I came across a reference a day or two ago in an American Prospect article (http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11538) to a book on masculinity and US politics: Stephen Ducat, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity (Beacon Press, 2005). I haven’t read the book, but having done a bit of Googling and read a couple of interviews with Ducat (http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/20343, http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/03/int05011.html), I have some sense of what it’s talking about and it’s got me thinking about masculinity and different political cultures.

Ducat’s theme is that current Republican politics in particular is marked by an obsessive focus with masculinity, and a persistent attempt to feminise Democratic politicians and liberal political views. Ducat is a psychologist and starts talking about ‘femiphobia’ as a key component of male personal life (it ‘operates unconsciously in many men as a very powerful determinant of their political behavior’). Hillary Clinton, in this scheme, is rejected as the embracing and smothering mother, while the social service state itself is feminised as the ‘nanny state’.

The immediate problem with such a psychological view is the universalising tendency of it. Because whether or not anxious masculinity is universal, the political culture in Europe and specifically the UK is very different from the US one. (One of the interviews raises this point, but Ducat doesn’t respond). George Bush I may have suffered from the ‘wimp factor’, being seen as not manly enough. But I can’t think of a British politician who has, or who has tried in a sustained way to get political advantage from e.g. associating with the military. (I know there was Thatcher in a tank, but that was a one-off). The only recent politicians who have made much of their military past are the Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown and the Conservative leadership candidate David Davis, and neither of them have been conspicuous political successes. (The last British politician who became PM on the strength of his military career was probably Wellington; there was a President Eisenhower, but no Prime Minister Montgomery). Indeed the Conservatives have just chosen David Cameron as a leader, a man who seems to be moving towards the ‘feminisation’ of his party, at least in theory. (Where British political culture may implicitly applaud masculine behaviour is in the recent emphasis on politicians fathering (legitimate) children - Blair, Cameron, Gordon Brown, Charles Kennedy have all benefited from this). Britain has complaints about the ‘nanny state’ too, but its pejorative tone is about infantilisation, more than about femaleness as a whole.

One reason for this difference may be the impact of Vietnam. Ducat sees the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ as being about wounded masculinity - a great power was humiliated by ‘little guys in black pajamas’. The US draft also created a gulf in military experience between the majority of middle and upper class Americans who evaded combat and a substantial minority of these groups who did fight. As has often been pointed out, there is a substantial group of chicken-hawks now in power, men who didn’t fight in Vietnam, but are keen on other people fighting their wars.

But Vietnam doesn’t explain everything. Ducat and some of the commentators on him mention the same tendency far earlier, particularly around Theodore Roosevelt in the 1890s and in the promotion of the Spanish-American war. Ducat talks about how ‘working class hyper-masculinity’ (expressed in physical acts such as drinking, gambling, fighting) has been appropriated by the upper classes, seen as a more authentic form of masculinity. This working class hyper-masculinity certainly exists in Britain as well, but it hasn’t been appropriated by British politicians. This is despite the fact that (until New Labour), the UK had a party which was more working class in its outlook than any substantial US one.

I don’t know the answer to the differences. To some extent it may reflect a heritage of colonising discourse (there is the same tendency in Australian politics, I believe, although not in Canadian politics, from my limited knowledge of these both). What interests me more is the reminder that two such seemingly similar cultures as the US (particularly given the cultural influence of the US on Britain) can still have very different political discourses and (implicitly) very different concepts of masculinity. The universal masculine once again proves to be a fantasy.

I’ve just had the unpleasant experience of having to read some of Saint Jerome’s tract Against Jovinian (I had to check analogies to some passages from a Carolingian author). The tract was written in 393 AD against the arguments of the Roman monk Jovinian, who had argued that all Christians, married and unmarried were equal. (For a translation see http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-06/Npnf2-06-10.htm)

I knew from the extracts of this work of Jerome that I’d come across before that it was misogynistic: Jerome wasn’t unique in that; even though it’s still distasteful to come across a writer apparently praising both suttee and rape victims who kill themselves from shame at their violation. But that’s only a minor part of Jerome’s argument. His main theme is repeated insistently: the married are inferior Christians to virgins. A married man is the slave of his wife; to remarry once widowed is worse than to commit fratricide. Jerome takes Paul’s idea of marriage as a concession to those unable to be chaste to extremes. Marriage to him is the lesser of two evils; he even calls it defilement at one point.

