of toughness in mind and body. ” (7) It is only relatively recently that social scientists have sought to link that insight with the concept of hegemony, a notion as slippery and difficult as the idea of masculinity itself.

Hegemony, a pivotal concept in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and his most significant contribution to Marxist thinking, is about the winning and holding of power and the formation (and destruction) of social groups in that process. In this sense, it is importantly about the ways in which the ruling class establishes and maintains its domination. The ability to impose a definition of the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and issues discussed, to formulate ideals and define morality is an essential part of this process.

Hegemony involves persuasion of the greater part of the population, particularly through the media, and the organization of social institutions in ways that appear “natural,” “ordinary:’ “normal. ” The state, through punishment for non-conformity, is crucially involved in this negotiation and enforcement. (8) Heterosexuality and homophobia are the bedrock of hegemonic masculinity and any understanding of its nature and meaning is predicated on the feminist insight that in general the relationship of men to women is oppressive.

Indeed, the term “hegemonic masculinity” was invented and is used primarily to maintain this central focus in the critique of masculinity. A fundamental element of hegemonic masculinity. then. is that women exist as potential sexual objects for men while men are negated as sexual objects for men. Women provide heterosexual men with sexual validation, and men compete with each other for this. This does not necessarily involve men being particularly nasty to individual women. Women may feel as oppressed by non-hegemonic masculinities, may even find some expressions of the hegemonic pattern more familiar and manageable. (9)

More than fifty books have appeared in the English language in the last decade or so on men and masculinity. What is hegemonic masculinity as it is presented in this growing literature? Hegemonic masculinity, particularly as it appears in the works of Carrigan, Connell, and Lee. Chapman, Cockburn, Connell, Lichterman, Messner, and Rutherford, involves a specific strategy for the subordination of women. In their view, hegemonic masculinity concerns the dread of and the flight from women. A culturally idealized form, it is both a personal and a collective project, and is the common sense about breadwinning and manhood.

It is exclusive, anxiety-provoking, internally and hierarchically differentiated, brutal, and violent. It is pseudo-natural, tough, contradictory, crisis-prone, rich, and socially sustained. While centrally connected with the institutions of male dominance, not all men practice it. though most benefit from it. Although cross-class. it often excludes workingclass and black men. It is a lived experience, and an economic and cultural force, and dependent on social arrangements. It is constructed through difficult negotiation over a life-time. Fragile it may be, but it constructs the most dangerous things we live with.

Resilient, it incorporates its own critiques, but it is, nonetheless, “unravelling. ” (10) What can men do with it? According to the authors cited above, and others, hegemonic masculinity can be analyzed, distanced from, appropriated, negated, challenged, reproduced, separated from, renounced, given up, chosen, constructed with difficulty, confirmed, imposed, departed from, and modernized. (But not, apparently, enjoyed. ) What can it do to men? It can fascinate, undermine, appropriate some men’s bodies, organize, impose, pass itself off as natural, deform, harm, and deny. But not, seemingly, enrich and satisfy. ) Which groups are most active in the making of masculinist sexual ideology? It is true that the New Right and fascism are vigorously constructing aggressive, dominant, and violent models of masculinity. But generally, the most influential agents are considered to be: priests, journalists, advertisers, politicians, psychiatrists, designers, playwrights, film makers, actors, novelists, musicians, activists, academics, coaches, and sportsmen. They are the “weavers of the fabric of hegemony” as Gramsci put it, its “organizing intellectuals. These people regulate and manage gender regimes: articulate experiences, fantasies, and perspectives; reflect on and interpret gender relations. (11) The cultural ideals these regulators and managers create and perpetuate. we are told, need not correspond at all closely to the actual personalities of the majority of men (not even to their own! ). The ideals may reside in fantasy figures or models remote from the lives of the unheroic majority, but while they are very public, they do not exist only as publicity.

The public face of hegemonic masculinity, the argument goes. is not necessarily even what powerful men are, but is what sustains their power, and is what large numbers of men are motivated to support because it benefits them. What most men support is not necessarily what they are. “Hegemonic masculinity is naturalised in the form of the hero and presented through forms that revolve around heroes: sagas, ballads, westerns, thrillers,” in books, films, television, and in -sporting events. (12) What in the early literature had been written of as “the male sex ole” is best seen as hegemonic masculinity, the “culturally idealised form of masculine character” which, however, may not be “the usual form of masculinity at all. ” To say that a particular form of masculinity is hegemonic means “that its exaltation stabilizes a structure of dominance and oppression in the gender order as a whole. To be culturally exalted, the pattern of masculinity must have exemplars who are celebrated as heroes. ” (13) But when we examine these bearers of hegemonic masculinity, they seem scarcely up to the task, with more than just feet of clay.

