Quote:
Originally Posted by toranokaze
Let me first speak to the nature of the debate of manhood and masculinity in the greater American culture.
This is a discussion that I have been intestinal involved in for the last 10 years. In general most of these discussions it are women talking about men with the occasional input from a man. Which is wrong, for you have one group talking about another group. It is as if you had white talking about what it means to be black or men talking about what it means to be a woman.
We need a closed debate and stand as men to define ourselves and what it that means in society.
In American society I have seen lack of value of masculine values, a lack of value of what men do, specifically fatherhood.
More on the question latter.
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For most of western history it has been men defining both genders, both at an intellectual level and in terms of assigning value. The lack of value attached to 'fatherhood' is not a lack of value assigned to masculinity it's a lack of value assigned to parenting. Western culture has historically had a slightly schizophrenic approach to the concept of parenting/nurture, at least since the early modern period. It is venerated and yet removed from standard value systems: economically, parenting and nurture is least valued of all available skills in the modern world. Womanhood is most strongly connected in our minds with that skill. Indeed, it loses the name of skill when it is employed by a woman and becomes an expression of nature, a continuation of childbirth. Female nurturing is valued highly in the common imaginary, but it is without economic value. Male participation in that nurturing is not valued as highly, because men are expected to express their value in an economic setting.
Women discussing what it is to be male, indeed, defining that identity culturally, can be seen in two ways. Either it is a colonisation of an area they'd previously been excluded from, partly as an extension of the specialised 'women's studies' into a wider understanding of 'gender' in which the next generation of social academics reacted to the female-centric nature of our understanding of gender and focused instead on masculinity. This then fed into wider popular discussions and cultural preoccupations. Or, it is an extension of the female caring/nurture role extended out into a wider setting.
Worth noting, though, that the preoccupation with what it means to be a man and the sense of a loss of some masculine idyll is not a new phenomenon. Every so often that idea has surfaced, usually along with a cultural accusation of women and their feminising influence on men, or their unwillingness to maintain their own femininity, choosing instead to try and be pseudo-men.
The problem is that on the whole we rarely define gender in terms of what a man is, or a what a woman is, but rather what they are not. We form our ideas of gender in terms of oppositional poles.