Slow Motion LYNNE SEGAL Is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

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Slow Motion LYNNE SEGAL is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Her books include Is the Future Female?:TTroubled Thougghts on Contemporary Feminism; Straigght Sex: ThePolitics of Pleasure; Why Feminism?: Gender, Psychology,g Politics and Makinng Trouble: Life and Politics. SlowMotion Changing Masculinities, Changing Men

Lynne Segal

Third, revised edition © Lynne Segal 1990, 1997, 2007 Foreword to the Third Edition © Raewyn Connell 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published by Virago Press 1990 Revised edition 1997 This edition published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-01927-0 ISBN 978-0-230-58252-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230582521 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This edition is not for sale in the United States of America and its Dependencies and Canada. 10987654321 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 For Peter This page intentionally left blank Contents

Foreworrd to the Thirrd Edition by Raewyn Connell x

Introduction to theTThirrd Edition–Men Afteer Feminism: What’s Left to Say? xvii Popular Perceptions of Crisis xviii BetweenMenand Feminism xx Discursive Freedoms: Gender Mobility xxiii Global Constraints andGender Continuities xxviii Acknowledgementts xxxii

Introduction tot he Oriiginal Edition xxxiii

PreambletoChapter 1 – The View from 2007

1. Look Back in Anger: Meninthe Fifties 1 Man About the House 2 Maternity Rules 7 Angry Young Men 10 Homophobia and the Fear of Unmanliness 13 Womenand the Left in the Fifties 17

PreambletoChaptter 2–The View from 2007

2. TheGood Father: Reconstructing Fatherhood 23 God the Father: What FathersMean to Us 23 TheHeart is Willing 26 The Slow Pace of Change29 Shared Parenting? 31 Men Who ‘Mother’ 36 Benefits and Costs of the New Fatherhood 39 The Problem With Reasserting Fatherhood 41 The Future of Fatherhood 47

PreambletoChapter3– The View from 2007

3. Shrinking the Phallus: Contemporary Research on Masculinity (I) 51 Searching for SexDifference 52 The Powerof SexRoles 55

vii viii Contents

Introducing theUnconscious 58 Object Relation: TheFragility of Men? 61

Preamble to Chapter 4 – The View from 2007

4. Asserting Phallic Mastery: Contemporary Research on Masculinity (II) 71 Linguistic Law and Phallic Order 71 The Limits of Lacan 76 Genderand Power 79

Preamble to Chaapter 5 – The View from 2007

5. Competing Masculinities (I): Manliness – The MasculineIdeal 89 Learning about Manhood: Historical Reflections 89 ToughGuys: The Pursuitof Heroism 94 ‘Martial Men’: The Appeal ofFascism 97 Making it: Masculinity as Power 103 RitesofPassage: The Men from the Boys 108

PreambletoChapter 6 – The View from 2007

6. Competing Masculinities (II): TraitorstotheCause 113 Fixing the Borders: The Emergence of the Modern Homosexual 114 The Male Homosexual Challenge: From ‘Camp’ to ‘Gay’ to ‘Super-Macho’ 121 Power and the Erotic: Dominance, Submission and Masculine Convention 126 Homophobia: The Enemy Within 131 ACommon Struggle: Homophobiaand Misogyny in the Eraof AIDS 133

Preamble to Chaapter7–TThe View from 2007

7. Competing Masculinities (III): Black Masculinity and the White Man’sBlack Man 142 ‘Devils in Waiting’: WhiteImages of Africa 143 Sex and Racism: TheBlack Male as Phallic Symbol 148 Black Male Rage:The ‘Emasculation’of Black Men? 153 Black Feminism and Black Masculinity 163

PreambletoChapter 8 – The View from 2007

8. TheBellyof the Beast (I): Sex as Male Domination? 173 TheSexuality of Men 175 The Appeal and Function of Pornography 183 Contents ix

Preamble to Chaptter 9 – The View from 2007 9. The Belly of the Beast (II): Explaining Male Violence 198 Myths of Rape: Sexist and Anti-Sexist 199 Continuitiesand Discontinuitiesin Men’s Use of Sexual Violence 204 Behind Closed Doors: Violence in theFamily 214 Is Violence Masculine? 219

Preamble to Chaapter 10 – The View from 2007 10. BeyondGender Hierarchy:CanMen Change? 229 Problem Partners: Sexual Liberation, Women’s Liberation and the Crisis of Personal Life 231 Dismantling ‘Masculinity’: Some Men’s Attempts to Change Themselves 235 Socialism, Feminism andthe ProblemofMen 246 The Road Ahead: A New Agenda256

Notes 261

Index 308 Foreword to the Third Edition Raewyn Connell

Asaresearcheronmenand masculinitiesIamoftenasked by students, journalists and researchers in other fields, what they should read to getan understanding of this topic. Since 1990 I have had no difficulty in answering this question: I tell them to read Lynne Segal’s Slow Motion. It was then, and is now,the best introduction to the research,the politicsand the human dilemmas aroundthe changing livesof men. For a controversial book to be still relevantafter 15 years isunusual. It was a brave book for a feminist to write at the time. The version offeminism which was dominant in the rich countries then had a simple, clear-cut view of the world and especially of men. The world’s problems were causedby ‘male violence’and‘male sexuality’ (usually conflated); all menwere potential rapists andkillers, incitedbypornography; feminists who worked or lived with men wereeither selling out or hopelessly deluded – womenneeded to separate frommen. Slow Motioo n contested every claim in this list. Curiously, in the 1980s an equally stereotyped mirror-image viewof masculinity had emerged in a therapeutic ‘men’s movement’ in the rich countries. According tothis movement, men needed toseparate from womentorediscover their true selves. Father/son links hadbeen broken, and men’s confidence and energy was sappedbyfeminist and counter-cultural criticisms of machismo. In woodland retreats and men’s groups, through ritual and male bonding, menandboys could rediscovertheir primordial masculinity and save us all from psychic catastrophe. Only men could understand masculinity. Slow Mototion contested this, too. In the 1980s something else was happening,with muchless publicity. In several fieldsof the social sciences andhumanities, questions about menand masculinities were becoming the subject of serious research.Theshake-up of Western culture by the women’s liberation movement was more profound than most people had realised atthe time. ‘Women’s Studies’, as it was practised in the 1970s,was overwhelmingly concerned with women, filling in the huge gaps left bypatriarchal systems of knowledge. Yet feminist analysis constantly raised new questions about men, considered as gendered people, about men in relation to women, about how masculinities were madeand sustained. Having haddirect experience of the raw sideof gender politics, Lynne Segal was in a good position to address the topicof menand masculinity. As

x Foreworrd xi a single mother she faced issuesabout child care and economic survival, as well as theemotions of mothering. Lynne migrated from AustraliatoBritain just when the women’s liberation movement was beginning. She became deeply involved in community organising in a then mainlyworking-class region of London.This sustained experience of grass-roots politics gave her a gut-level realism that shows through strongly in Slow Motion. Partof this experience, as she tells in her first (joint)book Beyond the Fragmentts,was setting up a pioneering Women’s Centre as a localbase for activitiesand campaigns involving women. Butshealso remained engaged withlabour movement politics and socialism. A broad commitmenttosocial justice also shows through in Slow Motiono . In the Britishleftshe faced masculine domination in the form ofhard-line militant politics, including the bizarre spectacle ofmany left-wing womentrashing feminism in accordance with the ‘line’ of their male-dominated factions. Through it all she keptasense of humour, asense of the importance of sexual politics, andarefusal to settle for one-dimensional logic. In the 1980s LynneSegalbecame a very well-known participant in debates over feminist strategy. Her 1983 editedbook Whhatistobe Done aboutt hhe Family? recalledthe radicalhopes, but also the silencing of women, in the 1960s, and insisted that there was now ‘no turning back’ for women, even in Thatcher’s Britain.The new leftand feminism had opened a potential for sexual equality which nothing could close off. In her next book, the best-selling Is the Future Female? (1987), LynneSegalconfrontedthe ‘popular feminism’ of the 1980s. She criticised its stereotyping of both women and men, its weird return to conventional imagesof women’s purity andpassivity,and the prevalence of idealist strategiesrather than practical ones. In particular, she argued for the importance of recognisingthe differ- encesamong men, for anypractical strategy for achievinggender equality. The next book, logically,was Slow Motion. Genderresearchfocusedon men followed gender researchfocused on women byagood ten years, but it was a logical consequence, and it did gradually build up. By the secondhalf of the 1980s there was a growing body of knowledgein sociology, inanthropology, in history and in cultural studies. Ajoint effort by women and men, thisresearchdocumented different patterns of masculinity, the social settingsinwhich they were found, and the social processesthrough which they were maintained. Theor- etical work, drawing on psychoanalysis, gay liberation theory,feminism and power structure research, began to developnew models for understanding menand masculinities. Lynne Segal was one of the first peopletosee the significance of thisnew research. She was certainly the first person to connect itsystematically with the problemsof sexual politics that feminism hadbeen debating. One of the greatvirtues of Slow Motion is that ittakes research seriously. It does not settle forthe sweepinggeneralisationsand silly anec- dotes peddledby pop psychologists from Robert Bly to JohnGray. Lynne xii Foreworrd