A football star is a model of hegemonic masculinity. (14) But is a model? When the handsome Australian Rules football player, Warwick “the tightest shorts in sports” Capper, combined football with modelling, does this confirm or decrease his exemplary status? When Wally (“the King”) Lewis explained that the price he will pay for another five years playing in the professional Rugby League is the surgical replacement of both his knees, this is undoubtedly the stuff of good, old, tried and true, tough and stoic, masculinity.

But how powerful is a man who mutilates his body, almost as a matter of course, merely because of a job? When Lewis announced that he was quitting the very prestigious “State of Origin” football series because his year-old daughter had been diagnosed as hearing-impaired, is this hegemonic? In Australian surfing champion, iron man Steve Donoghue, Connell has found “an exemplar of masculinity” who lives “an exemplary version of hegemonic masculinity. ” But, says Donoghue, “I have loved the idea of not having to work ….

Five hours a day is still a lot but it is something that I enjoy that people are not telling me what to do. ” This is not the right stuff. Nor are hegemonic men supposed to admit to strangers that their life is “like being in jail. ” Connell reveals further contradictions when he explains that “Steve, the exemplar of masculine toughness, finds his own exemplary status prevents him from doing exactly what his peer group defines as thoroughly masculine behaviour: going wild, showing off, drunk driving, getting into fights, defending his own prestige. This is not power. And when we look to see why many young men take up sport we find they are driven by “the hunger for affiliation” in the words of Hammond and Jablow; we see the felt need for “connectedness” and closeness. How hegemonic is this? (15) Homosexuality and counter-hegemony Let us, however, pursue the argument by turning now to examine those purported counter-hegemonic forces that are supposedly generated by the gender system itself. There are three main reasons why male homosexuality is regarded as counter-hegemonic. Firstly, hostility to homo- exuality is seen as fundamental to male heterosexuality; secondly, homosexuality is associated with effeminacy; and thirdly, the form of homosexual pleasure is itself considered subversive. (16) Antagonism to gay men is a standard feature of hegemonic masculinity in Australia. Such hostility is inherent in the construction of heterosexual masculinity itself. Conformity to the demands of hegemonic masculinity, pushes heterosexual men to homophobia and rewards them for it, in the form of social support and reduced anxiety about their own manliness.

In other words, male heterosexual identity is sustained and affirmed by hatred for, and fear of, gay men. (17) Although homosexuality was compatible with hegemonic masculinity in other times and places, this was not true in post-invasion Australia. The most obvious characteristic of Australian male homosexuals, according to Johnston and Johnston, has been a “double deviance. ” It has been and is a constant struggle to attain the goals set by hegemonic masculinity, and some men challenge this rigidity by acknowledging their own “effeminacy. This rejection and affirmation assisted in changing homosexuality from being an aberrant (and widespread) sexual practice, into an identity when the homosexual and lesbian subcultures reversed the hegemonic gender roles, mirror-like, for each sex. Concomitantly or consequently, homosexual men were socially defined as effeminate and any kind of powerlessness, or a refusal to compete, “readily becomes involved in the imagery of homosexuality” (18) While being subverted in this fashion, hegemonic masculinity is also threatened by the assertion of a homosexual identity confident that homosexuals are able to give each other sexual pleasure.

According to Connell, the inherent egalitarianism in gay relationships that exists because of this transitive structure (my lover’s lover can also be my lover), challenges the hierarchical and oppressive nature of male heterosexuality. (19) However, over time, the connection between homosexuality and effeminacy has broken. The “flight from masculinity” evident in male homosexuality, noted thirty years ago by Helen Hacker, may be true no longer, as forms of homosexual behaviour seem to require an exaggeration of some aspects of hegemonic masculinity, notably the cult of oughness and physical aggression. If hegemonic masculinity necessarily involves aggression and physical dominance, as has been suggested, then the affirmation of gay sexuality need not imply support for women’s liberation at all, as the chequered experience of women in the gay movement attests. (20) More than a decade ago, Australian lesbians had noted, “We make the mistake of assuming that lesbianism, in itself, is a radical position. This had led us, in the past, to support a whole range of events, ventures, political perspectives, etc. ust because it is lesbians who hold those beliefs or are doing things. It is as ludicrous as believing that every working class person is a communist. ” (21) Even though there are many reasons to think that there are important differences in the expression and construction of women’s homosexuality and men’s homosexuality, perhaps there is something to be learned from this. Finally, it is not “gayness” that is attractive to homosexual men, but “maleness. ” A man is lusted after not because he is homosexual but because he’s a man. How counter-hegemonic can this be?

