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Hi! I need help with my discussion board assignment.
Hegemonic // Toxic Masculinity
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Take a look at Mike Donaldson’s article on “Hegemonic Masculinity” found here: hegemonic masculinity.pdfDownload hegemonic masculinity.pdf
Then view the Ted Talk by Jackson Katz, titled, “Violence Against Women: It’s a Men’s Issue”
LinkLinks to an external site.
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Answer the following questions by Wednesday; respond to two other posts by Friday.
1. What is hegemonic or toxic masculinity?
2. Why does Jackson Katz consider violence against women a ‘man’s issue?’ How are boys and other men affected by this violence?
3. What kinds of micro efforts (raising our boys) or macro efforts (changing society) would you suggest to address hegemonic masculinity?
Trans Men and Sexism
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What does it mean to be a trans man?
How does that experience translate for those how have grown up as a ‘woman’?
After reading the following segment, consider these questions, submitting your answers by Wednesday, then responding to at least two more posts by Friday!
https://time.com/transgender-men-sexism/Links to an external site.
1. Discuss the title of this segment and how it relates to the experience of transgender men.
2. What are some issues that transgender men experience when they transition later in life?
3. What stood out to you most when reading this account of transgender men?
4. Share with the class one article that identifies the current struggles of trans folx. What did you learn?
The Way We Never Were
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Here’s a picture of some trends in U.S. households, according to the Pew Research Center.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/Links to an external site.
LinkLinks to an external site.
And…
Sociologist Stephanie Coontz discusses “The Way We Never Were,” found here: —–> Links to an external site.LinkLinks to an external site.
After taking a careful look at these sources, discuss the following questions with your initial post by Wednesday; after that, respond to at least two more posts by Friday.
1. What does Coontz argue about today’s typical family in the U.S.?
2. How might race, social class, gender, or other identities experience family structure in the U.S.?
3. How might this information help us make decisions regarding education on families or inform policies related to families?
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University of Wollongong
Research Online
Faculty of Arts – Papers (Archive)
Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities
October 1993
What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?
Mike Donaldson
University of Wollongong, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers
Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons
Recommended Citation
Donaldson, Mike, What Is Hegemonic Masculinity? 1993.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/141
Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information
contact the UOW Library: [email protected]
Theory and Society, Vol.22, No.5,
Special Issue: Masculinities, Oct., 1993, pp.643-657.
What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?
Mike Donaldson
Sociology, University of Wollongong, Australia
Structures of oppression, forces for change
A developing debate within the growing theoretical literature on men
and masculinity concerns the relationship of gender systems to the
social formation. Crucially at issue is the question of the autonomy of
the gender order. Some, in particular Waters, are of the opinion that
change in masculine gender systems historically has been caused exogenously and that, without those external factors, the systems would
stably reproduce.(1) For Hochschild, the “motor” of this social change is
the economy, particularly and currently, the decline in the purchasing
power of the male wage, the decline in the number and proportion of
“male” skilled and unskilled jobs, and the rise in “female” jobs in the
growing services sector.(2) I have argued that gender relations themselves
are bisected by class relations and vice-versa, and that the salient
moment for analysis is the relation between the two.(3)
On the other side of the argument, others have been trying to establish
“the laws of motion” of gender systems. Connell, for instance, has insisted on the independence of their structures, patterns of movement.
and determinations, most notably in his devastating critiques of sexrole theory. “Change is always something that happens to sex roles, that
impinges on them. It comes from outside, as in discussions of how technological and economic changes demand a shift to a ‘modern’ male
role for men. Or it comes from inside the person, from the ‘real self’
that protests against the artificial restrictions of constraining roles. Sex
role theory has no way of grasping change as a dialectic arising within
gender relations themselves.” It has no way of grasping social dynamics
that can only be seriously considered when the historicity of the
structure of gender relations, the gender order of the society, is the
point of departure.(4)
This concern with broad, historical movement is linked to the question
of male sexual politics. Clearly, if men wish to challenge patriarchy and
win, the central question must be, who and where are the “army of
redressers?” (5) But “the political project of rooting out the sexism in
masculinity has proved intensely difficult” because “the difficulty of
constructing a movement of men to dismantle hegemonic masculinity is
that its logic is not the articulation of collective interest but the attempt
to dismantle that interest.(6) It is this concept of “hegemonic masculinity” on
which the argument for autonomy of the gender structures turns,
for it is this that links their broader historical sweep to lived experience.