Jerome’s sneering at the married is persistent: they are second-rate, as far as he concerned. At one point he complains about there being too many married clergy (men could become clerics when still married in the fourth century, but only if they ceased sexual relations with their wives):

That married men are elected to the priesthood, I do not deny: the number of virgins is not so great as that of the priests required. Does it follow that because all the strongest men are chosen for the army, weaker men should not be taken as well?...As it is, men of second or third-rate strength are chosen, that the army might have its full numerical complement... Not unfrequently it happens that married men who form the larger portion of the people [of a congregation] in approving married candidates seem to approve themselves, and it does not occur to them that the mere fact that they prefer a married person to a virgin is evidence of their inferiority to virgins.

There’s no trace of charity in Jerome’s work and all too much pride; an ascetic looking down at his inferiors. Worst of all is that he makes God and Jesus into his image. Jerome admits that the apostle Peter was married (though he argues that he abandoned her when he became a disciple). He contrasts Peter with the apostle John:

And yet John, one of the disciples, who is related to have been the youngest of the Apostles and who was a virgin when he embraced Christianity, remained a virgin and on that account was more beloved by our Lord and lay upon the breast of Jesus...If, however, Jovinianus should obstinately contend that John was not a virgin...let him explain, if he was not a virgin, why it was that he was loved more than the other Apostles.

For Jerome’s Jesus, faith, commitment, acceptance of his claims are only secondary matters. If you’ve ever had sex you can’t be Jesus’ special friend: you stuck with being second rate on earth and in heaven. A petty man creates a petty God: not a pretty sight.

I have currently got some temporary work in a British university (which for obvious reasons had better remain nameless). The student newspaper was running a story recently about the problems of students who were mothers and the following are some extracts:

XXX, a 20-year old student at [university] was told that there was up to a two-year waiting list for the [university] nursery
...
When asked about the issue, XXX, dean of students, acknowledged the need to provide childcare for students, but said it wasn’t top of their list of priorities.

He said: “All colleges are crying out for additional space, some would argue why this precious space (nursery) is being taken up at [college site].

“Childcare is incredibly important for some students, but I don’t think nursery provisions is necessarily the best way to deal with it. It’s hugely expensive”, he added.

There are 3,820 staff members and 18,052 students at [university], but only 34 places in the university day nursery.

The complacency of the (male) dean is breathtaking: even the current inadequate provision seems almost too much for him, and he noticeably isn’t interested in suggesting any alternatives. The message seems clear: as the cover-line of the newspaper puts it: ‘Mums need not apply’.

This article particularly wound me up because the university had just been making an enormous fuss about a ‘diversity event’ the same week, including individual mail-outs to all staff. There is a lot of stress in the university generally on inclusivity, with regular workshops on disability awareness, a new working group to counter homophobia etc. Black or white, gay or straight, able-bodies or with disabilities, my university wants you: just as long as you don’t have inconvenient children in tow.

There was a very interesting Channel 4 programme by an Islamic scholar called Tariq Ramadan a couple of weeks ago (see http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/reformation.html). I’d heard Ramadan mentioned before, but this was the first time I’d seen an extended piece about his views. Ramadan is a Swiss Muslim, much concerned with working out how Muslims should live in the West. His main argument was that Europe’s Muslims were the ones most likely to be at the vanguard of leading an Islamic Reformation. Most current Muslim theology presupposes an Islamic state in which it will be expressed. European Muslims, in contrast, because they are living as religious minorities, are having to face much more directly questions about how Islam faces modernity and other cultures. Ramadan is particularly impressive because he (and some of the study groups he helps arrange) are going beyond simply rejecting some traditions as not contained in the Koran. He is actually discussing some of the more objectionable bits of the Koran and arguing whether they are still applicable today, in a very different world. (Among the passages he discussed were injunctions to kill non-Muslims, the use of amputation as a punishment for theft and whether the Koran justifies beating wives).