Changing men, gender segmentation and paid and unpaid work Connell notes, “Two possible ways of working for the ending of patriarchy which move beyond guilt, fixing your head and heart, and blaming men, are to challenge gender segmentation in paid work and to work in men’s counter-sexist groups. Particularly, though, countersexist politics need to move beyond the small consciousness raising group to operate in the workplace, unions and the state. ” (22) It is hard to imagine men challenging gender segmentation in paid work by voluntarily dropping a third of their wage packet.

But it does happen, although perhaps the increasing trickle of men into women’s jobs may have more to do with the prodding of a certain invisible finger. Lichterman has suggested that more political elements of the “men’s movement” contain human service workers, students, parttimers. and “odd-jobbers. ” Those in paid work, work in over-whelmingly female occupations -counselling, nursing, and elementary teaching are mentioned. In this sense, their position in the labour market has made them “predisposed to criticise hegemonic masculinity, the common sense about breadwinning and manhood. It can also be seen as a defence against the loss of these things, as men attempt to colonize women’s occupations in a job market that is increasingly competitive, particularly for men’s jobs.? (23) If we broaden the focus on the desegmentation of paid work to include unpaid work, more interesting things occur. While Connell has suggested that hegemonic masculinity is confirmed in fatherhood, the practice of parenting by men actually seems to undermine it. Most men have an exceptionally impoverished idea about what fatherhood involves, and indeed, active parenting doesn’t even enter into the idea of manhood at all.

Notions of fathering that are acceptable to men concern the exercise of impartial discipline, from an emotional distance and removed from favouritism and partiality. In hegemonic masculinity, fathers do not have the capacity or the skill or the need to care for children, especially for babies and infants, while the relationship between female parents and young children is seen as crucial. Nurturant and care-giving behaviour is simply not manly. Children, in turn, tend to have more abstract and impersonal relations with their fathers.

The problem is severely compounded for divorced fathers, most of whom have extremely little emotional contact with their children. (24) As Messner has explained, “while the man is ‘out there’ establishing his .name’ in public, the woman is usually home caring for the day-to-day and moment-to-moment needs of her family …. Tragically, only in mid- life, when the children have already ‘left the nest’ … do some men discover the importance of connection and intimacy. ” (25) Nonetheless, of the little time that men spend in unpaid work, proportionally more of it goes now into child care.

Russell has begun to explore the possibility that greater participation by men in parenting has led to substantial shifts in their ideas of masculinity. The reverse is probably true too. Hochschild found in her study that men who shared care with their partners rejected their own “detached, absent and overbearing” fathers. The number of men primarily responsible for parenting has grown dramatically in Australia, increasing five-fold between 1981 and 1990. The number of families with dependent children in which the man was not in paid work but the woman was, rose from 16,200 in 1981 to 88,100 in 1990.

Women, however, still outnumber men in this position ten to one. (26) Not only a man’s instrumental relations with others are challenged by close parenting, but so are his instrumental relations with himself. Men’s sense of themselves is threatened by intimacy. Discovering the affection, autonomy, and agency of babies and children, disconcerted by an unusual inability to cope, men are compelled to re-evaluate their attitude to themselves. In Russell’s study, the fathers who provided primary child care “constantly marvelled at and welcomed the changes that had taken place in their relationships with their children. (27) Even Neville Wran, the former premier of the Australian state of New South Wales whose most renowned political activity was “putting the blowtorch to the belly” of political opponents. said of fatherhood, which occurred in his sixties, “It’s making me a more patient, tolerant, understanding human being. I’m a real marshmallow. ” (28) The men who come to full-time fathering do not, however, regard themselves as unmanly, even though their experiences have resulted in major shifts in their ideas about children, child care, and women.

In fact, one quarter of them considered these changes a major gain from their parenting work. This was despite the fact that these men’s male friends and workmates were highly critical of their abandonment of the breadwinner role, describing them, for instance, as being “bludgers,” “a bit funny,” “a bit of a woman,” and “under the thumb. ” (29) This stigmatism may be receding as the possibility of securing the children’s future, once part of the father’s responsibility in his relations with the “public sphere,” is becoming less and less possible as unemployment bites deeper. 30) Child-minders and day-care workers have confirmed that the children of active fathers were “more secure” and “less anxious” than the children of non-active fathers. Psychological studies have revealed them to be better developed socially and intellectually. Furthermore, the results of active fatherhood seem to last. There is considerable evidence to suggest that greater interaction with fathers is better for children, with the sons and daughters of active fathers displaying lower levels of sex-role stereotyping. (31) Men who share the second shift had a happier family life and more harmonious marriages.