Put simply, if the gender system has an independence of structure,
movement, and determinations, then we should be able to identify
counter-hegemonic forces within it; if these are not identifiable, then
we must question the autonomy of the gender system and the existence
of hegemonic masculinity as central and specific to it.
On the other hand, if gender systems are not autonomous, then the
question “why, in specific social formations, do certain ways of being
male predominate, and particular sorts of men rule?” remains to be
answered and the resistances to that order still remain to be identified.
The political implications of the issue are clear. If there is an independent
structure of masculinity, then it should produce counter-hegemonic
movements of men, and all good blokes should get involved in
them. If the structure is not independent, or the movements not counterhegemonic, or the counter-hegemony not moving, then political
practice will not be centred on masculinity … and what do we men do
then, about the masculine images in and through which we have shaped
a world so cruel to most of its inhabitants?
Hegemony and masculinity
Twenty years ago, Patricia Sexton suggested that “male norms stress
values such as courage, inner direction, certain forms of aggression,
autonomy. mastery, technological skill, group solidarity, adventure and
considerable amounts of toughness in mind and body.” (7) It is only relatively
recently that social scientists have sought to link that insight with
the concept of hegemony, a notion as slippery and difficult as the idea
of masculinity itself.
Hegemony, a pivotal concept in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and his
most significant contribution to Marxist thinking, is about the winning
and holding of power and the formation (and destruction) of social
groups in that process. In this sense, it is importantly about the ways in
which the ruling class establishes and maintains its domination. The
ability to impose a definition of the situation, to set the terms in which
events are understood and issues discussed, to formulate ideals and
define morality is an essential part of this process. Hegemony involves
persuasion of the greater part of the population, particularly through
the media, and the organization of social institutions in ways that
appear “natural,” “ordinary:’ “normal.” The state, through punishment
for non-conformity, is crucially involved in this negotiation and
enforcement.(8)
Heterosexuality and homophobia are the bedrock of hegemonic masculinity
and any understanding of its nature and meaning is predicated
on the feminist insight that in general the relationship of men to women
is oppressive. Indeed, the term “hegemonic masculinity” was invented
and is used primarily to maintain this central focus in the critique of
masculinity. A fundamental element of hegemonic masculinity. then. is
that women exist as potential sexual objects for men while men are
negated as sexual objects for men. Women provide heterosexual men
with sexual validation, and men compete with each other for this. This
does not necessarily involve men being particularly nasty to individual
women. Women may feel as oppressed by non-hegemonic masculinities,
may even find some expressions of the hegemonic pattern more
familiar and manageable.(9)
More than fifty books have appeared in the English language in the last
decade or so on men and masculinity. What is hegemonic masculinity
as it is presented in this growing literature? Hegemonic masculinity,
particularly as it appears in the works of Carrigan, Connell, and Lee.
Chapman, Cockburn, Connell, Lichterman, Messner, and Rutherford,
involves a specific strategy for the subordination of women. In their
view, hegemonic masculinity concerns the dread of and the flight from
women. A culturally idealized form, it is both a personal and a collective
project, and is the common sense about breadwinning and manhood. It is exclusive, anxiety-provoking, internally and hierarchically
differentiated, brutal, and violent. It is pseudo-natural, tough,
contradictory, crisis-prone, rich, and socially sustained. While centrally
connected with the institutions of male dominance, not all men practice it.
though most benefit from it. Although cross-class. it often excludes workingclass and black men. It is a lived experience, and an economic
and cultural force, and dependent on social arrangements. It is constructed
through difficult negotiation over a life-time. Fragile it may be,
but it constructs the most dangerous things we live with. Resilient, it
incorporates its own critiques, but it is, nonetheless, “unravelling.” (10)
What can men do with it? According to the authors cited above, and
others, hegemonic masculinity can be analyzed, distanced from, appropriated,
negated, challenged, reproduced, separated from, renounced,
given up, chosen, constructed with difficulty, confirmed, imposed,
departed from, and modernized. (But not, apparently, enjoyed.) What
can it do to men? It can fascinate, undermine, appropriate some men’s
bodies, organize, impose, pass itself off as natural, deform, harm, and
deny. (But not, seemingly, enrich and satisfy.)
