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Masculinity as Homophobia
Michael Kimmel
1.
The great secret of American manhood is: We are afraid of other men. Homophobia is a central
organizing principle of our cultural definition of manhood. Homophobia is more than the irrational fear
of gay men, more than the fear that we might be perceived as gay. “The word ‘faggot’ has nothing to do
with homosexual experience or even with fears of homosexuals,” writes David Leverenz (1986). “It
comes out of the depths of manhood: a label of ultimate contempt for anyone who. Seems sissy
untough, uncool” (p. 455). Homophobia is the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal
to us and the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men. We are afraid to let other
men see that fear. Fear makes us ashamed, because the recognition of fear in ourselves is proof to
ourselves that we are not as manly as we pretend, that we are, like the young man in a poem by Yeats,
“one that ruffles in a manly pose for all his timid heart.” Our fear is the fear of humiliation. We are
ashamed to. Be afraid. . .
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2.
The fear of being seen as a sissy dominates the cultural definitions of manhood. It starts so early. “Boys
among boys are ashamed to be unmanly,” wrote one educator in 1871 (cited in Ratunda, 1993, p. 264). I
have a standing bet with a friend that I can walk onto any playground in America where 6-year-old boys
are happily playing and by asking one question, I can provoke a fight. That question is simple: “Who’s a
sissy around here?” Once posed, the challenge is made. One of two things is likely to happen. One boy
will accuse another of being a sissy, to which that boy will respond that he is not a sissy, that the first
boy is. They may have to. fight it out to see who’s lying. Or a whale group of boys will surround one boy
and all shout “He is! He is!” That boy will either burst into tears and run home crying, disgraced, or he
will have to take on several boys at once to prove that he’s not a sissy. (And what will his father or older
brothers tell him if he chooses to run home crying?) It will be some time before he regains any sense of
self-respect.
3.
Violence is often the single most evident marker of manhood. Rather it is the willingness to fight, the
desire to fight. The origin of our expression that one has a chip on one’s shoulder lies in the practice of
an adolescent boy in the country or small town at the turn of the century, who would literally walk
around with a chip of wood balanced on his shoulder-a signal of his readiness to fight with anyone who
would take the initiative of knocking the chip off (see Gorer, 1964,p. 38; Mead, 1965).
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4.
As adolescents, we learn that our peers are a kind of gender police, constantly threatening to unmask us
as feminine, as sissies. One of the favorite tricks when I was an adolescent was to ask a boy to look at his
fingernails. If he held his palm toward his face and curled his fingers back to see them, he passed the
test. He’d looked at his nails “like a man.” But if he held the back of his hand away from his face, and
looked at his fingernails with arm outstretched, he was immediately ridiculed as a sissy.
As young men we are constantly riding those gender boundaries, checking the fences we have
constructed on the perimeter, making sure that nothing even remotely feminine might show through.
The possibilities of being unmasked are everywhere… Even the most seemingly insignificant thing can
pose a threat or activate that haunting terror. On the day the students in my course “Sociology of Men
and Masculinities” were scheduled to discuss homophobia and male-male friendships, one student
provided a touching illustration. Noting that it was a beautiful day, the first day of spring after the brutal
northeast winter, he decided to wear shorts to class. “I had this really nice pair of new Madras shorts,”
he commented. “But then I thought to myself, these shorts have lavender and pink in them. Today’s
class topic is homophobia. Maybe today is not the best day to wear these shorts.”
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Our efforts to maintain a manly front cover everything we do. What we wear. How we talk. How we
walk. What we eat. Every mannerism, every movement contains a coded gender language. Think, for
example, of how you would answer the question: How do you “know” if a man is homosexual? When I
ask this question in classes or workshops, respondents invariably provide a pretty standard list of
stereotypically effeminate behaviors. He walks a certain way, talks a certain way, acts a certain way.
He’s very emotional; he shows his feelings. One woman commented that she “knows” a man is gay if he
really cares about her; another said she knows he’s gay if he shows no interest in her, if he leaves her
alone. Now alter the question and imagine what heterosexual men do to make sure no one could
possibly get the “wrong idea” about them. Responses typically refer to the original stereotypes, this time
as a set of negative rules about behavior. Never dress that way. Never talk or walk that way. Never show
your feelings or get emotional. Always be prepared to demonstrate sexual interest in women that you
meet, so it is impossible for any woman to get the wrong idea about you. In this sense, homophobia, the
fear of being perceived as gay, as not a real man, keeps men exaggerating all the traditional rules of
masculinity, including sexual predation with women. Homophobia and sexism go hand in hand…
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POWER AND POWERLESSNESS IN THE LIVES OF MEN
. . ‘. Manhood is equated with power-over women, over other men. Everywhere we look, we see the
institutional expression of that power-in state and national legislatures, on the boards of directors of
every major U.S. corporation or law firm, and in every school and hospital administration. Women have
long understood this, and feminist women have spent the past three decades challenging both the
public and the private expressions of men’s power and acknowledging their fear of men. Feminism as a
set of theories both explains women’s fear of men and empowers women to confront it both publicly
and privately. Feminist women have theorized that masculinity is about the drive for domination, the
drive for power, for conquest.
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5.