In a longitudinal study, Defrain found that parents reported that they were happier and their relationships improved as a result of shared parenting. In an American study, househusbands felt positive about their increased contribution to the family-household, paid work became less central to their definition of themselves, and they noted an improvement in their relationships with their female partners. (32) One of the substantial bases for metamorphosis for Connell’s six changing heterosexual men in the environmental movement as the learning of domestic labour, which involves “giving to people, looking after people. ” In the same sense that feminism “claimed emotional life as a source of dignity and self respect,” active fathers are challenging hegemonic masculinity. For hegemonic masculinity, real work is elsewhere, and relationships don’t require energy, but provide it. (33) There is also the question of time. The time spent establishing the intimacy that a man may crave is also time away from establishing and maintaining the “competitive edge,” or the “public face. There are no prizes for being a good father, not even when being one is defined narrowly in terms of breadwinning. (34) Social struggles over time are intimate with class and gender. It is not only that the rich and powerful are paid handsomely for the time they sell, have more disposable time, more free time, more control over how they use their time, but the gender dimensions of time use within classes are equally compelling. No one performs less unpaid work, and receives greater remuneration for time spent in paid work, than a male of the ruling class.

The changes that are occurring remain uncertain, and there is, of course, a sting in the tail. Madison Avenue has found that “emotional lability and soft receptivity to what’s new and exciting” are more appropriate to a consumer-orientated society than “hardness and emotional distance. ” Past television commercials tended to portray men as Marlboro macho or as idiots, but contemporary viewers see men cooking, feeding babies, and shopping. Insiders in the advertising industry say that the quick and easy cooking sections of magazines and newspapers are as much to attract male readers as overworked women.

U. S. Sports Illustrated now carries advertisements for coffee, cereal, deodorants, and soup. According to Judith Langer, whose market-research firm services A. T. & T. , Gillette. and Pepsico among others, it is now “acceptably masculine to care about one’s house. (35) The “new man” that comes at us through the media seems to reinforce the social order without challenging it. And he brings with him, too, a new con for women. In their increasing assumption of breadwinning, femocratic and skilled worker occupations, the line goes, women render themselves incomplete.

They must -‘give up” their femininity in their appropriation of male jobs and power, but men who embrace the feminine become “more complete. ” (36) And if that isn’t tricky enough, the “new men” that seem to be emerging are simply unattractive. Indeed, they’re boring. Connell’s six changing heterosexual men in the environmental movement were attracted to women who were “strong, independent, active. (37) Isn’t everybody attracted by these qualities? Gay men find “new men” irritating and new men are not too sure how keen they should be on each other, and no feminist worth her salt would be seen dead with one.

The ruling class: Really real men? If the significance of the concept of hegemonic masculinity is that it directs us to look for the contradictions within an autonomous gender system that will cause its transformation, then we must conclude it has failed. The challenges to hegemonic masculinity identified by its theorists and outlined above seem either to be complicit with, or broader than, the gender system that has apparently generated them. I can appreciate why Connell is practically interested in and theoretically intrigued by arguing against the notion of the externality of gender change. Both experience and theory show the impossibility of liberating a dominant group and the difficulty of constructing a movement based not on the shared interest of a group but on the attempt to dismantle that interest. ” (38) (My emphasis). The key is the phrase “constructing a movement. ” It is only a system which has its own dynamics that can produce the social forces necessary to change radically that system. But Connell himself has written that gender is part of the relations of production and has always been so.

And similarly, that “social science cannot understand the state, the political economy of advanced capitalism. the nature of class, the process of modernisation or the nature of imperialism, the process of socialisation, the structure of consciousness or the politics of knowledge, without a full-blooded analysis of gender. ” (39) There is nothing outside gender. To be involved in social relations is to be inextricably “inside” gender. If everything, in this sense, is within gender, why should we be worried about the exteriority of the forces for social change?

Politics, economics, technology are gendered. “We have seen the invisible hand;’ someone wittier than I remarked, “It is white, hairy and manicured. ” Is there, then, some place we can locate exemplars of hegemonic masculinity that are less fractured, more coherent, and thus easier to read? Where its central and defining features can be seen in sharper relief? If the public face of hegemonic masculinity is not necessarily even what powerful men are, then what are they necessarily? Why is it “no mean feat to produce the kind of people who can actually operate a capitalist system? (40) Even though the concept “hegemony” is rooted in concern with class domination, systematic knowledge of ruling class masculinity is slight as yet, but it is certainly intriguing. One aspect of ruling class hegemonic masculinity is the belief that women don’t count in big matters, and that they can be dealt with by jocular patronage in little matters. Another is in defining what “big” and “little” are. Sexual politics are simply not a problem to men of the ruling class. Senior executives couldn’t function as bosses without the patriarchal household.