Which groups are most active in the making of masculinist sexual ideology? It
is true that the New Right and fascism are vigorously constructing aggressive,
dominant, and violent models of masculinity. But generally, the most influential
agents are considered to be: priests, journalists, advertisers, politicians,
psychiatrists, designers, playwrights, film makers, actors, novelists, musicians,
activists, academics, coaches, and sportsmen. They are the “weavers of the
fabric of hegemony” as Gramsci put it, its “organizing intellectuals.” These
people regulate and manage gender regimes: articulate experiences,
fantasies, and perspectives; reflect on and interpret gender relations.(11)
The cultural ideals these regulators and managers create and perpetuate. we
are told, need not correspond at all closely to the actual personalities of the
majority of men (not even to their own!). The ideals may reside in fantasy
figures or models remote from the lives of the unheroic majority, but while they
are very public, they do not exist only as publicity. The public face of
hegemonic masculinity, the argument goes. is not necessarily even what
powerful men are, but is what sustains their power, and is what large numbers
of men are motivated to support because it benefits them. What most men
support is not necessarily what they are. “Hegemonic masculinity is
naturalised in the form of the hero and presented through forms that revolve
around heroes: sagas, ballads, westerns, thrillers,” in books, films, television,
and in -sporting events.(12)
What in the early literature had been written of as “the male sex role” is
best seen as hegemonic masculinity, the “culturally idealised form of
masculine character” which, however, may not be “the usual form of
masculinity at all.” To say that a particular form of masculinity is hegemonic
means “that its exaltation stabilizes a structure of dominance
and oppression in the gender order as a whole. To be culturally exalted,
the pattern of masculinity must have exemplars who are celebrated as
heroes.” (13)
But when we examine these bearers of hegemonic masculinity, they
seem scarcely up to the task, with more than just feet of clay. A football
star is a model of hegemonic masculinity.(14) But is a model? When the
handsome Australian Rules football player, Warwick “the tightest
shorts in sports” Capper, combined football with modelling, does this
confirm or decrease his exemplary status? When Wally (“the King”)
Lewis explained that the price he will pay for another five years playing
in the professional Rugby League is the surgical replacement of both
his knees, this is undoubtedly the stuff of good, old, tried and true,
tough and stoic, masculinity. But how powerful is a man who mutilates
his body, almost as a matter of course, merely because of a job? When
Lewis announced that he was quitting the very prestigious “State of
Origin” football series because his year-old daughter had been diagnosed as
hearing-impaired, is this hegemonic?
In Australian surfing champion, iron man Steve Donoghue, Connell
has found “an exemplar of masculinity” who lives “an exemplary version of
hegemonic masculinity.” But, says Donoghue, “I have loved the
idea of not having to work ….Five hours a day is still a lot but it is something that I enjoy that people are not telling me what to do.” This is not
the right stuff. Nor are hegemonic men supposed to admit to strangers
that their life is “like being in jail.” Connell reveals further contradictions when
he explains that “Steve, the exemplar of masculine toughness, finds his own
exemplary status prevents him from doing exactly what his peer group defines
as thoroughly masculine behaviour: going wild, showing off, drunk driving,
getting into fights, defending his own prestige.” This is not power. And when
we look to see why many young men take up sport we find they are driven by
“the hunger for affiliation” in the words of Hammond and Jablow; we see the
felt need for “connectedness” and closeness. How hegemonic is this? (15)
Homosexuality and counter-hegemony
Let us, however, pursue the argument by turning now to examine those
purported counter-hegemonic forces that are supposedly generated by
the gender system itself. There are three main reasons why male homosexuality is regarded as counter-hegemonic. Firstly, hostility to homo-
sexuality is seen as fundamental to male heterosexuality; secondly,
homosexuality is associated with effeminacy; and thirdly, the form of
homosexual pleasure is itself considered subversive.(16)
Antagonism to gay men is a standard feature of hegemonic masculinity
in Australia. Such hostility is inherent in the construction of heterosexual masculinity itself. Conformity to the demands of hegemonic
masculinity, pushes heterosexual men to homophobia and rewards
them for it, in the form of social support and reduced anxiety about
their own manliness. In other words, male heterosexual identity is
sustained and affirmed by hatred for, and fear of, gay men.(17)
Although homosexuality was compatible with hegemonic masculinity
in other times and places, this was not true in post-invasion Australia.
