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Gender & Gender Roles: Many men are rejecting a masculinity gender role that leads the average man to the grave seven years earlier than the average woman and makes a man old before his time.
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Gender & Gender Roles The Men's Movement. At the beginning of the feminist movement, the traditional American male was valued for his competitiveness, his ability to win at all costs and his capacity for producing money, money, money. The man and woman of yesterday measured his success by his ability to win and provide for his family! The man of yesterday revered competition, winning at all costs, and measured business success in terms of money, power, and hierarchy. Some men (and women) still view success as winning. But for many men, the holy grail of winning no longer produces a satisfying lifestyle. The men's movement brought men together who were beginning to question society's ideas of masculinity. Men, particularly younger men, questioned their fathers' ideas of masculinity versus their own quest for a more balanced life. They asked tough questions:
In fact, increasing numbers of American men got together to share their feelings and discuss their personal issues. 1. They questioned the traditional divisions between men and women--that men "work and do" while "women care and feel." 2. They compared the outcomes of their father's and grandfather's lives with their own hopes and expectations. 3. They sought a balance of family life and work that their fathers would never have even imagined. 4. They questioned if financial power and winning were worth dying for. |
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Warren Farrell writing for The New York Times, said the problem with the male system was that the more money a man produced for the people he loved, the further away he had to be from them. Farrell wrote, "That's what I call the male tragedy. The incentive for the men's revaluing of their lives and roles is that now they will be directly connected to love." For other men, external events such as well-educated wives/lovers who earn equal or near equal incomes, were forcing them to reexamine the traditional masculine role that "good provider equals good man" and leading them away from their fathers' lives, value systems, and "winner-take-all" mentalities. Regardless of how they reached this road, as the men's movement progressed, many men were getting in touch with their softer, more nurturing side while searching for a more balanced life than society had offered their immediate ancestors. They rejected a masculinity that leads the average man to the grave seven years earlier than the average woman and makes a man old before his time. Many of these young men (and a few older men) are beginning to balance work, family life, community service, and leisure activities with their expanded definition of masculinity. This broader, deeper sense of masculinity is providing a self-worth that is founded on more than their jobs, competition, and their status--measured in monetary success, winning, power, and "toys owned." The men's movement has given men "permission" to express their emotions and released them from the strict male code that feelings are to be repressed if one is to be masculine. Men who have achieved this comfort with emotions can and do carry them over into male-female and family relationships. There are some men who are using the Men's Movement in an attempt to strengthen patriarchy and their control of women. Plus there will always be the patriarchal voice of the religious right attempting to keep women in "their place." However, many men gather in an attempt to trust each other, to relate to each other, to become better fathers, better husbands, better brothers, better friends, better men. And as they grow, their male-female relationships are becoming more rewarding, too.
More information about gender and gender roles.
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