The exercise of this form of power requires quite special conditions – conventional femininity and domestic subordination. Two-thirds of male top executives were married to housewives. The qualities of intelligence and the capacity for hard work which these women bring to marriage are matched, as friends of Anita Keating, the wife of the Prime Minister of Australia, remarked, by “intense devotion … her husband and her children are her life. ” Colleen Fahey, the wife of the premier of New South Wales, had completed an 18-month part-time horticulture course at her local technical college, and she wanted to continue her studies full-time. But my husband wouldn’t let met,” she said. “He said that he didn’t think it was right for a mother to have a job when she had a 13-year-old child … I think if I’d put my foot down and said I’d really wanted a career, he’d have said, ‘You’re a rotten mother leaving those kids. ” (41) The case for this sort of behaviour is simply not as compelling for working-class men, the mothers and the wives of most of whom undertake paid work as a matter of course. Success itself can amplify this need for total devotion, while lessening the chances of its fulfilment outside of the domestic realm.

For the successful are likely to have difficulty establishing intimate and lasting friendships with other males because of low self-disclosure, homophobia, and cut-throat competition. The corporate world expects men to divulge little of their personal lives and to restrain personal feelings, especially affectionate ones, towards their colleagues while cultivating a certain bland affability. Within the corporate structure, “success is achieved through individual competition rather than dyadic or group bonding. The distinction between home and work is crucial and carefully maintained. For men in the corporation, friends have their place outside work. (42) While William Shawcross, the biographer of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, found him “courageous” and “charming,” others close to Murdoch described him as “arrogant,” “cocky,” “insensitive, verging on dangerous,” “utterly ruthless,” and an “efficient Visigoth. ” Murdoch himself described his life as “consisting of a series of interlocking wars. Shawcross also found that Murdoch possessed “an instinctive feel for money and power and how to use them both;’ had a “relentless, unceasing drive and energy,” worked “harder and more determinedly” than anybody else, was “sure that what he was doing was correct”, “believed that he had become invincible”, and was driven by the desire “to win at all costs. ” (43) And how must it feel to know that you can have whatever you want, and that throughout your life you will be looked after in every way, even to the point of never having to dress and undress yourself?

Thus the view that hegemonic masculinity is hegemonic insofar as it succeeds in relation to women is true, but partial. Competitiveness, a combination of the calculative and the combative, is institutionalised in business and is central to hegemonic masculinity. The enterprise of winning is life-consuming, and this form of competitiveness is “an inward turned competitiveness, focussed on the self,” creating, in fact, an instrumentality of the personal. (44)

Hegemonic masculinity is “a question of how particular groups of men inhabit positions of power and wealth, and how they legitimate and reproduce the social relationships that generate their dominance. ” (45) Through hegemonic masculinity most men benefit from the control of women. For a very few men, it delivers control of other men. To put it another way, the crucial difference between hegemonic masculinity and other masculinities is not the control of women, but the control of men and the representation of this as “universal social advancement,” to paraphrase Gramsci.

Patriarchal capitalism delivers the sense, before a man of whatever masculinity even climbs out of bed in the morning, that he is “better” than half of humankind. But what is the nature of the masculinity confirming not only that, but also delivering power over most men as well? And what are its attractions? A sociology of rulingclass men is long overdue. Footnotes 1. M. Waters. “Patriarchy and Viriarchy: An Exploration and Reconstruction of Concepts of Masculine Domination. ” Sociology 7 (1989): 143-162. 2. A. Hochschild with A. Machung. The Second Shit: Woking parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking. 989): 257. 3. M. Donaldson, Time of Our Lives: Labour and Love in the Working Class (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991). 3. R. Connell. “Theorising Gender,” Sociology, 19 (1985): 263; R. Connell, “The Wrong Stuff: Reflections on the Place of Gender in American Sociology. ” in H. J. Gans, editor, Sociology in America (Newbury-Park: Sage Publications 1990), 158; R. Connell, “The State, Gender and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal” , Theory and Society 19/5 (1990): 509-523. 5. Connell. “Theorising Gender,” 260. 6. R. Connell, Which Way is Up? Essays on Class, Sex and Culture (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 234-276. 7.

T. Carrigan, B. Connell. and J. Lee, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity. ” in H. Brod. editor. The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies (Boston:. Allen and Unwin), 75. 8. R. Connell. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 1987), 107; Carrigan. Connell and Lee, 95. 9. Carrigan, Connell. and Lee. “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity. ” 86: Connell, Which Way is Up? 185. 10. Connell, Which Way is Up; Connell. Gender and Power; R. Connell, “A Whole New World: Remaking Masculinity in the Context of the Environmental Movement,” Gender and Society 4 (1990): 352-378: R.