It was clear from the programme that Ramadan’s approach wasn’t appreciated by more conservative/hardline scholars. Whether it will have any impact is hard to say, but it’s a potentially valuable development for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The one question I had was with his statement about this being a reformation. If you want to try and put it into these Christian-centred terms, then I’d say that arguably some of the more fundamentalist strains of Islam (Wahabism or Deobandism) are more like the Protestant developments of the sixteenth century and later. This is the theology that argues that cultural accretions must be removed from religion and that the pure original doctrines of the first centuries AD/AH should be the eternal norm of behaviour. Ramadan’s views seem in some ways more like nineteenth and twentieth century liberal Christian theology, with an emphasis on context and an implicit willingness to abandon a literal reading/application of the sacred text. Which raises the question: can a more liberal Islam survive as a religion in a pluralistic world? Liberal Christianity is now doing noticeably badly in terms of adherents: it is in more conservative, evangelical and fundamentalist churches that the growth in numbers is largely seen. If a more liberal Islam develops, can it survive, or will it tend simply be submerged into the secular world?

There seem to be a spate of articles by right-wingers and Islamophobes at the moment (mainly American, but including the Italian Orin Falucci) going on about the threat of Europe becoming ‘Eurabia’ or being in a state of ‘dhimmitude’ (see e.g. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12105031_1). According to these views, Europe is being swamped by Muslims demographically, while meanwhile a culture of political correctness suppresses European culture and allows Islamists to flourish.

Given all the hype about the declining population of Europe, I thought at least the demographic point might have some validity. But when you look at the figures, the change is much less striking. The suggestion is that Europe’s population of Muslims will double by 2025 (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84409/robert-s-leiken/europe-s-angry-muslims.html). This sounds striking until you see that Muslims currently form about 4-5% of Europe’s population (on average - this conceals wide variations between countries). So even if you allow for a decline in the non-Muslim population as well, that still suggests a Muslim population of around 10-12%.

What changes might a Muslim percentage of that size mean? Well, an interesting comparison is the percentage of Blacks and Hispanics in the US. This is around 12-13% (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html). So what has the impact been in the US?

1) Do people still criticise Blacks and Hispanics and even use hate-speech against them or are they afraid to? They’re not afraid to.

2) Do politicians dare offend Black and Hispanic voters? They do court their vote, but they’re equally prepared to implement racist policies.

3) Do Black and Hispanic concerns dictate US foreign policy? Largely, no, apart from the Cuban anti-Castro lobby. (One point is that these broad ethnic groups rarely have coherent foreign policy views. Similarly, there are few foreign policy issues that are of equal concern to British Muslims (largely from Pakistan), French Muslims (largely from North Africa) and German Muslims (largely from Turkey). The right-wingers focus on the few common issues (support for Palestinians, opposition to the Iraqi war), rather than the many separate issues).

4) Do Blacks and Hispanics have economic dominance in the US? No, they’re at the bottom of the heap, largely.

5) Can the US be seen culturally as a Black or Hispanic country? Both cultures have had some influence on mainstream culture, but certainly not predominant.

All this suggests that an increase in the European Muslim population isn’t necessarily going to make a major change to Europe, in terms of a cultural percentage. There might also be differences if Muslims were uniquely hard to absorb into a society or Europe was uniquely bad at integration. The first seems to be countered by Americans’ claims about how well Muslims have been absorbed by the US.

The second is a more plausible argument: Europe, as a collection of relatively mono-ethnic nation states is less good at fully integrating immigrants, than the US, a nation of immigrants. This is probably true, although it should be noted that the cultural/political attitudes towards immigrants vary greatly between e.g. the UK and France (which does not even keep official statistics on ethnicity on principle). The other point is that societies can change in their attitude towards immigration. Australia is a nation of immigrants, but overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon immigrants until the mid-twentieth century. Its attitude had changed towards accepting and integrating non-white immigrants and their descendants. Europe has the possibility of doing this too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about manliness and when I was playing around with Google I ended up finding an amazing article by Peggy Noonan, the conservative columnist about ‘manliness’. Read it at http://www.menstuff.org/issues/byissue/manliness.html, because the summary that follows can’t give the full effect. Manliness, thinks Noonan, is back after September 11th 2001: the real heroes were workers who had physical strength, courage and the willingness to use these for the good of others. She then goes on to extol a man in Australia who punched a shark who was attacking his wife:

He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share his sensitive feelings about the shark, he did not make wry observations about the shark, he punched the shark in the head.