Segal knows that research is often inconclusive, is sometimes contradictory and is often difficulttointerpret. Nevertheless, research is our only way, in the long run, of building our understanding of personal and social issues, of correcting our errors of understanding, andof opening new fields of knowledge. Another great strengthof SlowMMotion is the range of issues itaddresses. Writers on gender issuesall too often think they have found the ‘One True Source’ of all the mischief – whether ‘Male Violence’, or modern man’s neglect of ‘Deep Masculinity’, or the ‘Capitalist Mode of Production’, or the ‘Unconscious Structured Like aLanguage’, or feminism’s ‘War Against Boys’, or Lynne Segal knowsbetter.She knowsthat gender relationsare a very complex realmof human life towhich there is nosingle master- key. Dangerous and oppressive situations are producedby theinterplay of multiple forces, varyinggroupsand changing strategies. Slow Motion is notable for the range of issues it addresses, and for the persistence with which itbringsdifferent issuestogether and exploresthe relationsamong them. Thus, it has a lot to say about masculine identities. But instead of treating ‘identity’asaproblem in a box of its own, Slow Motion treats identity form- ation as a dynamic process, interwoven with sexuality and relationships, in varying contexts of race, class and nationality. Itisavery sophisticated treatment. Particularly innovative is Slow Motion’streatment of masculinity and race. There had been a certain discussion of this issue in the 1980s, influenced by Black feminism in the USA, but it had frankly not got far.LynneSegal put her finger on a vitalpoint, thatcontemporary thinking about race is a ‘legacyof colonialism’(1st edition, p.175). We have to think about both Black and White masculinities within a history involving conquest, cultural domination and continuing economic inequalities bothlocal and global. When the book was published, this was a very unusual emphasis in writing about men. With the growth of research in colonised societies, and much more substantial workon historiesof masculinity and Empire, it isnow widely accepted. Nevertheless, what remains the most powerful part of Slow Motion isthe psychological analysis. Most of the public debate about masculinity has been pitched at a psychologicallevel, involving claims about men’sinnate character, men’s emotional inhibitions, the fear offemininity, the effects of mother/son relations in early childhood, etc. Through the book,LynneSegal confronts those arguments directly, anddoesawonderful jobof sweeping away the bullshit. She does not reject psychological analysis. Quite the contrary–shesetsouttoreplace bad psychological analysiswith good.She shows the limits of essentialism, sex role psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis–all of which(in different ways) over simplify the issues. She places men’s emotions in the context of the social relations that giverise to them – and places those relations in the social structures of the widerworld. In Foreworrd xiii short, Slow Motion gives us a contexttual psychology of men, which is far more realistic and powerfulu than the alternatives. A key reason why Lynne Segal could do this isthat sheisatrained psychologist, in fact a very skilful one. However, she has always had atouchof scepticism about grand generalisa- tions, asking what the actual evidence amounts to. The first edition of Slow Motion thus provided a critical, comprehensive survey of the research anddebatesonmenand masculinities that hadbeen done by the late 1980s. Neither the research nor the commentary hasstood still since that time, as Lynne’supdatesatthe start of each chapter for this edition will summarise. Fifteen years laterwe have a rich anddiverse field of knowledge, as well as continuingpublic interest in questionsabout men, boysand gender. Overall, there has been a great consolidation of descriptive research on masculinities. We now have very detailed studiesof the social construction of masculinity, and the variations among masculinities, in factories, schools, military forcesand offices, in commercialsports, in art and mass media, in particular communitiesand social movements, among disabled men, athletes, gay men, rich men, youth and old men, among particular ethnic groups, in occupationssuch as mining andpolice work, andatdifferent periods of history. I call this the ‘ethnographic moment’ in masculinity research.Only a minorityof the studies are strictly doneby ethnographers – some are life-history studies, some are documentary, some are surveys – but all of them shareethnography’s concernwith the detailed documentation of local social reality. Thisapproachhas been extraordin- arily fruitful, and has provided massive documentation of the diversity of masculinities, the interplay between different forms of masculinity, and the embedding of masculinities in economic and organisational contexts – all being themes in Slow Motioo n.Aprofoundly important development has been the globalisation (in the good sense)of research on menand masculinities. A couple of yearsago Icounted the collections (not just individual studies)of research on masculinity that had recently been published. Just five yearssaw the appearance of collections of research from Brazil,Germany, France, the middle East, Scandinavia, North America, Latin America generally,southern Africa, Japan, New Zealand and Australia. More have beenadded since, together with the 2005 Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities that attempts to be worldwidein its coverage. There isnot space here for detail, but I want to mention two initiatives. The mostwide-ranging research agenda on menand masculinities, anywherein the world,was launchedby a team atthe Federation of Latin American Social Science Organizations at Santiago in Chile, led by Teresa Valdés and José Olavarría. This has included continent-wide conferences, innovative studies on topicssuch as sexuality, youth and fatherhood, all linked with feminist work on gender inequalities and gender reform. Another striking innovation is the ‘travelling seminar’ on men and masculinitiescreated by a group of activists and academics in India, recently describedby the film-maker xiv Foreworrd

Rahul Roy. Lacking an institutionalbase for amen’s studies programme, this group took theinitiative on tour around a number of Indian cities, running lectures, workshopsand filmshows to stir debate on theissues in each place. Athird important development has been the growthof applied masculinity research,which takesthe findingsof descriptive research and theory, and puts them to work in some field of social practice. Again, the range isconsid- erable. This kindof work includes:

• educational work on the learning problems of boys, on schooldiscipline and violence, onsexualharassment and sexism in schools; • occupationalhealth and safety,exploring reasons for the rates of injury anddeath among men in particular occupations, with similarwork on the prevention of road deaths and injury; • reproductive and sexualhealth, especially the prevention of AIDS; • inter-personal violence and its prevention, for instance work on men’s involvementin domestic violence, and on the situations that produce public violence; • peacemaking, and social reconstruction aftercivil orinternational war; • men’srelationship to children, especially as fathers but also as teachers; • counselling and psychotherapy of men,inwaysthat pay attention to gender relations.

