“ Ways in Which the Current Masculinity Paradigm Also Harms Men”

“ Ways in Which the Current Masculinity Paradigm Also Harms Men”

Course: Anthropology 3240 :Sexing the Subject: Sexuality from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Humans feel the need to define and understand everything. Although everything we see and define is based on our own ethnocentric views and understanding of the world. We are always creating definitions and editing them in order to help us make sense of things. We construct things and aim to expand their definitions to explain everyone and everything in the world, which is often incorrect and biased. Surely there are many overlaps in the definitions but there are always discrepancies between them. When it comes to gender and what it means to be a man or a woman, there isn’t one definition that can be accurately applied to every man or every woman. Traditional scholars often categorized the generic man as the norm for what is human kind and failed to acknowledge the problems that arise from that assumption. Matthew Guttmann brings this problem into focus in his essay titled Trafficking in Men: The Anthropology of Masculinity and describes the way that scholars have always described men and discusses diversity in cultures regarding topics such as fathering and families among others. This brings us to the concept of masculinity, its implications, and how it desperately needs to be transformed. Since the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of the gay liberation movement, there has been a lot of questions and criticism regarding hegemonic masculinity. According to the English Oxford dictionary, masculinity is defined as noun: possession of the qualities traditionally associated with men. Synonyms include virility, manliness, machismo, vigor, strength, muscularity, ruggedness, and robustness.

The first problem with this definition is that it isn’t easily obtainable by most men in our modern society. Yet, men still feel the need to try to live up to that definition although it isn’t realistic...