A Response to the question “Has masculinity really changed?”

Excellent Post! I really liked the last point that you made about the difference in potential gender fluidity between men and women, and I think that this difference is really critical to an understanding of gender in today’s society. In the wake of the presumed liberation of women, females in our society are put in a position of having to express both femininity and masculinity in order to survive. They must be able to compete with men in male-dominated fields, but also must present a display of femininity in order to avoid the slew of derogatory words used to describe women that do not display such femininity. In short, to survive in a supposedly liberated society (and I stress the “supposed” nature of this liberation for obvious reasons), women must synthesize both the masculine and the feminine into a unified identity. For men, however, only displays of masculinity are valued. What I’m basically saying is that, even though we live in a society that claims to be egalitarian in terms of gender, gender is valued in the scale of masculinity, there is no space in which feminine attributes, and I mean genuinely feminine attributes, not the aspects of femininity that have been favorably appraised by men, are considered valuable. A woman has to in some way embody androgyny in order to be considered successful as a woman.

On the flip-side of this, femininity is not valued in men, and therefore men must only display that which is masculine in order to be seen as successful. This mirrors the situation in early Spain, in which it was considered a positive thing, a social promotion if you will, for a woman to be regarded as a man, but if a man does not measure up to the expectations of masculinity, he is robbed of his manhood, essentially receiving an incredibly humiliating social demotion. I think it is interesting that this same structure of gender fluidity, in which only movement in one direction, towards the masculine, is considered favorable, still can be seen in today’s presumably gender-liberated society.