This work has not gone without challenge, any more than Slow Motiono went unchallenged. Some feminists continue to worry that paying attention to men andboysdiverts attentionfrom the situation ofwomen and girls, and may also lead to scarce resources being diverted. (This has certainly happened in education.) Gender research in general, and masculinity research in particular, is attackedby right-wingpublicists as basedon hatredof men or refusal torecognisethe biological‘truth’ about gender. My own research onmen and masculinities in Australia was attackedbyright-wingpoliticiansas a waste of public money. Nowadays,the same party makes policiesabout gender issues by ignoring what research has found – so in that resepect, they have made their own criticism come true. Earlier research on masculinities has beencriticised bypost-structuralists for relying on atoo-rigid concept of genderidentity. There is something in thiscriticism, and very interesting new researchhas shown how men can shift between different positions in gender discourse, depending on what suits themin a particular situation. (Presumably women can dothe same.) This does notchange what we have already learntabout culturaldefinitions of masculinity,but certainly adds new insights about howmenandboysrelate to these culturaldefinitions. While the research field has developed, the political situation has continued to change. Theearly 1990ssaw a growth anddiversification of ‘men’smovements’,traced in Michael Messner’s ThePolitics of Masculin- ities, especially those aimed atthe restoration of what was supposed to Foreword xv be traditional masculinity. Themythopoetic movementcelebrating ‘deep masculinity’ was publicisedby best-sellers such as Iron John, and a movement for restoring Black masculinity and fatherhood intheUSA produced a huge public demonstration in Washington, the ‘Million Man March’. Meanwhile conservative Christian groups created the ‘Promise Keepers’, an evangelical movementtoemphasise the role of husbands/fathers as head of the family. This became verypopular for some years, especially in the USA,though it has now declined. There has been some consolidation of alternatives that embody more progressive gender politics. The gay men’s communities of the developed world recovered from theinitial HIV/AIDS crisis anddeveloped prevention and support programmes that remarkably demonstrate men’s capacities for collective action and care. Internationalnetworksdeveloped to exchange information and experience about theepidemic, and therehas also been a complex global interplay of sexual identitiesand practices, as Dennis Altman showsin Global Sex. The ‘new fatherhood’, seen asamedia myth in countrieslike Australia which giveengaged fathers no economic support, has become much more ofareality inthe Nordic countries, as Øystein Holter showsin Can Men Do It? The competingpatriarchies that marked Apartheid politics in SouthAfricahave beencontestedby feminism, by the movement for humanrights,by the reconciliation movement, and by new formsof social action thatseekgender solidarity rather than gender separation.The manypossibilities of change among men are vividly shown in Robert Morrell’s Channginng Men in SoutthernAfrica. Anti-sexist, pro-equalitypoliticsamong men havealso moved into international arenas. The anti-violence ‘White Ribbon’ movement, which arose in Canada inresponse tothe massacre of women engineering students by a gender-crazed man, is now international.UNESCO undertook an initi- ative connectingthe ‘cultureof peace’ with changes towardsmore peaceable masculinities. In 2004 the United NationsCommission on the Status of Women (a committee of the General Assembly) adopted a document on the role of men andboys inachieving gender equality, the first international policy agreement on this issue, after a consultation involving researchers, policymakers and activists around the world.These are hopeful signs. Yet the year 2004also saw the re-election of George Bush in the aftermath of the bombing and invasion of Iraq and the mass bombing of Afghanistan. The new brutality of neo-conservative regimes, not confined to the USA but also seen in Russia, Israel, Britainand Australia, has a gender politics. The appeal to toughness inthe face of challenges, the resorttoviolence in the first instance rather than the last, the dogmatism, ethnocentrism and preoccupation with control, all signify (and are at a certain level intended to signiffy) a restored masculinity, anauthoritative, in-command masculinity. The famous photo-op where President Bushdressedup as asoldier and dropped in on the troops by helicopter (something President Eisenhower, a real general, and President Kennedy, a real war hero, had never done) xvi Foreworrd bothdramatised the re-masculinisation of politicalleadership, and signalled a curious artificiality in the performance. Nevertheless neo-conservatism is a real political force, and its consequences for equal opportunity, women’srightsand gayrights, as well as peace and racial and religious tolerance, are dire. If we are nottosink back on all these fronts, then genderanalysis, specifically tounderstand the patterns of men’s livesand forms of masculinity, remains important. In that project, Lynne Segal’s SlowMMotion continues to be relevant and remains a great resource.

RaewynConnell Sydneey

References Altman,Dennis, (2001), Global Sex, Chicago,University of ChicagoPress. Breines, Ingeborg, RobertConnell and Ingrid Eide (eds)(2000), MaleRoles,MMasculinities and Violence: A Cultureof Peace Persspective, Paris, UNESCO Publishing. Holter, Øystein Gullvåg,(2003), Can Men Do It? Men and Gender Equalitty – The Norrdic Experience, Copenhagen,Nordic Council of Ministers. Kimmel, Michael S., Jeff Hearn and R.W. Connell (eds)(2005), Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage Publications. Messner,Michael A., (1997), ThePolitics of Masculinities: Men in Movementts, Thousand Oaks, Calif., SagePublications. Morrell,Robert, (ed.), (2001), Changing Men in SoutthernAfrica,Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, University of Natal Press. Roy,Rahul, (2003), ‘Exploring Masculinities – A Travelling Seminar’,Agendaand abstracts, Unpublished manuscript. United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, (2004), TheRoleof Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality: Aggreed Conclusions, available online at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw48/ac-men-auv.pdf. Valdés, Teresa and José Olavarría, (ed.), (1998), Masculinidades y equidaddegénerro en América Latina, Santiago, FLACSO/UNFPA. Introduction to the Third Edition – Men After Feminism: What’s Left to Say?

Just forawhile, it came as a surprise when theWestern world discovered that men overall,men ingeneral, might have gender troubles of their own, even the most confident and authoritative of them. Having escaped exhaustive scrutiny for so long, as men probedanddisputedthe nature and complaints of women, anew social agenda began to resituate the usual agents of knowledge as themselvesoneof its most restless anddemanding objects. To ask the question, ‘what is wrong with men?’ was definitely one of the many reverberations offeminism, whenitre-emerged asamovement just over a generation ago. Once thequestion hovered, irretrievably, in thepublic arena,however, there was only one way for men to handle it. They would have to address itthemselves. This meantthat the initial publication of Slow Mottion, in 1990, was in many ways propitious. ‘Men’s Studies’, had just been launched, as ever, most visibly in the USA, with the study of menand their lives out in the open and on the move as never before.1 Where are we now, and what is lefttosay? Oddly, after so much inkhas beenspilt on menand masculinities, the questions in the popular domain have only intensified. The quarrels betweendifferent authorities addressing themremain as deep as ever. If we are to track what has happened to men and masculinity overthe last two decadeswe will therefore need to embark on morethan one journey. The cascade of booksthatappeared on thetopic duringthistime have now matched the sudden outpouring of writing and research on women and femininity immediately preceding them, in many ways mirroring as well as partially replacing them. In both cases, the development of differing theoretical trajectoriesinacademic scholarship often divergedfrom the parallel discussion ofmen and their apparently mounting difficultiesoccurring in the public domain. Throughout the 1990s there was, internationally, an unprecedented interest inmen’s lives, as economic and other social adjust- ments began to impact on specific groups of men, just as they did on those of women. Inscholarly pursuits, men’snew visibility was quickly an opening for detecting ambiguity, complexity, mutability in notions of ‘masculinity’, whilein popular culture, a more concrete languageof ‘crisis’ was widely used. In public culture, men emerged inthe 1990sassociety’s new victims, portrayed as suffering from falling levels of confidence, losing out as they journeyed throughlife, inschools, jobs, personal relationships,

xvii xviii Introduction to the Thirrd Edition overall health and well-being.It was now menwho were popularly addressed as disadvantaged all along the way.2 More optimistically,this was also a time when we saw popular images of ‘softer’ aspects of ‘masculinity’,whether in the form of the ‘new man’ (even if regularly an object of media suspicion, whennot a target for ongoing derision),alongside more positive backing for notions of new, more engaged fathering. The connection betweenscholarly manoeuvresandpopular concerns is that each reflects a world in which,after feminism and (quite independ- ently driven) otherchangesinthe workforce and households, men’s once unquestionedlegitimacy as theruling sex could no longer be seen as inevitable. However, to query men’s birthright as the literal ‘master’ sex does not, onits own, eitheroverturn the habitual ways in which men have dominated women, or provide imagesof the future for eithersex. In 2000, the best known psychiatrist in the United Kingdom, Anthony Clare, offi- cially endorsedthe notion of ‘masculinity incrisis’, arguing that men were nowin dangerof becoming ‘redundant’: ‘Atthe beginning of the twenty- first century it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that menare in serious trouble.’3 Yet, if menare becoming redundant,those in charge ofmanaging their fate now, with only minor changes from before, remain men themselves. Globally, men occupy all but 10 percent of cabinetseats, as well as keypositions in all international agencies.4 Moreover, asIwill return to, the dawning of the21st centuryhascome withprolonged warfare on the global agenda, accompanying andextending the growth of religious fundamentalism, nationalism and ethnic strife. All advance primordial imagesand practicesofmale toughness, withaggressive machismothe inevitable display behind military invasion andconquest. Whatever is new in the study of men and masculinity, therefore, can only arrive fraught withcontradiction.

