Masculinity

I found this week's readings on Masculinity to be quite interesting in terms of giving some historical and cultural perspective on the evolution of ideas of masculinity (especially as those ideas have evolved in conjunction with feminist thought).  I made a slideshow on the intersectionality of women's rights and animal's rights, and in that presentation I talk a bit about how in our culture (and many others), masculinity is often constructed in the context of meat-eating.  Exhibit A:

Not only is this commercial full of men asserting their independent masculinity by eating red meat, but it is also a shameless play off of past social justice movements (like women's rights and the civil rights movements).  Symbols of solidarity and references to bra-burning and protests culminate in the destruction of a minivan, that ultimate symbol of male domesticity.  I see this as a visual representation of Kimmel's description of "men's liberationists" movements, but of course the movement has been completely co-opted and placed within a capitalist framework that is really just about buying more crappy food from Burger King.

C. Wesley Buerkle wrote of this ad and others like it that:  
“[These commercials] emphasize that women, like the burgers men prefer to eat, exist for men's pleasure. Just as the commercials forgo questioning the assumption that men have a God-given need for beef over any other food, the advertisements accept without question that men also have the right to women's bodies. Richard Nate explains that metonyms, over metaphors, often illustrate social conditions through closely related expressions. Put another way, critics need not look far to find the thing represented by a metonym, for it is the placeholder of an object close at hand rather than highly abstract. The utter collapse of women with food, especially in Burger King's Super Bowl ad, speaks to a conflation of sexual and culinary desires, men having the absolute right to enjoy both at their will and without restraint.”

Ads like this are figureheads of a patriarchal media culture that wields feminization like a weapon, and uses feminized terms to discredit not only women and animals, but also vegetarian men, gay men, men in non-traditional occupations, etc.  The "cult of masculinity" that dominates our culture is based on a model of manhood that  This is why, in my mind, "men's liberationists" were less about any sort of liberation and more about further entrenching the patriarchal status quo.  Still, this image of "embattled men" continues to dominate.  The past couple of Super Bowls have been packed full of commercials that demean domesticated men and encourage them to rise up and free themselves of their women-built shackles!

I think it's so important to think about how the media constructs both "ideal femininity" and "ideal masculinity;" there is so much that is troubling about these social/media constructions: the limited and inauthentic selves that are created, the heteronormativity, the narrow and arbitrary beauty standards, the pervasive messages about sex and relationships and race and class, and the normative modeling of intensely gendered behaviors and the underlying supremacy and hierarchy.  But for me, the single most troubling thing is the mind-bending cynicism with which the popular media uses these tactics--building insecurities in children, crafting distorted pictures of relationships, demeaning women, and the list goes on and on--solely for the goal of selling us stuff.  That's it.  That's the end game.  To get us to buy more things that we don't need, to convince us to align ourselves fully with an obsessively consumerist culture.  Masculinity has been constructed by different cultural, economic and political forces over the years, but I would argue that at this point in time, media is one of the strongest enforcers of gendered social norms, both of femininity and masculinity (always constructed, of course, dichotomously).