The most obvious characteristic of Australian male homosexuals,
according to Johnston and Johnston, has been a “double deviance.” It
has been and is a constant struggle to attain the goals set by hegemonic
masculinity, and some men challenge this rigidity by acknowledging
their own “effeminacy.” This rejection and affirmation assisted in
changing homosexuality from being an aberrant (and widespread)
sexual practice, into an identity when the homosexual and lesbian
subcultures reversed the hegemonic gender roles, mirror-like, for each
sex. Concomitantly or consequently, homosexual men were socially
defined as effeminate and any kind of powerlessness, or a refusal to
compete, “readily becomes involved in the imagery of homosexuality” (18)
While being subverted in this fashion, hegemonic masculinity is also
threatened by the assertion of a homosexual identity confident that
homosexuals are able to give each other sexual pleasure. According to
Connell, the inherent egalitarianism in gay relationships that exists
because of this transitive structure (my lover’s lover can also be my
lover), challenges the hierarchical and oppressive nature of male
heterosexuality.(19)
However, over time, the connection between homosexuality and effeminacy
has broken. The “flight from masculinity” evident in male homosexuality, noted thirty years ago by Helen Hacker, may be true no
longer, as forms of homosexual behaviour seem to require an exaggeration of
some aspects of hegemonic masculinity, notably the cult of
toughness and physical aggression. If hegemonic masculinity necessarily
involves aggression and physical dominance, as has been suggested, then
the affirmation of gay sexuality need not imply support for
women’s liberation at all, as the chequered experience of women in the
gay movement attests.(20)
More than a decade ago, Australian lesbians had noted, “We make the
mistake of assuming that lesbianism, in itself, is a radical position. This
had led us, in the past, to support a whole range of events, ventures,
political perspectives, etc. just because it is lesbians who hold those
beliefs or are doing things. It is as ludicrous as believing that every
working class person is a communist.” (21) Even though there are many
reasons to think that there are important differences in the expression
and construction of women’s homosexuality and men’s homosexuality,
perhaps there is something to be learned from this.
Finally, it is not “gayness” that is attractive to homosexual men, but
“maleness.” A man is lusted after not because he is homosexual but
because he’s a man. How counter-hegemonic can this be?
Changing men, gender segmentation and paid and unpaid work
Connell notes, “Two possible ways of working for the ending of patriarchy
which move beyond guilt, fixing your head and heart, and
blaming men, are to challenge gender segmentation in paid work and to
work in men’s counter-sexist groups. Particularly, though, countersexist politics need to move beyond the small consciousness raising
group to operate in the workplace, unions and the state.” (22)
It is hard to imagine men challenging gender segmentation in paid work
by voluntarily dropping a third of their wage packet. But it does
happen, although perhaps the increasing trickle of men into women’s
jobs may have more to do with the prodding of a certain invisible
finger. Lichterman has suggested that more political elements of the
“men’s movement” contain human service workers, students, parttimers. and “odd-jobbers.” Those in paid work, work in over-whelmingly
female occupations -counselling, nursing, and elementary
teaching are mentioned. In this sense, their position in the labour market
has made them “predisposed to criticise hegemonic masculinity, the
common sense about breadwinning and manhood.” It can also be seen
as a defence against the loss of these things, as men attempt to colonize
women’s occupations in a job market that is increasingly competitive,
particularly for men’s jobs.?(23)
If we broaden the focus on the desegmentation of paid work to include
unpaid work, more interesting things occur. While Connell has suggested that
hegemonic masculinity is confirmed in fatherhood, the practice of parenting by
men actually seems to undermine it. Most men have an exceptionally
impoverished idea about what fatherhood involves, and indeed, active
parenting doesn’t even enter into the idea of manhood at all. Notions of
fathering that are acceptable to men concern the exercise of impartial
discipline, from an emotional distance and removed from favouritism and
partiality. In hegemonic masculinity, fathers do not have the capacity or the
skill or the need to care for children, especially for babies and infants, while
the relationship between female parents and young children is seen as
crucial. Nurturant and care-giving behaviour is simply not manly. Children, in
turn, tend to have more abstract and impersonal relations with their fathers.