Popular PerceptionsofCrisis Indisputably, the main shiftthat hasoccurred since I wrote Slow Motion has been thepublic perception of crisis in the lives of boysand men, its description growing more alarmed year on year throughout the ninetiesand continuing to thepresent moment. Regular coverage now portraysmen’s ongoing higherincidences of suicide,alcoholism, drug addiction, serious accidents, cardiovascular disease and significantly lower life expectancies when compared with women. Indeed, at every age, widespreaddemographic studies have been undertaken to reveal men’s poorer health overall and higherriskof death relative to women.5 By 2003, the annual educational survey of the Organisation forEconomic Co-operation and Development (OECD) confirmed that young women were achieving betterresults than young men inevery developed country around the world, adding thatthis accompanied asignificant shift in women’s expectations and achievements, with 15-year-old girls more confidentthan boysabout getting high-income jobs.6 After feminism, it would seem,things have never beenthe same for Introducttion to the Thirrd Edition xix men. From the boardroom to the bedroom,women havenot only been found sittingatthe highesttable, if inrather small numbers, but perhaps initiating the action. Meanwhile, male managers,while still in fact overwhelmingly monopolising power and influence, say they feel ‘besieged’ on all sides by economic changesand new competition from younger women, as well as from othermen.7 The contemporaryperceptions of crisis in menand masculinity have triggered regularattempts to tacklethe problem. In 1998 theAustralian government setaside one million dollars for setting up a telephone help line for men in crisis, promising to assist up to 10,000 men annually deal with familyand relationshipproblems.8 In Britain, the official reaction to perceptionsof male troubles has been more piecemeal, but no less publicly evident. David Blunkett, when Minister of Education, announced urgentaction to boost boy’s performance inschoolswhen girls outperformedboys in A-Level examinations for the first timeever in 2000.9 Various New Labour, ‘New Deal’ programmes had already been set up with government funding. In response to evidence that women in the workforce had begun to outnumber men from the closeof the 1990s (by a minute fraction), theyprimarily targeteddifferent groupsof men.10 Therehas also been regularffunding for research into possibilities for changing men’s health patterns, especially in relation to sexuality and HIV/AIDS.11 In the USA, in 2001, Jane Fonda donated 12.5 million dollars from her personal fortune for theestablishment of a Center for Gender and Education at Harvard University, telling the New Yorrk Times that she hoped this would help undothe damage inflicted on young boys byAmerica’s schools, where ‘inmany waysmen suffer more’ from their traditional sex roles: ‘The damagedone to boysasaresultof these gender strictures is veryprofound.’12 However, the outcome of these projects mayprove limited,when the disjunction between notions of men as the dominant sexand the realities of many men’s lives has only a tangential connection with eitherthe impact offeminism or the greater assertiveness and confidenceof women today. The future facing both menand womenin the 21st century is one where both jobsand the stability offamily life are far from guaranteed,whilethe increasing employment patterns for womenreflect distinct market demands, especially the fast growth inthe service industry and the expansion of poorly paid, part-time work.13 Nor has the consensus in public discussion that boysand men are introuble generated any sort of agreement over what to doabout it. Onelineof thought, for instance, promotedby theHarvard psychiatrist William Pollack in his bestseller, Real Boyys (2000), in line with his British counterpart Anthony Clare, argues that men are ‘inadesperate crisis’becausethey are still trying to conform to rigid, now outmoded, codes of traditionalmanhood.14 His fellow American psychologist, the renegade feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, maintains the opposite in her book, The War Against Boyys (2000).15 There we find the equallypopularview xx Introduction to the Thirrd Edition that boys are suffering because our culture seeks to ‘feminise’ them, dispar- aging anddevaluing manhood.Inthe former we are encouraged tosolve men’spsychological problems by reinforcing new forms of personal express- iveness, in the latter by offering models for ‘manly instruction’. I wrote Slow Motion asanintervention in the debate over the nature and effect of shifting relations between womenand meninthe faceoffeminist and other challenges. More than 15 years later, the debaterages more strongly than ever, leaving my reflectionson the dilemmas of either trying toreform or to reaffirm our dominant conceptions of masculinity as pertinent as ever.

Between Men and Feminism Unsurprisingly, many feminists were suspicious of the shiftingpublic gaze onto men’s problems in the 1990s. This was not just because it oftenside- lined concernwith the specific pressuresandanxieties still confronting women and girls, most prominent in the heyday of feminist campaigning in the1970sand’80s. It was also because male gender issueswere routinely packagedasboys ‘losing out’ to girls, overlooking the far more significant contrasts between different groups of boys. Inonecharacteristic illustration from the UK, David Blunkett, pronouncing on theeducationalfailure and low self-esteem of (some) boys, attributed ittoschools having encouraged ‘too much equality’, too much‘aggressive assertiveness’, in girls. This government minister of the day eventhought itwise to warn women, especially ‘young women’, that unless things change ‘there will be avery substantial backlashfrom males’.16 His threatening response was issued when, for the first time ever, less than 1 per cent of girls out-performedboysatA-levels in 1999 (by amere0.6 per cent). More generally, such spurious compar- isons serve primarily to obscure the reality of where the trouble lies, when most boysare neither ‘losing out’ nor ‘failing’. They are doingbetter than ever before atschool, and even betteragainasthey move from school to university,orinto careers. There is nothing at all new in theeducational failure of working-class and certain ethnic minority boys,whose alienation inschoolhas alwaysaccompaniedthe assertion of a reactive form of rebel- lious bravado. As Michèle Cohen notes, the question that needs to be asked is not ‘Why are boys now underachieving?’, but rather why it is that ‘boy’s underachievement hasnow become an object of concern’.17 Sadly, there is nothing new atall either in blaming women, in this case girls, and feminist- inspired teachers, formale problems, now that young women, overall, are not falling behindboysasearly on as they once did. When we look thoughtfully at the evidence usually offered forthe crisis in masculinity today,we quickly decipher a picture in which all the most significant differences on display are differences between men themselves rather than between men and women. Thus, it is particular groups of men, especially unemployed, unskilled and unmarried men, who have far higher mortality Introducttion to the Thirrd Edition xxi and illness rates when compared with other groups of men.18 Aswitheduca- tional failure, class, ethnicity and‘race’, not gender, are the major predictors of unemployment and crime. Unemploymentisthe common condition of theoverwhelming majority of men who commit serious offences, while boys in caring, non-violent households, in non-violent neighbourhoods, are hardly more likely to be violentthangirls from similar backgrounds.19 The destructive consequencesof inequalitiesanddifferences between men and theircontrasting milieus do have aserious gender dimension, but it isone internal to ‘masculinity’ itself, the product of the toxic effects of boysand men anxiously comparing themselvesand competing with each otherto show thatthey are still the ‘winners’. Insteadof tackling the problems of masculinity, as such,the media packagingof research encouraged only the deceptive contrasts betweenmen and womenwe saw above. ‘Clever Girls’, andthe attention they receive fromfeminist influencedteachers, the BBC announced in the mid-1990s, create the problem of ‘Lost Boys’. In its ‘in- depth’ reflection on ‘The problem of Co-Education’, we were told: ‘Success for girls may now be being matched by failure for boys.’20 The significant point for feminists, of course, is that it is only when gendercontrasts appear inways which seem to question traditional assumptions that men should be seentobe the dominantsexthat media attention choosestofocus on them at all. Not only were many feminists critical of the skewedmedia focus on masculinity, but alsosome wereapprehensiveabout the concurrent growth of masculinity studies in higher education. They worried that those who helped promote the theoretical shift from Women’s to Gender Studieswere encouraging men to occupy the institutional space they had fought so hard to create just over two decades ago, threatening its evolving women-centred outlook and epistemology.21 This is, of course, just what I myself could be criticised for doing, and was, inwriting Slow Motioo n, thereby emphasising the importance of studying men’s livesand the multifarious provenance of ‘masculinity’.Do‘masculinity studies’ appropriate feminist scholarship, resituating men as the newauthoritieson gender matters, making men rather than women the latest victims of normative masculinity? Yes, according to the US literary critic, Sally Robinson, who reports that when teaching gender courses her male studentssee their own interest in masculinity as at variance with feminist scholarship and,indeed, female lecturers. Mennowadays, she argues, tend to be seen as the proper authorities fortheorising masculinity, despite a rejection of notions of direct ‘experience’ as the only grounding for research and pedagogy.22 In a report from another US campus, women teachers were apparently seen as more biased and polemical than men when addressinggender matters.23 Withoutwishing to deny the routine sexism that most likely subtends these reports, I remain altogether more welcoming of male gender theorists. From the pioneering workof sociologists such as Bob Connell (as he was then xxii Introduction to the Thirrd Edition known), Michael Kimmel, Michael Kaufman, Jeff Hearn or Michael Messner, to the recent semiotic forays of Fred Pfeil,Calvin Thomas, Joseph Boone or John Beynon,the focus of most of thescholarly work on masculinity has been attentive to the oppressive nature of dominant conceptions of masculinity on women and subordinated groups of men, even while noting their historically located ambiguities, turbulence and transition.24 ‘How can you trust groupsof mennotto repeat theold order, or nottoerase women altogether in forming their own cosy communities?’,Boone asked,in the bookhe co-edited,theyear Slow Motion was published.25 His question already challengesthose men’s networksand movements dedicated to ‘Saving the Male’, the largestof them born and flourishing in hisown backyard,the USA, from theearly 1990s. The best known movements committedtohealing menkicked off with Robert Bly’s primarily middle-class,whiteMythopoetic Movement, seeking to recuperate the ancient power of ‘deep masculinity’. His book, Iron John, published in 1990, remainedabestseller in the USAfor over a year, offering atherapeutic solution for helping mentofeel more intouch with their ‘deep masculinity’,their suppressed masculine heritage.26 This was followed by the staging ofthe Black MillionManMarch onWashingtonin 1995, a gathering atleast twice the sizeof the historic Martin LutherKing march three decades earlier. Theyear 1995 also saw the somewhat more mixed- raceChristian Promise Keepers launched, as another movement for reaf- firming amore caring, responsible patriarchalpaternalism, gathering over three millionfollowers by the close of the decade.27 Inthe face ofmove- ments wanting to separate out men’s issues from women’s, to overlook, if not refurbish, men’s historic power over women, masculinity theorists have for the most part beencritically interrogating the nature of these recent formsof male bonding. They should be seen, in my view, as legitimising feminist concerns, not undermining them.28 When the solidarities, conflicts and inequalities between men, as well as their articulations of inner desires andconfusion, all impact upon men’s complex relations with women, the place of menand masculinity studies issurely best negotiated from witthin feminist pedagogy and projects, rather than defensively rebuffed. Better targets for feminist resentmentare those academics in the social sciences andhumanities who, after all this time, either pay little or no attention to gender issues, or perhaps disregard if not disdainwomen’s concerns, when focusing on men. In her book, Cool Men and theSecond Sex (2003), SusanFraiman, for instance, detects a casualdisparagement of women, accompanying extreme ambivalence towards feminism in many cutting-edge literary scholars today. Fraiman’s targets are those doyens of cultural studies she sees endorsing the ‘coolest’, most undomesticated forms of masculinity, as they confidently apply thetools of post-structuralist critical theory to theirenjoymentof the heroic alienation or frenzied violence displayedbymen inmuchpopular culture. Her worries today update those Introduction to the Thirrd Edition xxiii expressedbyfeminist theorists over a decade ago, such as Tanya Modleski and Biddy Martin, fearing that theshift from feminist andlesbianstudies to what they saw as the gender neutrality often characterising deconstruction andqueer theory would lead to an erasure of womenas theobject of critical focus, replacedby a fondness for embracing new, proliferating images of sexual andgender dissidence.29 However, it is not so much the attention that has been paid to newly affirmed gay, ethnic or other dissident masculinities in the 1990s that worries the feminist cultural critic, Sally Robinson (who, likeModleski and Fraiman, is based inthe US academy), but rather the reverse. In Marked Men, sheexplores the contemporarycultural foregrounding of the heterosexual ‘wounded whitemale’ who,now that heisnolonger theun-gendered, ‘unmarked sex’, has been enthusiastically embraced and is portrayed as the latest victim, assaulted on all sides by feminism andother sinister external forces. Robinson describesthe widely acclaimed novels of writers such as John Updike and Phillip Roth as complicit with an agenda aimed at supplanting the political criticism of men’s continuing socialdominance overall with personalised accounts of their individual sense of emasculation in recent,less secure times.30 Similar displacements, as she notes, could be seeninmany of the most sophisticated Hollywood films from the 1990s, typified by Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides (1991) and Joel Schumacher’s Fallinng Down (1993), which also condensetheexploration of cultural shifts and falling living standards into a focus on personal crisis in men’s lives. As others have noted, male powercan be consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution, enabling mentodeal with the threat offemale power by absorbing and appropriating it.