Because this is Peggy Noonan’s real point: intellectuals and feminists destroyed manliness, and also gentlemanliness (because ‘manly men are almost by definition gentlemen’). Peggy Noonan in the 1970s once told a man on a plane she didn’t need his help putting her heavy luggage in a locker. She comments:

I bet he became an intellectual, or a writer, and not a good man like a fireman or a businessman who says “Let’s roll”

She then goes on to describe how ‘feminists…peaceniks, intellectuals’ destroyed John Wayne, ‘a hero, and a symbol of American manliness’. But now: ‘I think he’s…back…I think he’s in Afghanistan now, saying with his slow swagger and simmering silence: “Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama boy.”’

It’s difficult to know where to start discussing this edifice of tosh, particularly since it starts with some fairly unexceptional stuff. Yes, I admire firemen and men who use their strength to help others; yes, a man who punches a shark to protect his wife is impressive. But the brutal truth about today’s world is there isn’t often much need for a shark-puncher. Not that I wouldn’t be happy to be married to one: but given a choice between a shark-puncher and a man who was willing to do the washing-up, I’d pick the second and just steer clear of swimming in Australia. (Of course, maybe manly men do the washing-up too, but it somehow doesn’t fit with Peggy Noonan’s image).

The other thing is, that before I married a shark-puncher I’d want to make sure that he was just a shark-puncher. The problem is that some men who’d punch a shark are also the sort of men who’d think that in a confrontation with another man, the thing to do is not negotiate, but to use your fists. And even worse, there are probably some shark-punchers who feel that punching is also the way to deal with a confrontation with a woman. I’m pretty sceptical that manly men are necessarily gentlemanly. Armies, for example, are in theory chock a block with manly men: soldiers, however, are not normally noted for their gentlemanly conduct.

Again, it’s not that I don’t appreciate gentlemanly conduct. But if you give me a choice between an early twentieth century society where I would get offered a seat on a train, but I had to give up my job when I got married or today, I know what I’d pick. Having doors opened for you is just not enough compensation for earning 25% less for the same job. I do worry about those manly, gentlemanly men as well: one brash young feminist ungratefully rejects your help and you go off to be an intellectual. That doesn’t suggest much courage in your convictions, in fact it seems rather…un-manly.

Peggy Noonan’s problem, finally, is that she wants to live in a fantasy world of binaries: manly/intellectual, John Wayne/Woody Allen, gentlemanly firemen/selfish academics. The fact that it is a fantasy is shown most clearly by her focus on John Wayne. I want to ask one question: who was more manly: John Wayne or Robert Runcie (a recent archbishop of Canterbury)? I’m sure Runcie would have come across to Peggy Noonan as the exemplar of the weak intellectual. He preached about penitence and reconciliation at the service of thanksgiving after the Falklands war, and got attacked by the press for this. There were constant complaints about him being theologically a wishy-washy liberal. How could he possibly be seen as a real man, next to John Wayne?

Except…John Wayne spent World War II in Hollywood, though of an age to be drafted, while Robert Runcie won the Military Cross for his bravery in a tank regiment. If Peggy Noonan can’t tell the difference between a chickenhawk and a manly man, I don’t think she can really say much of any use about manliness.

What Michael Roper’s contrast of masculinity as ideology and subjectivity (see previous post) does suggest is a way of approaching my original problem: how do you recognise a crisis in masculinity? I’m not convinced by one suggestion: that masculinity is in a state of permanent crisis/anxiety in a patriarchal society because men are scared of losing their dominant position. If that was the case you’d also need a permanent crisis of the nobility from the time of the Ancient Near East to 1789 or beyond and no-one’s ever suggested that. Dominance doesn’t necessarily cause fear.

A second view links crises in masculinity to periods of rapid economic and social change, to which the same kind of answer may be due: when are there periods of no change? If you ask any historian, their period always seems to be full of such changes (at least as opposed to the ‘previous’ era). A third view, that crises in masculinity are caused by a change in the position/role of women (though more logical), is also surprisingly difficult to sustain. How many substantial changes were there to women’s social, legal or economic position before the modern world? Judith Bennett may have taken things a little too far by saying that there is no economic change while women earn less than men, but she is convincing that there’s an awful lot of continuity for women across the medieval/early modern boundary.