The problem is severely compounded for divorced fathers, most of whom
have extremely little emotional contact with their children.(24) As
Messner has explained, “while the man is ‘out there’ establishing his
.name’ in public, the woman is usually home caring for the day-to-day
and moment-to-moment needs of her family ….Tragically, only in mid-
life, when the children have already ‘left the nest’ …do some men discover the importance of connection and intimacy.” (25)
Nonetheless, of the little time that men spend in unpaid work, proportionally
more of it goes now into child care. Russell has begun to explore the
possibility that greater participation by men in parenting has
led to substantial shifts in their ideas of masculinity. The reverse is
probably true too. Hochschild found in her study that men who shared
care with their partners rejected their own “detached, absent and overbearing” fathers. The number of men primarily responsible for parenting has
grown dramatically in Australia, increasing five-fold between
1981 and 1990. The number of families with dependent children in
which the man was not in paid work but the woman was, rose from
16,200 in 1981 to 88,100 in 1990. Women, however, still outnumber
men in this position ten to one.(26)
Not only a man’s instrumental relations with others are challenged by
close parenting, but so are his instrumental relations with himself.
Men’s sense of themselves is threatened by intimacy. Discovering the
affection, autonomy, and agency of babies and children, disconcerted by an
unusual inability to cope, men are compelled to re-evaluate their attitude to
themselves. In Russell’s study, the fathers who provided primary child care
“constantly marvelled at and welcomed the changes that had taken place in
their relationships with their children.”(27) Even Neville Wran, the former
premier of the Australian state of New South Wales whose most renowned
political activity was “putting the blowtorch to the belly” of political opponents.
said of fatherhood, which occurred in his sixties, “It’s making me a
more patient, tolerant, understanding human being. I’m a real
marshmallow.” (28)
The men who come to full-time fathering do not, however, regard
themselves as unmanly, even though their experiences have resulted in
major shifts in their ideas about children, child care, and women. In
fact, one quarter of them considered these changes a major gain from
their parenting work. This was despite the fact that these men’s male
friends and workmates were highly critical of their abandonment of the
breadwinner role, describing them, for instance, as being “bludgers,” “a
bit funny,” “a bit of a woman,” and “under the thumb.” (29) This stigmatism
may be receding as the possibility of securing the children’s future,
once part of the father’s responsibility in his relations with the “public
sphere,” is becoming less and less possible as unemployment bites
deeper. (30) Child-minders and day-care workers have confirmed that the
children of active fathers were “more secure” and “less anxious” than
the children of non-active fathers. Psychological studies have revealed
them to be better developed socially and intellectually. Furthermore,
the results of active fatherhood seem to last. There is considerable evidence
to suggest that greater interaction with fathers is better for children, with the
sons and daughters of active fathers displaying lower levels of sex-role
stereotyping. (31)
Men who share the second shift had a happier family life and more
harmonious marriages. In a longitudinal study, Defrain found that parents
reported that they were happier and their relationships improved as a
result of shared parenting. In an American study, househusbands felt
positive about their increased contribution to the family-household,
paid work became less central to their definition of themselves, and
they noted an improvement in their relationships with their female
partners.(32) One of the substantial bases for metamorphosis for Connell’s six
changing heterosexual men in the environmental movement
was the learning of domestic labour, which involves “giving to people,
looking after people.” In the same sense that feminism “claimed
emotional life as a source of dignity and self respect,” active fathers are
challenging hegemonic masculinity. For hegemonic masculinity, real
work is elsewhere, and relationships don’t require energy, but provide
it.(33) There is also the question of time. The time spent establishing the
intimacy that a man may crave is also time away from establishing and
maintaining the “competitive edge,” or the “public face.” There are no
prizes for being a good father, not even when being one is defined narrowly in
terms of breadwinning. (34)
Social struggles over time are intimate with class and gender. It is not
only that the rich and powerful are paid handsomely for the time they
sell, have more disposable time, more free time, more control over how
they use their time, but the gender dimensions of time use within
classes are equally compelling. No one performs less unpaid work, and
receives greater remuneration for time spent in paid work, than a male
of the ruling class.