Discursive Freedoms: Gender Mobility I wrote Slow Motion atthe closeof the 1980swith severalgoals inmind. The bookhad, first of all,aspecific political agenda. Illustrating thatmen can anddo change in reaction to cultural forces, I aimed to explore the complexly layered impediments, as well as the possibleincentives, that exist for gaining men’ssupport for feminist goals. Given the divisions within feminism, Iidentified those goalsasloosely as possible with the most open and practical ways of encouraging men’s commitmenttogenderjustice and social equality more generally (both interpersonally and within institutional sites), as well as with feminist efforts tounderstand anderadicate men’s much greater, iffar from uniform, perpetration of violence and coercion across the cultural spectrum. Though innoway reducing to it, the book’s political project could not be separated from its second, equally knotty task of trying to provide adequate analytic tools foraddressing the psychological, social andlinguistic domain of masculinity, confronting its definitive symbolic primacy inthe phallocentric grounding ofsexualdifference. This xxiv Intron duction to the Thirrd Edition theoreticalgoal would need to encompass why men were everywhere emer- ging as the newly troubled sex, even as they remained, the world over, the most powerfulu one. Many of men’s dilemmas, however, are not so hard to fathom.Since all the linguisticcodes, cultural imagery and social relations forrepres- enting the idealsof ‘manliness’, or what istermed‘normative masculinity’, symbolise power, rationality, assertiveness, invulnerability, it is hardly surprising that men, individually, should exist in perpetual fear of being unmanned. Masculinity, as historical researchers have been exploring, has always been crisis ridden, although the social expression of men’s vulnerab- ilities wouldbecome more prominentatcertain times, incertain contexts, than others. Surveying the creation of modern masculinity in Europeover the last hundred years and more, theimpressive work of the late Jewish, German-born, American gay historian, George Mosse, illustrates that its ruling idealsof astrong, fearless, muscularly embodied manhood, were alwaysunder threat. Normative masculinity was regularly seen as under- mined in panicsover effeminacy, its survival threatened by the presence of sexualdeviancy (especially homosexuality), gypsies, vagrants and Jews.31 Michael Kimmelprovides much the same overview, without quitethe same historical specificity, in his book, Manhood in America.32 Panicsover effeminacy were pervasive because men’sself-image could never exist in isolation fromwomen, from the ‘femininity’ it had, definitively, to exclude.That self- image needed to be further buttressed by the presence of other subordinated, ormarginalised, groups of men, those it also depended upon to define its strength against. After the ongoing challenges offeminism, after the increasingly confident resistance of an expanding array of sexual dissidents, after the battlesof racialised and ethnic minoritiesconfronting enduring cultural disparagement andexploitation (in all itsmutating viciousness) we can only expect to find anxiety and insecurity shadowing the symbolic birthright of the straight, white, male. Surveying the existing writing on masculinity from historical, sociolo- gical and psychological sources, Slow Motioo n theorised men’s possession of ‘masculinity’ as a culturally variable condition, which psychically was so often at least partially at odds with itself – as any life historiesread throughaFreudian filterhighlight. Inspecting men’s differing investments in normative masculinity, or their challenges to its precepts (sometimes intentional, often unavoidable),Isaw possibilities foradegree of optimism in certainmen’s own thoughtful questioning of notions of sexualdifference anddominance. I still do. Nevertheless, I was mindful of the ways in which such questioning of normative masculinity, along withefforts to ‘reform’ men’sways bypersuading them to let go of the restrictions (and the prerog- atives) of orthodox manhood, might merely dent rather than dismantle the recurring symbolic or structural repositioning of men as the dominant sex. However weakened one minute, there isalwaysscope for recuperation Introducttion to the Thirrd Edition xxv the nextminute, for those used tooccupying the dominant position in any complex structure of hegemony, whether inthe gender domain, or any otherstructurally entrenchedhierarchy. One major obstacleis that the very men whomight seem to have mosttogain by distancing themselves from masculinity’s conformist competitivestrivings for dominance are the very individualswhose daily indignitiesmakes the unreliable promises of manhood the more seductively compulsive. These contradictory forces were built into my analysis throughoutthis book, as I tried to highlight the recurrentlyparadoxical and fraught nature of men’sattachmentto,conflicts with, or selective rejections of normative masculinity, however close toor distanced they mightbe from Western idealsofmanhood. Incongruity and doubt could be all too easily exposed in men’sself-presentationsofmanhood, their assertive performancesof masculinity, even – perhaps especially – when surveying its most determined Western exemplars, from Papa Hemingway to NormanMaileror Sylvester Stallone. But in the late 1980s,Ihadyettosee where deploying the full armouryofpost-structuralism’sstressontheinevitablepluralityandinstability of meaning could lead. Throughout the 1990s divisionsdeepened within feminist scholarship and the related academic milieu, as those whocame to be known as ‘postmodern’ feminists, primarily interested in language, discourse and its deconstruction, distanced themselves from the earlier 1970s emphasison social and economic concerns, tied inwith cultural analysis.33 Once‘masculinity’ was seen as culturally contingent, with men’s confident possession of it apparently in need of constant verification, new forms of subversive semiotics could arise.Inparticular, following Judith Butler’s appropriation of diverse poststructuralist positions for rearticulating feminist frameworks, such moves began to flourish with the rapid growthofa deconstructive, ‘queer methodology’throughout the 1990s.34 Exposing the linguistic mobility,orperformativity, of gender categories, that is, the way in which gender identities acquire stability and coherence only through the range of discourses available for delineating the body, it became possible to observe, or imagine, situations wherethere was no necessary connection between masculinity and men, or femininity and women. Before writing Gender Trouble, Butlerwould later confide,she had spent her evenings in thegay bars of the USA, surveying men in drag: ‘ it quickly dawned on me that someof these so-called men could do femininitymuchbetter than I ever could, ever wanted to, ever would. And so I was confrontedby the transferability of the attribute.’35 In Butler’s deconstructive analysis, representations, howeverseemingly fixed, could be conceived as ‘open to significant rearticulations and transformations under the pressure of social practices of various kinds’.36 Along these lines, an array of ‘queer theorists’began celebrating the subversive possibilities for exposing the artificiality or constructedness of oppositional genderorsexual markings, delineations which, asagain Butler emphasised, xxvi Introduction to the Thirrd Edition leaned first and foremost on the active/passive binary (or ‘heterosexual matrix’)for distinguishing male from female performanceinthe consum- matory hetero/sex act. Another prominent exponentof queer theory, Eve Sedgwick, suggested in the mid-1990s that what we now need to doisto question the assumption that everything that seems distinctive about men can beclassified as masculinity,orthat everything which can be said about masculinity ‘pertains in the first place to men’. ‘Asawoman’, she wrote, ‘I am a consumer of masculinities, but I am not more so thanmenare; and, like men, Iasawoman am also a producer of masculinities, and a performer of them.’37 A few years later, Judith Halberstam published a book on ‘female masculinity’, tracing itbacktothe ‘female husband’ andthe ‘androgyne’ of old, seeing it in the more familiar‘tomboy’, ‘butch dyke’or ‘lesbian boy’, today. As an alternative form of masculinity, detached from actual men, queertheorists saw such hybrid identitiesasone important way of rethinking oppressive aspects of normative masculinity, undermining the traditions inwhich it still conjures up‘a naturalized relation between maleness and power’.38 Here, however, the performative destabilisation of masculinity couldbe usedto provoke dissidentrecognition, pleasure anddesire only,it seemed, within a lesbian space. From this position, Cindy Patton, like Butler and Sedgwick, writing fromwithin the US academy, would celebrate: ‘The marvellous revival of butch-femmeerotics reminded us that weknew how to turnmasculinity onits head, and that we did not have to beafraidof these powerful transgressions macho dykes in leather’,she gleefully continued, ‘have undone the phallus with their collection of dildos.’39 More generally, the fashionably ‘postmodern’ attention to surface, style and performance inre-staging andde-centring the gendered basis of power can indeed serve toemphasisethe conceptual mutability of gender categories, exposing their survival as highly regulated performances. Exposing, certainly, but to what extent, one may wanttoask, doessuch disclosure undothe binary itself, that is, efface perceptions of masculinity’s old entitlements? Today,the mostsophisticated cultural theorists will know how to soften their grip, how to hang loose, in their identifications; or at least, how to appear to. ‘What can antihomophobic straights dotohelp makethe world “queerer than ever”’, to help students ‘recognize the social and political realities of male domination and women’s oppression?’, US gender theorist Calvin Thomas wonders.40 Forhim, as for others wanting to provide acritical analysisof dominant masculinity as discursive fiction, hauntedby all ittries to exclude,the answeristoreveal, over and over again, this essentialdependence of the presumeddominant identity on its subordinated outside. To fight against suchhierarchical configurations, one mustalways be prepared,Thomas insists, to promote erotic and political connections with others, and with the world, that can be sustained only if ‘identity and identifications are allowed to be putatrisk’.41 Introduction to the Thirrd Edition xxvii