If you think about masculinity as ideology and subjectivity, however, you get two possible focuses of ‘crisis’, when (as inevitably) there is a gap between reality and ideology/fantasy: how it is for a particular man and how it ‘ought’ to be. There’s always going to be some gap in this, but it isn’t necessarily going to cause a crisis in an individual (after all, no-one can live up to Christian ideals, but not all Christians are permanently in a state of crisis). But when the gap is seen as significant in some way and the ideal is too far away, then a man can either have a crisis in himself (because he isn’t living up to his ideals) or (particularly if a lot of men have the same experience), he can decide that there’s something wrong with the whole ideology and try and develop a different ideology of masculinity. In other words you can have a crisis of masculine subjectivity or a crisis of masculine ideology. The two are different things, but a crisis in ideology is likely (though not inevitably) to come as a result when there are numbers of men who’ve had a crisis of masculine subjectivity, so they can feel it’s not just them, it’s ‘the system’ that’s at fault.

I’m aware that this is a simplistic model, but it does at least give some handle in approaching some supposed historical ‘crises of masculinity’. Take the current ‘crisis of masculinity’. There’s a lot of argument about whether it exists at all. There’s an interesting article by James Heartfield (http://www.genders.org/g35/g35_heartfield.html), which says there is no masculinity crisis and provides some revealing statistics. The problem, he thinks, is that both men and women have lost authority to capital: it is the working class, not masculinity that is in crisis. I think he’s right that the biggest problems in Britain are for the working class, but that ignores the gendered side of it. Working class men and women may both find it a struggle to find well-paid and fulfilling jobs, but women often have another ‘job’ available to them, as full-time mother. This is certainly badly-paid and whether it’s fulfilling will depend on the individual, but it does provides a ready-made identity and ‘career path’. In contrast, full-time fatherhood isn’t established enough to provide a useful model of masculinity.

If you factor in these aspects, then there’s an argument that there is a crisis in working-class masculinity. There has been a collapse in well-paid manual jobs, at least in some areas. As a result, some young working class men are rejecting a masculine ideology of themselves as workers/providers as unrealistic and trying to find alternative ways of showing their manliness which may be destructive/self-destructive. Most masculine subjectivities aren’t in crisis, but some are, and some previous masculine ideologies are ‘in crisis’, in the sense of no longer seen as appropriate.

Meanwhile, back in the Middle Ages…The basic discussion in the earlier Middle Ages is really all about the upper classes (because we know almost nothing about peasant ideologies, let alone subjectivities). The main split here is the lay/clerical divide, which is a basic binary in theory (even if somewhat blurred in practice). In the Carolingian period, there are attempts at moral reform for both clerics and laity, which tend to focus on men, because Carolingian sources don’t say that much on women (or certainly not much about lay women). The Carolingian focus on clerical/monastic reform is pretty wide-ranging. It takes in demands for clerical celibacy, but it’s quite a bit wider than that; it also fudges the issue of clerics fighting. In other words, it doesn’t focus solely on the two key distinctions made between laymen and clerics: marriage and the carrying of weapons. The reformers aren’t trying to provoke a crisis about masculinity. Meanwhile, there is a new (or at least newly visible) attempt to provide a Christian moral code for lay noblemen. As I try and show in my thesis, this is actually fairly positive about lay noble life – a lot of it seems to be implying that with a few relatively small changes, a nobleman can have good things in this life and the next. (This of course doesn’t exclude some noblemen (i.e. Gerald of Aurillac) having their own personal crises and rejecting most of normal male lay life). Put together, these changes don’t suggest a ‘crisis in masculinity’ in the period.

The trickier case is the eleventh/twelfth century ‘crisis’, popularised in particular by Jo Ann McNamara, "The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050-1150," Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis, 1994), 3-30. (In my view, this is a very sloppy bit of writing, particularly when it gets onto lay masculinity). If you look at clerics, first of all, whether or not there were a lot of male clerics having subjective crises, there were certainly a number of key reformers keen that they should have. The Gregorian reform movement focused on clerical marriage as one of the twin sins of wickedness (the other was simony) and in its eagerness to put clerics off marriage, trotted out a whole load of misogyny from St Jerome etc. I think you can count this as a crisis, even if it’s arguably mainly a manufactured crisis.

The trickier case is whether there was a crisis in lay masculinity. I’m not sure you can say much about male subjectivities in the period. What I’m not sure that anyone’s yet done is look at the totality of works addressed to laymen in the period to get some sense of whether there’s a change in the ideology of masculinity there. I don’t know if it could be done (or at least for a particular region), but this might be more revealing about changes then any simple reference to ‘crisis’.