The changes that are occurring remain uncertain, and there is, of
course, a sting in the tail. Madison Avenue has found that “emotional
lability and soft receptivity to what’s new and exciting” are more appropriate to
a consumer-orientated society than “hardness and emotional
distance.” Past television commercials tended to portray men as Marlboro
macho or as idiots, but contemporary viewers see men cooking,
feeding babies, and shopping. Insiders in the advertising industry say
that the quick and easy cooking sections of magazines and newspapers
are as much to attract male readers as overworked women. U.S. Sports
Illustrated now carries advertisements for coffee, cereal, deodorants,
and soup. According to Judith Langer, whose market-research firm
services A.T. & T., Gillette. and Pepsico among others, it is now
“acceptably masculine to care about one’s house. (35)
The “new man” that comes at us through the media seems to reinforce
the social order without challenging it. And he brings with him, too, a
new con for women. In their increasing assumption of breadwinning,
femocratic and skilled worker occupations, the line goes, women
render themselves incomplete. They must -‘give up” their femininity in
their appropriation of male jobs and power, but men who embrace the
feminine become “more complete.” (36)
And if that isn’t tricky enough, the “new men” that seem to be emerging
are simply unattractive. Indeed, they’re boring. Connell’s six changing
heterosexual men in the environmental movement were attracted to
women who were “strong, independent, active. (37) Isn’t everybody
attracted by these qualities? Gay men find “new men” irritating and
new men are not too sure how keen they should be on each other, and
no feminist worth her salt would be seen dead with one.
The ruling class: Really real men?
If the significance of the concept of hegemonic masculinity is that it
directs us to look for the contradictions within an autonomous gender
system that will cause its transformation, then we must conclude it
has failed. The challenges to hegemonic masculinity identified by its
theorists and outlined above seem either to be complicit with, or
broader than, the gender system that has apparently generated them.
I can appreciate why Connell is practically interested in and theoretically
intrigued by arguing against the notion of the externality of gender change.
“Both experience and theory show the impossibility of liberating a dominant
group and the difficulty of constructing a movement based not on the shared
interest of a group but on the attempt to dismantle that interest.” (38) (My
emphasis). The key is the phrase “constructing a movement.” It is only a
system which has its own dynamics that can produce the social forces
necessary to change radically that system.
But Connell himself has written that gender is part of the relations of
production and has always been so. And similarly, that “social science
cannot understand the state, the political economy of advanced capitalism. the nature of class, the process of modernisation or the nature of
imperialism, the process of socialisation, the structure of consciousness
or the politics of knowledge, without a full-blooded analysis of
gender.” (39) There is nothing outside gender. To be involved in social
relations is to be inextricably “inside” gender. If everything, in this
sense, is within gender, why should we be worried about the exteriority
of the forces for social change? Politics, economics, technology are
gendered. “We have seen the invisible hand;’ someone wittier than I remarked, “It is white, hairy and manicured.”