Connell. “An Iron Man: The Body and Some Contradictions of Hegemonic Masculinity,” in M. Messner and D. Sabo, editors, Sport, Men and the Gender Order (Champaign. Ill. : Human Kinetics Books, 1990): Connell, “The State, Gender and Sexual Politics”; Carrigan, Connell and Lee, 86; R. Chapman. “The Great Pretender: Variations in the New Man Theme. ” in R. Chapman and J. Rutherford. editors. .Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity (London: Lawrence and Wishart. 1988) 9-18; C. Cockburn. “Masculinity, the Left and Feminism. ” in Male Order:103–329; P. Lichterman. Making a Politics of Masculinity,” Comparative Social Research 11 (1989): 185-208; M. Messner “The Meaning of Success: The Athletic Experience and the Development of Male Identity,” in The Making of Masculinities:193-2 10; J. Rutherford. “Who’s That Man’? ” in Male Order, 21-67. I I. Connell, Which Way is Up: 236, 255, 256. 12. Connell, Which Way is Up: 185,186,239. 13. Connell, “Iron Man,” 83, 94. 14. Connell, “Whole New World,” 459. 15. D. Hammond and A. Jablow, “Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid: The Myth of Male Friendship,” in The Making of Masculinities: 256: Messner. “The Meaning of Success”, 198; Connell. Iron Man. ” 87, 93: Donoghue in Connell. “Iron Man,” 84-85. 16. Carrigan, Connell, and Lee, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity”: Connell, Gender and Power. 17. G. Herek, “On Heterosexual Masculinity: Some Physical Consequences of the Social Construction of Gender and Sexuality,” in M. Kimmel, editor, Changing Men, New Directions on Men and Masculinity (Newbury Park: Sage. 1987): 71-72; Connell. “Whole New World,” 369. 18. Carrigan, Connell and Lee, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity”: 93; C. Johnson and R. Johnston, “The Making of Homosexual Men. ” in V. Burgmann and J.

Lee, editors, Staining the Wattle. A People’s History of Australia Since 1788. (Fitzroy: McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1988): 91; Connell, Gender and Power: 80; Carrigan, Connell and Lee: 86. 19. Carrigan, Connell, and Lee. 85; Connell. Gender and Power : 116. 20. Johnston and Johnston. “Homosexual Men. ” 94: Carrigan. Connell, and Lee. 74: J. Hearn, The Gender of Oppression: Men, Masculinity and the Critique of Marxism (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987); Connell, , Gender and Power: 60; Connell, Which Way is Up: 234. 177-178. 21. Otto in L. Ross. “Escaping the Well of Loneliness. ” Staining the Wattle: 107. 22.

Connell. “Whole New World,” 474-475, 477. 23, Lichterman, “Making a Politics. ” 187-188, 201, 204. 24. Hochschild, Second Shift, 239: V. Seidler, “Fathering, Authority and Masculinity,” Male Order, 276; G. Russell, The Changing Role of Fathers? (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. 1983), 98. 117; Seidler, “Fathering,” 287: Hochschild, Second Shift, 249; Connell, Which Way is Up, 32. 25. Messner. “Meaning of Success,”: 201. 26. Russell, Changing Role; Hochschild, Second Shift, 2, 217, 227; C. Armitage, “House Husbands. The Problems They Face,” Sydney Morning Herald (4 July 1991): 16. 27. Seidler. Fathering,” 298, 290, 295; Russell, Changing Role, 177. 28. Bicknell, “Neville Wran: A Secret Sadness,” New Idea (May 11, 1991): 18. 29. Russell, Changing Role, 128-129, 135-136. 30, Seidler. “Fathering,” 283. 31. Hochschild, Second Shift, 218, 237; P. Stein. “Men in Families,” Marriage and Family Review 7 (1984): 155. 32. Hochschild, Second Shift, 216; Defrain in Stein, “Men in Families. ” 156; E. Prescott, “New Men,” American Demographics 5 (1983): 19. 33. Connell. “Whole New World. ” 465; Seidler, “Fathering,” 275. 31. Donaldson, Time of Our Lives, 20-29. 35. Chapman, “Great Pretender,” 212; Prescott, “New Men. 16, 20, 18. 36. Chapman, “Great Pretender,” 213. 37. Connell, “Whole New World,” 465. 38. Connell, “Whole New World,” 176. 39. Connell, Gender and Power, 15; Connell, “The Wrong Stuff,” 161. 40. Connell, Which Way is Up: 71. 41. R. Connell, Teachers’ Work (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1985). 187; Connell. Which Way is Up: 71: Hochschild, Second Shift, 255: N. Barrowblough and P. McGeough. “Woman of Mystery. The Trump Card Keating Hasn’t Played,” Sydney Morning Herald, (8 June 1991): 35. D. Cameron. “Just an Average Mrs. Premier,” Sydney Morning Herald, (28 Nov. 1992): 41. 42. M.

Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in . Marxist Feminist Analysis (London: Verso, 1980): 187-216; Messner, “Meaning of Success. ” 201: R. Ochberg, “The Male Career Code and The Ideology of Role,” in The Making of Masculinities: 173. 184; Hammond and Jablow, 255-256; Illawarra Mercury, “Family Comments Greeted with Fury. ” (1 December 1992): 7. 43. W. Shawcross, Rupert Murdoch, Ringmaster of the Information Circus (Sydney: Random House. 1992). 44. Carrigan. Connell. and Lee, 92; Connell, Gender and Power, 156; Connell. “Iron Man. ” 91; Seidler. “Fathering,” 279. 45. Carrigan, Connell, and Lee, 92.

The stories of The Yellow Wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and A Room of One’s Own by Virgina Woolf are important to view in their historical contexts. Both novels demonstrate that there are limits placed on women that prevent them from living complete lives. This demeans women and does not give them the same rights and privileges as men. The Yellow Wallpaper demonstrates the attitudes during the nineteenth century that concern female mental and psychical health.

Whereas A Room of One’s Own explores whether women are capable of writing great literature and the obstacles that they are faced. Each story demonstrates an common idea that women are viewed as unequal to men and that they must work a lot harder to achieve the respect they wish to gain. Within each of these two novels the authors place the settings with great relevance to the stories morals. Within The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator uses the wallpaper to symbolize an interpretation of something that affects her directly.

As the story goes on, the wallpaper gains more and more significance. In the beginning it seems unpleasant, as it is ripped and is an “unclean yellow” (pg. 2). The pattern of the wallpaper fascinates the narrator due to its formless pattern, which the narrator tries to figure out how it is organized. She does so for hours and hours until she sees a ghostly pattern which one can only see in certain light. Once this pattern comes into focus she sees a desperate women who is looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, this resembles the bars of a cage.

The narrator sees many women behind these bars trying to escape. This wallpaper represents the structure of women lives, their families and tradition. Gilman uses the wallpaper to show the domestic lives of many women who are trapped in their roles. Like wise to A Room of One’s Own, Woolf describes throughout her narrative that every women needs a room of their own, something that women are able to enjoy without any question by men. This room provides a woman with time and space to write and do things they are passionate about.

During Woolf’s time, women very rarely enjoyed these types of luxuries. Women’s art was unable to be shown because women did not have a safe space to express themselves. She used the room as a symbol for much larger issues such as a women’s privacy, independence and the inequalities between men and women. As Woolf says within the story, until these inequalities are gone, women will remain as second-class and all of their literary achievements will go unnoticed. There are many gender inequalities presented within society even today.

Within these two stories the inequalities between men and women are significant in the authors writing. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman allows her readers to view the position of women within marriage and their economic dependence on men. when this story was officially published, people took it as a tale about women not a true reality of what women faced. With the domestic functions of a female and active work of males, women are remained as second-class citizens. This story reveals that gender division keeps women from achieving their full potential.

John’s assumption that he is superior leads him in the misjudgement of his wife as he tries to “help” her. The narrator has no input into her own life and the only place she can control anything is within her mind. Inequality is also found throughout A Room of One’s Own, women are treated unequal within the narrators society as they have produced less literature then men. The narrator creates a women named Judith Shakespeare, who is the twin sister of William Shakespeare. She does so to show how society discriminates against women.

Judith is seen to be equally as talented as her brother William but because of her gender she is not encouraged by their family and society. As Judith writes she is secretive and feels very ashamed for writing. Men have dominance over women as shown throughout both stories, when Judith asks her father to not be married; her father beats her until she eventually commits suicide. Due to women being treated so differently, Woolf shows that even though Judith is just as talented as William she will never be as successful because she is a woman.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a type of story where the narrator writes to herself. Her descent into madness is both seen subjectively and objectively as the narrator portrays. If Gilman had told her story in a traditions first-person narration the events that are from inside the narrators head would not be able to be told and the reader would not know what she is thinking, and the women inside the wallpaper might seem to actually exist. If told in third-person narrative then the political symbolism would not be seen.

Gilman also uses a journal to give the story intimacy and allow the narrator to put down thoughts and feelings. Whereas in A Room of One’s Own, the author gives the narrator a place where she can write what she thinks without any input or bother from society. A place for women to put down their thoughts and express themselves. The Yellow Wallpaper demonstrates the nineteenth century attitudes concerning female physical and mental health. The narrator is confined to a room where she was driven mad. With the use of symbolism, Gilman allows the reader to see how women were treated and how unequal society may be.