Illustrative of this process, the Canadian philosopher, Brian Pronger argues in ‘OnYour Knees’ that men must open up their bodiestothe possibility of feminism by celebrating new forms of recepttive desire, displaying their own passageways towelcome, after Cixous, ‘the dwelling place of the other in me’. ‘Theerotic event of being willingly joyfully, penetrated orally and anally’, he writes, ‘deterritorializes the bodies of [men] andliterally opens the gates to the freedom of demasculinizeddesire.’ He seessuch enthusiastic bodily surrender as subverting the whole‘pointof [phallic] masculinity’: whichhas hitherto been ‘to become larger, to takeup more space,yield less of it’, producing normative masculine desire as not so muchheterosexual as quintessentially homophobic.42 It is, for sure, a sentiment that looms large in empirical studies of schoolboys’ talk.43 Such subversiveeroticsare undoubtedly instructive in their exposure of the charade of ‘masculinity’s’ hard, inviolable male body. However, astraight man can personally ironise and question the fictionsof iconic manhood, without either losing the acceptanceit bestowson him, orseriously under- miningthe multiple codingssecuring its tiestocultural power, phallic assertiveness and‘heteronormativity’. The contemporarypreoccupations with gender outlaws in queertheory – female masculinity, cross-dressing, transexuality, and othercombined and repackaged genderand sexual signi- fiers – do tell us something useful about the mutable, mimicable nature of gender codings. Yet, queertheory’s energetic reiteration of all the conceiv- able permutations of masculinity and femininity mightalso bethought to keep us in thrall to theirnow ever-expandingpleasures, fears, demands and anxieties. Indeed, female to male transsexual Jay Prosserarguesthat if we listen carefully to transsexual and transgendered narratives, they tell us more about the continuing cultural force offeelings of biological embodiedness, and related gender belonging, suggesting ‘not the revelation of the fiction- ality of gendered categories but [rather] the sobering realization of their ongoing foundational power’, fictional or not.44 A more mundanedistancing from what is seen as masculinity’s imperious constraints issometimesobserved if we turn from theoretical conjecture and autobiographical narrative tosome of the recent empirical investiga- tionsof young men’sself-descriptions. Here, a sardonic, mild detachment from the dominant ideals characterised many men’saccountsof themselves, whether throughapartial awareness of the waysin which mencan suffer from strict adherence to its codes, or simply because a self-parodying playfulness is more likely to be a sign of inner confidence than of inner frailty inone’sgender identification. Analysing young men’s ‘discursive practices’ tosee how they constructtheir sense of identity, psychologists Margaret Wetherall and Nigel Edley reportthat most spoke of their distance from notions of heroic masculinity: aboutwhich they were ironic, playfulu , detached.45 Moreover, as theirownand other research on black male youth indicate, the forms of ‘physical toughness’ and‘emotional coolness’ seen as xxviii Introduction to the Thirrd Edition characterising dominant masculinity are often most pronounced in boysand men most lacking in socialpower, andhelp to keep them that way.46 Yet, in arather similar study,Stephen Frosh andhis fellow researchers interviewing 11- to 14-year-old Londonschoolboys, illustratedhow boysstill forcefully police themselvesand each otherby teasingbanter to betough(but nottoo tough); cool(but not stupid); good at sport; not aswat; not ‘gay’; not soft. These prevailing notions of hegemonic masculinity are indeed multifaceted and shifting, strongly inflected by class, ethnicity and other affiliations, but none the less their powerandpervasiveness hugely narrows the rangeof permissible boys’behaviour. And this isso, even thoughboys know that they will fall shortof the idealsthemselves.47 Wetherall and Edley’s account of men’s apparent ironicdetachment harmoniseswith the satirical shamelessness which pervades men’snew Life- style magazines, such as Loaded, written, itdeclares withatwinkle, ‘formen whoshould know better’. Loaded encourages its male consumers to mock traditional masculinity in the very act offlaunting it. Suchambiguity or oscillation thus becomes part of the refashioningof an even moreelusive ‘masculinity’, which canonceagain present itself as ideologically inscrut- able, as British cultural theorist, Bethan Benwell notes, because it is essen- tially evasive ‘about its own definition’.48 Irony enablesmenstrategically to distance themselves from misogyny, homophobiaandtraditional tough guy ideals, which is sophisticated and good,while simultaneouslyproviding an outlet for just such reactionary, anti-feminist fantasies, which is not so good. Overall, it seems clear from most of the empirical research now available, at least in the richer global metropolis, that we have seen continuing change and growing diversity in the activity and self-perceptionsof men overthe last few decades.49 What is less clear is the impact this diverse self-fashioning has on undermining the phallocentric framing of sexualdifference or the structuringof male dominance in the broader societal and international domain. It is easy to locateevidence for gendershifts, especially inemploy- ment patterns and personallife. These are balancedbysignificant continuities: whetherat the top echelonsof political power, in practices of crime and violence, or the ever-proliferating, if at times deliberately hazy, gender markers in the world offashion, sport or the backgroundlandscape of media images takenasa whole.50