This feminist definition of masculinity as the drive for power is theorized from women’s point of view. It
is how women experience masculinity. But it assumes a symmetry between the public and the private
that does not conform to men’s experiences. Feminists observe that women, as a group, do not hold
power in our society. They also observe that individually, they, as women, do not feel powerful. They
feel afraid, vulnerable. Their observation of the social reality and their individual experiences are
therefore symmetrical. Feminism also observes that men, as a group, are in power. Thus, with the same
symmetry, feminism has tended to assume that individually men must feel powerful.
This is why the feminist critique of masculinity often falls on deaf ears with men. When confronted with
the analysis that men have all the power, many men react incredulously. “What do you mean, men have
all the power?” they ask. “What are you talking about? My wife bosses me around. My kids boss me
around. My boss bosses me around. I have no power at all! I’m completely powerless!” Men’s feelings
are not the feelings of the powerful, but of those who see themselves as powerless. These are the
feelings that come inevitably from the discontinuity between the social and the psychological, between
the aggregate analysis that reveals how men are in power as a group and the psychological fact that
they do not feel powerful as individuals. They are the feelings of men who were raised to believe
themselves entitled to feel that power, but do not feel it. No wonder many men are frustrated and
angry…
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6.
Often the purveyors of the mythopoetic men’s movement, that broad umbrella that encompasses all the
groups helping men to retrieve this mythic deep manhood, use the image of the chauffeur to describe
modern man’s position. The chauffeur appears to have the power-he’s wearing the uniform, he’s in the
driver’s seat, and he knows where he’s going. So, to the observer, the chauffeur looks as though he is in
command. But to the chauffeur himself, they note, he is merely taking orders. He is not at all in charge.
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7.
Despite the reality that everyone knows chauffeurs do not have the power, this image remains
appealing to the men who hear it at these weekend workshops. But there is a missing piece to the
image, a piece concealed by the framing of the image in terms of the individual man’s experience. That
missing piece is that the person who is giving the orders is also a man. Now we have a relationship
between men-between men giving orders and other men taking those orders. The man who identifies
with the chauffeur is entitled to be the man giving the orders, but he is not. (“They,” it turns out, are
other men.)
8.
The dimension of power is now reinserted into men’s experience not only as the product of individual
experience but also as the product of relations with other men. In this sense, men’s experience of
powerlessness is real-the men actually feel it and certainly act on it-but it is not true, that is, it does not
accurately describe their condition. In contrast to women’s lives, men’s lives are structured around
relationships of power and men’s differential access to power, as well as the differential access to that
power of men as a group. Our imperfect analysis of our own situation leads us to believe that we men
need more power, rather than leading us to support feminists’ efforts to rearrange power relationships
along more equitable lines…
9.
Why, then, do American men feel so powerless? Part of the answer is because we’ve constructed the
rules of manhood so that only the tiniest fraction of men come to believe that they are the biggest of
wheels, the sturdiest of oaks, the most virulent repudiators of femininity, the most daring and
aggressive. We’ve managed to disempower the overwhelming majority of American men by other
means-such as discriminating on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, age, or sexual preference.
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10.
Masculinist retreats to retrieve deep, wounded masculinity are but one of the ways in which American
men currently struggle with their fears and their shame. Unfortunately, at the very moment that they
work to break down the isolation that governs men’s lives, as they enable men to express those fears
and that shame, they ignore the social power that men continue to exert over women and the privileges
from which they (as the middle-aged, middle-class white men who largely make up these retreats)
continue to benefit-regardless of their experiences. as wounded victims of oppressive male socialization.
11.
Others still rehearse the politics of exclusion, as if by clearing away the playing field of secure gender
identity of any that we deem less than manly-women, gay men, nonnative-born men, men of colormiddle-class, straight, white men can reground their sense of themselves without those haunting fears
and that deep shame that they are unmanly and will be exposed by other men. This is the manhood of
racism, of sexism, of homophobia. It is the manhood that is so chronically insecure that it trembles at
the idea of lifting the ban on gays in the military, that is so threatened by women in the workplace that
women become the targets of sexual harassment, that is so deeply frightened of equality that it must
ensure that the playing field of male competition remains stacked against all newcomers to the game.
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12.
Exclusion and escape have been the dominant methods American men have used to keep their fears of
humiliation at bay. The fear of emasculation by other men, of being humiliated, of being seen as a sissy,
is the leitmotif in my reading of the history of American manhood. Masculinity has become a relentless
test by which we prove to other men, to women, and ultimately to ourselves, that we have successfully
mastered the part. The restlessness that men feel today is nothing new in American history; we have
been anxious and restless for almost two centuries. Neither exclusion nor escape has ever brought us
the relief we’ve sought, and there is no reason to think that either will solve our problems now. Peace of
mind, relief from gender struggle, will come only from a politics of inclusion, not exclusion, from
standing up for equality and justice, and not by running away.
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NOTES
Gorer,G. (1964).The American People: A Study in National Character. New York: Norton.
Leverenz, D. (1986, Fall). Manhood, Humiliation and Public Life: Some Stories. Southwest Review, 71.
Mead, M. (1965). And Keep Your Powder Dry. New York: William Morrow.
Rotundo, E.A. (1993). American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books.
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