A Room of One’s Own explores whether women were capable f writing great literature and demonstrated obstacles that a female writer is faced with. Woolf confronts many aspects of being female ans the idea of madness. According to Woolf, a woman needs a room of her own in order to express herself through literature. Both novels demonstrate that there are limits placed on women that prevent them from living complete lives. This demeans women and does not give them the same rights and privileges as men.

Culture is a body of common beliefs, traditions, values and principles which are shared by members of a particular group. A culture helps to determine the behaviors, attitudes and expectations of its people. Every society or community has some traditions, beliefs and customs regarding either gender. Most of this expectations are based on the sexual identity of one being either male or female which emanate from their different roles in human reproduction and variations in their physical characteristics. Cultural views on sexual identity comprises of beliefs, expectations and constraints of what men or women are supposed to do or not to do.

Sexual identity refers to the level or degree to which we identify ourselves as male or female depending on various social, cultural and biological aspects . Our culture has various ways of distinguishing between the two major sexual identities. As a result, the expectations and constraints imposed on a woman are different from those imposed on the males. The fact that women give birth and lactate exposes them to certain constraints in their motherly roles in the society. For instance, our culture tends to view females as receptive and the males as intrusive in their respective sexual behaviors.

Though such constraints are presumed to be less pervasive in the society today due to the fact that our culture is evolving into a modern social structure away from the hunter-gatherer kind of socio-economic life it used to be, the distinction between the two sexes still remains quite pervasive in terms of behavior, roles and interests . Many sociologists have traced the origin of such differences to the different cultural norms put forward by our culture to the society. Since birth, boys and girls become accustomed to different cultural standards either consciously or unconsciously which reflect their respective roles later in life.

For instance, girls tend to take up the role of mothers and caretakers in the family while boys are taught to be the heads of the family as the bread-winners and protectors. The differentiation between male and female behaviors is a matter which is deeper than the concept of contextual relativism in the culture. Apart from behaviors, roles and expectations based on sexual identity, our culture has led to the evolution of some gender stereotypes which are associated with a particular sex whether male or female . The spread of such classical stereotypes in the media particularly dominates the society today.

Both print and electronic media clearly indicate the different cultural standards of men and women in the society together with their varying capabilities based on their sexual identities. Until recently, the media has depicted the female gender as a weaker sex in terms of the roles, professions and the society expectations as compared to the male gender. However, the continued calls for gender equality has led to certain media portraits which show that women are as capable as their male counterparts thus removing the long held constraints and stereotypes imposed by our culture on women which tend to undermine their professional capabilities.

Houston stresses on four major gender stereotypes. She puts them across as; men are afraid of commitments, men are bound to say or do anything in order to prevent their partners from discovering that they are cheating on them, women concentrate too much on what men say or do and finally, a woman can use any available strategy to keep a man. Such gender stereotypes she adds, are the source of certain phrases like ‘just like women’, ‘men are dogs’ and so forth which tend to associate men and women with certain behaviors and not others.

As a young woman, all these cultural views have shaped my behavior and my self-understanding as such in various ways. For a young person to understand his or her sexual identity, it is vital to solve the tension caused by numerous cultural values between ‘who i am’ and ‘what how the society views or expects of me’. As a woman, the culture expects me to be submissive and to behave as so especially when dealing with the male gender. Moreover, our culture expects women not to show their interest towards men as they are said to be the ‘hunters’ and women the ‘hunted ‘.

Such cultural values expect women to suppress their feelings and behave in a particular manner in matters concerning their sexual orientation and identity in the society. All these cultural views have shaped my personal behavior as a woman and my view on the whole concept of sexual identity. Due to the numerous gender stereotypes, behaviors, expectations and constraints imposed on the different sexes, there arises some tension between religious and societal values.

Our culture which views women as second to men has consequently put some cultural restrictions which burr women from top positions in the religious matters and other societal issues. However, some cultural values tend to be in consistency with religious value in that in both cases, women especially those who are married are expected to act in a submissive way when dealing with their husbands. It can thus be said that, the environment and the cultural background in which one is brought up largely influences his or her future relationships with the opposite sex and other people in the society.

Many gender stereotypes have adverse effects on future relationships especially for the young people who wish to establish stable and strong foundations for their future family lives. For instance, the stereotype that all men promoted by our culture are polygamous or unfaithful can have detrimental the women’s ability to trust men hence the increased number of divorces in the modern society . From a theological point of view, marriage is seen as a vocation, covenant, sacrament, communion and a lasting partnership . However, this views are exposed to various interpretations especially in the cultural context of the modern society.