Is there, then, some place we can locate exemplars of hegemonic masculinity
that are less fractured, more coherent, and thus easier to read? Where its
central and defining features can be seen in sharper relief? If the public face
of hegemonic masculinity is not necessarily even what powerful men are, then
what are they necessarily? Why is it “no mean feat to produce the kind of
people who can actually operate a capitalist system?” (40)
Even though the concept “hegemony” is rooted in concern with class
domination, systematic knowledge of ruling class masculinity is slight
as yet, but it is certainly intriguing. One aspect of ruling class hegemonic
masculinity is the belief that women don’t count in big matters, and
that they can be dealt with by jocular patronage in little matters. Another is in defining what “big” and “little” are. Sexual politics are simply
not a problem to men of the ruling class. Senior executives couldn’t
function as bosses without the patriarchal household. The exercise of
this form of power requires quite special conditions – conventional
femininity and domestic subordination. Two-thirds of male top executives
were married to housewives. The qualities of intelligence and the
capacity for hard work which these women bring to marriage are
matched, as friends of Anita Keating, the wife of the Prime Minister of
Australia, remarked, by “intense devotion …her husband and her
children are her life.” Colleen Fahey, the wife of the premier of New
South Wales, had completed an 18-month part-time horticulture
course at her local technical college, and she wanted to continue her
studies full-time. “But my husband wouldn’t let met,” she said. “He said
that he didn’t think it was right for a mother to have a job when she had
a 13-year-old child …I think if I’d put my foot down and said I’d really
wanted a career, he’d have said, ‘You’re a rotten mother leaving those
kids.” (41)
The case for this sort of behaviour is simply not as compelling for
working-class men, the mothers and the wives of most of whom undertake
paid work as a matter of course. Success itself can amplify this
need for total devotion, while lessening the chances of its fulfilment
outside of the domestic realm. For the successful are likely to have difficulty
establishing intimate and lasting friendships with other males
because of low self-disclosure, homophobia, and cut-throat competition.
The corporate world expects men to divulge little of their personal lives and to
restrain personal feelings, especially affectionate ones, towards their
colleagues while cultivating a certain bland affability. Within the corporate
structure, “success is achieved through individual competition rather than
dyadic or group bonding.” The distinction between home and work is crucial
and carefully maintained. For men in the corporation, friends have their place outside work. (42)
While William Shawcross, the biographer of media mogul Rupert
Murdoch, found him “courageous” and “charming,” others close to
Murdoch described him as “arrogant,” “cocky,” “insensitive, verging on
dangerous,” “utterly ruthless,” and an “efficient Visigoth.” Murdoch
himself described his life as “consisting of a series of interlocking wars.”
Shawcross also found that Murdoch possessed “an instinctive feel for
money and power and how to use them both;’ had a “relentless, unceasing
drive and energy,” worked “harder and more determinedly” than anybody else, was “sure that what he was doing was correct”, “believed that
he had become invincible”, and was driven by the desire “to win at all
costs.” (43) And how must it feel to know that you can have whatever you
want, and that throughout your life you will be looked after in every
way, even to the point of never having to dress and undress yourself?
Thus the view that hegemonic masculinity is hegemonic insofar as it
succeeds in relation to women is true, but partial. Competitiveness, a
combination of the calculative and the combative, is institutionalised in
business and is central to hegemonic masculinity. The enterprise of
winning is life-consuming, and this form of competitiveness is “an
inward turned competitiveness, focussed on the self,” creating, in fact,
an instrumentality of the personal. (44)
Hegemonic masculinity is “a question of how particular groups of men
inhabit positions of power and wealth, and how they legitimate and
reproduce the social relationships that generate their dominance.” (45)
Through hegemonic masculinity most men benefit from the control of
women. For a very few men, it delivers control of other men. To put it
another way, the crucial difference between hegemonic masculinity and
other masculinities is not the control of women, but the control of men
and the representation of this as “universal social advancement,” to
paraphrase Gramsci. Patriarchal capitalism delivers the sense, before a
man of whatever masculinity even climbs out of bed in the morning,
that he is “better” than half of humankind. But what is the nature of the
masculinity confirming not only that, but also delivering power over
most men as well? And what are its