Global Constraints andGender Continuities Concluding the first edition of my book when I did, attheclose of the 1980s, I remained open-minded aboutthe future: welcoming all the changes and growing diversity in men’s lives and relations with women and children, noting the resilience, if now less all-encompassing, inpatterns of gender hierarchy. Seven years later, in 1997, I still hoveredbetween hope andhesita- tion, pondering our genderedlives: ‘Although it will be many decades before Introduction to theTThirrd Edition xxix women overturn men’s economicprivileges’,Iconcluded, ‘the trends in that direction are inescapable – determinedby the compulsions of capitalism far more than the achievements offeminism, and thusoperating at global rather than locallevels.’51 I was optimistic. Almostadecade later, I read that in Britain it will take two centuries, another 40elections, on currenttrends, toachieve an equal number of womenasmeninParliament. Thetrendsare still inthe right direction, butthey move unconscionably slowly. Yes, women are reaching higher levels in the workplace, yetthis years report from the British Equal opportunity Commission (EOC), arriving exactly three decades after the implementation of the passing ofthe Sex Discrimination Act promoting equality between thesexes, showed that women’saverage hourlywages still laggedwell behind thoseof men, at their best just over 13 percent lowerin full-time public sector jobs, at their worst 45 per cent lower in the part-time private sector jobs.52 Eventhis levelof economic progress in the richerWestern countries is itself currently dependent onmore disturbing patterns in women’s lives globally, as immigrant domestic workers have been leaving their own homesand families to care for childrenand households in countries far afield.53 Iwas also a little too insular, back in the 1990s. Men receptive to change and to sharingpower and responsibilities with women in their public and private livesare nowadaysconfronted with spectres of refurbished militar- istic manhoods in theglobal arena. We haveentered aperiod when political scientists are issuing urgent warningsof the likelihoodof continuous warfare ahead, this new century.54 The escalatingglobal inequality of recent decades, with its ongoing destabilisation in poorer nations, has resulted inaconstant resortto violence. The consequent displacement of millionsof people has consolidated a ruthless strengtheningof state powersand nationalborders to keep out those seeking asyluminricher Western nations. Meanwhile, the powerof virile metaphor isthe ubiquitous accompanimentof statesof war and spreading militarisation. Interpreting the horror of the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, on September 11th 2001, reaction everywhere played upon images of theevent as the consummatesymbolic emasculation of America’s phallic power. As commentators from both the Islamic and Western world have noted, the spectacular ‘triumph’ of that event was adroitly staged both to assuage the sense of inferiority and injustice of a deeply divided Muslim world, as well as ignite its anger against theUS-Western military onslaught certain to follow. Western hawksquickly became fundamentalism’s willing allies, eager tostage theirownruthless retaliation, launchinganeternal‘war on terrorism’, proclaiming the messianicgoalof ‘infinite justice’. These are mighty forces toconfront forthoseof us trying toundermine the binding of masculinity toacts of dominance and violence. The current presidentof the USA, GeorgeBush Junior, is a man who lovestosee meninuniform, parading xxx Introduction to the Thirrd Edition himself as their Supreme Commander, while strutting an invincibleAmer- ican masculinity: ‘Your man has got cojones’, hesays of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, after the Camp David meeting where Blair agrees to back him all the way in war against Iraq.55 Any optimism surrounding the prolif- eration of new, more egalitarian and compassionate imagesof masculinities in Western discoursesseemsthreatened when muchof the world watches in alarm as the USA transforms itselffrom sole superpower into what many see as arrogant ‘imperial bully’, its massive military deployment straddling every point of theglobe,supportedby theBritish government and other ‘willing’ satellites.56 Unsurprisingly, it is feminist scholarsand activists who have most closely studiedthe reactionary rhetoric of gender in warfare. For over 30 years, no one has beenmore sensitively attunedtothe significance of the ‘masculinist’ postures and practices of warfare, and the situation of womencaught up in them, than the American feminist,Cynthia Enloe.57 In the UK,Cynthia Cockburn has been equally visible, organising withwomen globally in conflict zones.58 Asthey and others observe, it is the ongoing militarisation of societiesthat helps explainwhy men’s violenceagainst women is still increasing around the world, along with the rapid growth in the sexual traffickingof women.59 The branchof the United Nations most concerned with global education and welfare, UNESCO, has recently declared violence against women, a ‘global epidemic’of the21st century,reaching immeasur- able levels of brutality and cruelty inmany situationsof conflict.60 Wherever armies invade, or national or ethnicconflict occurs, domestic violence increasesrapidly, bothduring andafter hostilities, as a direct effect of milit- aristiccultures, alongside the strains, displacementsand traumas of war. However, what feminists, like most men themselves, have saidless about is theways in which mentoo arethe constant victims of the violenceof other men, overwhelmingly so in times of conflict, when they too are more likely tosuffer sexual humiliation, rape and all other forms of bodily frag- mentation and abuse. The Canadian academic, Adam Jones, is one observer of wars andgenocide who stresses theimportanceof abroader gender framein studying the causesandeffects of conflict, including the gendered targeting of men, both as the anticipated perpetrators and the victims in the staging of violence. He notes thatthe targeting of specific groups of men isoneof the mostreliable indicators of the onset, or impending onset, of genocidalconflict. The demonisation of out-group males was a key feature of the propaganda discourse instigating the three classic genocidesof the twentieth century, against Armenians in Turkey, Jews in Europe and the Tutsisof Rwanda, where all-out genocide was precededbyvarious gender- selective measures, including mass roundupsandlocalisedkillings of men.61 In the most recent atrocities in Rwanda, for instance, Adams emphasises the inordinatestress placed upon maintaining traditional masculine gender roles stemming from years of economiccrisisand resource scarcity, with Introducttion to theTThirrd Edition xxxi young Hutu boysand men systematically targeted to focus their anger on the Tutsi menace.62 Clearly, it is not only in sensational atrocities, from genocide to the torture of prisoners in Abu-Graub or indefinite detention of Islamic captives in Guantanamo Bay, that we need toponder the ways inwhich mensuffer hideously, primarily atthe handsof their fellow men. Men become victims all the time, whether inschool-yards, workplaces, hotel bars, football terraces, prisonsor battlefields. To focus on the nuances of men’sactual suffering is already to begin to undermine themyth of masculinity’s invulnerability compared to women. As Judith Butler argues in Precarious Lives, we need to beginwith the premise that all human bodiesare fundamentally dependent and vulnerable. Our common condition is precisely thissharedhelplessness, which is as evident inthe susceptibility of our desiresand attachments to rejection and loss, as in our enduringphysical injurability.63 It is playing ‘masculinity’s’ own game to suggest that mendonot experience fear, traumaand bodily shattering, much like a woman. Men have no doubt often beenhurtandhumiliatedby the actionsor taunts of women. However, the point to stress is ratherdifferent. If men want to retain their grip on normative masculinity, the woesand worries they will have to learnnot only to endure, but to underplay, even to deny, will from the beginning arise predominantly from the wordsand actions of other boysand men. Once again, it is the search for affirmations of ’manhood’ that remain the cause of, not the solution to, men’s deepest fearsandsuffering. If the recentstress on ‘masculinity incrisis’ could be put in terms of this broader context of sharedhuman vulnerability,itwould itself begin to turn around the ways in which men feel threatened simply as men. Stressing men’s shared human condition with women does not, of course, help shoreup the dominant location of the ‘masculine’ in the gender binary. Itis possible, as we have seen, toexpose the linguistic instabilitiesand culturalmythologies behind those attributes thatare necessary, although often never quite sufficient, to sustain men’s sense of a ‘masculinity’ that confers someinherent mastery. Yet, however diverse, contested and poten- tially transferable,the masculinities individuals display, men’ssenseof enti- tlement (or resentmentat personallackof it) isunlikely to shiftsolong as structural and institutional sitesand practices, along with the old symbolic framings, continue toposition women, the world over, as less powerful than men. We can learn from the discursive contradictions and fluidities of a falsely homogenised and universalised’masculinity’.But we still need concrete programmes for modifying everyday gender practices, once we have taken on board themultiplicity of subject positions women and men actually occupy, and the manifold complexitiesof the livesthey lead. Acknowledgements

Asalways, I am immeasurably indebted to the many friendsand acquaint- ances who have encouraged and assisted me throughoutthe writing of this book.Peter Osborne read every draftof every chapter, patientlypointing out thestrengthsand weaknesses of my argument. Barbara Taylor and Gregory Elliott each painstakingly edited myprose; Ruthie Petrie, Ursula Owenand others fromVirago gave advice and encouragement. James Swinson, Bob Connell, Catherine Hall, Stuart Hall, JohnFletcher, David Morgan, Sheila Rowbotham, Chris Whitbread and Isaac Julien offered me useful information or assistance on selected chapters. The unstinting affection, generosity andsupport I have had from Peter Osborne and James Swinson, plus that of my son Zimri, gave me the confidence anddesire to embark upon and complete this project (with others, they must also take some of the blame forwhat optimism there isinthe text). I cannot thank enough all those who have steadfastly assistedme overthe last few years, and who, eveninthese depressing times, help sustain my belief in the possibility of enriching the socialist projectwith asexual politicsofhope, equality and freedom.

xxxii Introduction to theOriginal Edition

‘Women do not write booksabout men,’ Virginia Woolf wrote; at least,not bookswhich endup classified assuch.1 Men do not write booksabout men either; at least, some haveclaimed. ‘The real man,’ Peter Schwenger tellsus in his surveyof masculinity and twentieth-century literature, ‘thinksabout practical matters rather than abstract onesand certainly doesnot brood upon himself or the natureof hissexuality.’2 He doesof course – but more in complacent self-mockery or mournful self-confession than to probeand pin down the specificitiesofmasculinity. In reality, and fortunately for the project of this book, both womenand men have writtenvolumeson the male sex. When menhave written of themselves, however, they have done so as though presenting the universal truths of humanity, ratherthan the partial truths of half of it. And even now, when writingof men, women have done so more to expose theevil of theirways thanto explore the riddles of ‘masculinity’ – its relation to, anddependenceupon,‘femininity’. It is certain that men have always preferred to study neither God norman, but ‘woman’. Defined as the particular sex – the different, the difficult, the problematicsex – it is women and not men who have traditionally beenthe object of scrutiny. But times change, and with themwhatwe read and write. Throughout the 1980s the shifting nature of men’s lives, their behaviour, experiences, anxieties, fears and cravings, were debated with new passion and concern. Booksresearching fatherhood, men’s violence against women and children, male identitiesand male mythologies now interrogate men, as a sex, in a way until recently reserved for women–as a problem. From the sex-roletheories of the fiftiestothe studies of genderandpower of the eighties, the psychology of men has increasingly come to be seen as one fraught with strain and crisis. An emphasison the divergent, inconsistent and contradictory meanings of masculinity now accompanies most research on men. Ironically, however, amidst this growing concern with masculinity, the thoughts of those seeking a sexual politicstoundermine men’s power over womenremainconsistently gloomy. Feminists and their supporters researching the realitiesof greater equality between the sexes argue that there is littleevidence of significant change, whether inthe home, the workplace or in the wider spheres ofcommunity, culture and politics. And while there has been some change in some men’s behaviour, it is clearly neither on a scale nor of acharacterseriously to havealtereddominant perceptionsof gender. Most of the new books on masculinity constantly emphasise complexity and contradiction. Yet they spendlittletimeexploring its specific natureand significance. Despite the explosion of writing on the topic, the

xxxiii xxxiv Introduction to the Oriiginal Edition category of ‘masculinity’ remains deeply obscure.Asweshall see,it is in fact becoming more obscure. In this book, I have attempted to approach the problem in a new way by looking not at ‘masculinity’ as such, butatcertain specific ‘masculinities’, in the belief that it isan understanding of the diffferences betweenmen which is central to the struggle forchange. The one thing which most of the current literature hasnot done is locate masculine identitiesandbehaviour in relation to sexual politics–inparticular, to the last twentyyears of conscious collective struggle toundermine men’s power over women, in Britain and elsewhere. Yet, I shall suggest, it is only by making this connection that we can gain any deeper theoretical insight into the problem of just what ‘masculinity’ is, or might become. The force and power of the dominant ideals of masculinity, I argue, do not derive from any intrinsiccharacteristic of individuals, but from the social meaningswhich accrue to these ideals from their supposed superiority tothat which they are not. To be ‘masculine’ is not tobe ‘feminine’, not tobe‘gay’, not to be tainted with any marksof ‘inferiority’–ethnic or otherwise. It is thus in relation to women’s liberation and gay liberation, and tosocial contexts whicheither foster possibilities for greater sexual equality or offercontinuing obstacles to change,that I will look at competing male identities – macho, Black, gay and sexist–tosee how specific male identities and behaviour are constantlyproduced, reproducedandtransformed. Men’s attachmenttothe dominant masculine ideal of powerand superiority, which I suggest isnecessarily ambiguous, is threatenedby other men’s assertion of contrastinggay, anti-sexist or Black male identities. Nor are we simply dealing with a multiplicity of masculine styles, forthese arealways cut across by,and enmeshed within, other, differing relations of power – class, age, skill, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on. In somechapters I will pointtoareas wherechange has begun in men’s idealsand men’s behaviour; oratleast where contradictions and strainsare most prevalent. Where, Iwill ask, are men today most open to pressure for change? How do we underminetheir strong resistance to change? From a flashback to the1950s, for example,Isuggest that the relationship of men to home and family hasundergone an irreversible transformation over the lastthree decades. Thoughdomesticity acquired anew salience for menas well as women in the fifties, questions of men’s relationship to childcare, housework, violencein the home,were not yet on the conceptual, let alone the political, agenda. In contrast, since theclose of the seventies, men’s roleas fathers, and preciselywhatthey do in the home, have been widely observed anddiscussed.Mostmen today desire andhave acloserrelationship with their childrenthan did their fathers. Reflecting upon the new emphasis on fatherhood, however, suggests that rather than shifting men’spower over womenand children, there are ways in which men today now have the best of both worlds: they retain power in the public sphere, while having Introducttion to the Oriiginal Edition xxxv greater access to the satisfactions (oftenwithout the frustrations) offamily life. Power struggles in the home heighten, however, as conflicts between women and men deepen, strengthening at leastthe possibilities for further movement. Having documented oneexampleof change in men’s lives, while questioning its precise significance for undermining men’s power, I move on to outline and assess thetheorising of masculinity currently available to us. ‘Whether we love men or hate them,’ Deirdre Englishhas written, ‘we – as feminists – have no task more necessary than understanding them.’3 It is only from psychoanalytic writing, not from the staticconformity models of role theory, that we can begin to gain some understanding of the measure of internal conflictsand fragile sexual identities which trouble and torment the minds of men. What we can observe, however, from psychoanalytic studiesof the symbolic force of‘masculinity’andthe overridingpsychic significance of simply being male, we cannot fully explainfrom within that framework alone. The powerand meaning of ‘masculinity’derive not just from anatomy or familial interaction, but fromwider socialrelations. They express the cultural realityof women’ssubordination embodied, not only– as theLacanians suggest–inlanguage, but in the functioning of the state, industry, and every other source of social, economic and political power. It isthe difficulty of moving beyond the pervasive methodological individu- alism of all psychological thinking(beyond theideathat all explanations of personal and socialphenomena can be reduced to facts about individuals) that makes it hard to understand whychange isso slow and so contradictory. The most striking thing about the sexualpolitics offeminists in the early daysofwomen’s liberation was its confidence andoptimism.The most striking thing about the progressivespiritwhatever its objectives in more recenttimes is its tendency tocynicism and pessimism. Bothhope and despair are always possible in assessingthesignificanceof transformations in the lives of women and men, when changeisneither linearnor homogen- eous. Therehas been more movement in the lives of some men thanothers, and in the lives of some women than others. It is not, in my view, possible for change tooccur for one sex without affecting the other. Nor has the direction andextent of change been arbitrary. Change has occurred where the social as well as the individual possibilities for it have been greatest and, in particular, where women’spower to demand it has been strongest. The idea of men’s behaviour as ultimately unchanging and inevitably coercive, if not murderous, has, perhaps unsurprisingly, appeared inmuch of the writing onmenand violence. It is less than helpful, however, to attempt to tieupall forms of aggression, sexual violence, institutionalised heterosexuality, warfareand ecologicaldestruction in one neat package as ‘male’. Insifting through the growing literature on men’s coerciveness and abuse of women, I suggest that it is possibleto make distinctions: between men who deploy violence against women and men who do not;between xxxvi Introduction to the Oriiginal Edition one form of violence and another; between the structureswhich foster and maintain different forms of violence and those whichhelp to undermine them. How, for instance, are we to view the realityof both women and men’s struggles for new forms of sexual experience and pleasure, despite continuing cultural signs offear of and contempt for women? Rethinking and reasserting the struggle for ‘sexualliberation’helps clarify the possibilities foranew non-repressive sexual agenda for both womenand men. Men’s resistance to change is notreducible to their psychic obstinacy or incapacity. Men can anddochange. Resistance to change is also bound up with the persistinggender routines which characterise most of the wider economic, social and political structures of contemporary society. But social realitiesare not static. Future relations between womenand men remain open, battlesare continuously fought, lost and won; and change, whether the intended outcomeof emancipatory activity orthe unintended consequence of other agencies, is inevitable.Muchofthe recent feminist writing on men has seemedtosuggest that nothing has changed. But it is more interesting, and certainly more useful, tosee how thingsdoin fact change. It is possible to steer a course betweendefeatist pessimism and fatuous optimism. Such, atany rate, is the project of this book.