Having just been reading John MacInnes’ claim that too many scholars see masculinity as a characteristic of men, rather than as an ideology or a fantasy, I then came across a recent article by Michael Roper (Michael Roper, “Slipping out of view: subjectivity and emotion in gender history”, History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), 57-72), which argues almost the opposite. Roper thinks historians and scholars more generally have focused on masculinity as a social or cultural construction rather than as an aspect of personality. He sees this as part of a trend he associates particularly with Joan Scott’s theories of using gender as a theoretical concept in ‘mainstream’ political and diplomatic history. An emphasis on how the ideology and language of masculinity/femininity was deployed politically moved study away from work on subjectivity.

This emphasis on studying gender as symbolism in the public sphere may be one of the reasons for a lack of studies of gender and subjectivity, but I think there are several other ones. The most obvious, for pre-modern historians, is how difficult it is to get access to anyone’s subjectivity on any topic. There are so few texts which provide the personal details of interest, and those that do exist tend to be heavily structured to make a particular point (e.g. Augustine’s Confessions). Even when you do start to get very subjective accounts that are relatively little shaped to suit an audience (e.g. Pepys’ Diaries), they’re rare enough that you have to wonder about whether their writers are typical in any way. Michael Roper is looking at letters from the front in the First World War, which is one of the rare cases where you have got lots of personal material, from a range of men with similar backgrounds and in a situation with extreme pressures on masculinity. There, perhaps you can find something revealing, but it seems much harder in other circumstances.

I think the other answer to Roper’s question: ‘Why has the study of cultural attributes been so difficult to integrate with the study of subjective experience?’ is that it runs into the whole vexed problem of psychohistory and whether there is anything useful that can be gained from this approach. Psychohistory is one of those techniques that I keep on going back to just to see if there’s anything useful there, but always getting put off by actually reading the material. The problem is obvious. Freud, on the basis of a few case studies, produced grand universal theories about the workings of the mind, which now seem to be largely discredited. A variety of other authors have developed/reinterpreted Freud’s work without (as far as I’m aware) producing anything much more useful. Psychohistory sees early experiences as key, but these are precisely the ones we know least about for almost all historical figures. Unlike the analysist, the historian can’t ask for more questions to elucidate a topic. As a result, psychohistory seems to waver between bland generalisations about what a typical childhood would be like in some historical period (as if you can just tweak the nineteenth-century Viennese experience a bit and get similar answers) and the ‘great man’ syndrome, that World War II was due to Hitler’s parents not loving him enough. (The big problem for psychohistorians is why in that case most people with horrible childhoods don’t go on to become genocidal maniacs).

My question for today: has anyone found psychological/psychoanalytical studies or theories that do seem to be of use to historians? If so, please let me know.

I am back thinking about masculinity, after a seminar paper on marriage and masculinity in crisis in the works of Orderic Vitalis (a twelfth century Anglo-Norman historian). But I’ve been deflected by a more theoretical book on modern masculinity: John MacInnes, The end of masculinity (OUP, 1998). He starts by claiming:

Most discussions of masculinity assume that it is an empirically existing form of identity, set out to analyse its oppressive or exploitative character, show how this results from or reproduces patriarchy, and either suggest alternative models of masculinity men might embrace or urge men to reject masculinity altogether. But this overlooks the fact that what we now think of as masculinity was originally used to legitimate patriarchy, by demonstrating how men were more capable of exercising public power than women. The core thesis of this book, however, is that masculinity does not exist as the property, character trait or aspect of individuals. This means that trying to define masculinity, or masculinities is a fruitless task, and also that explanations of how men came to have much greater power, resources and status than women in the modern world which rely upon the concept of masculinity used in this way are unlikely to be helpful. I argue that masculinity exists only as various ideologies or fantasies about what men should be like, which men and women develop to make sense of their lives. If this is the case, it can make no sense to argue that men should reform their masculinity to help in the struggle for sexual equality – for how are men to reform something which does not exist? I therefore make no attempt in this book to define different types of masculinity or trace the social and historical relations of different forms to one another.

If masculinity doesn’t exist, I’m in a rather unfortunate position as a historian of it. But while I’m quite happy to accept that masculinity is an ideology (in fact, that’s my basic position), I don’t see how that necessarily means that it doesn’t exist. Ideologies may not be tangible objects, but they definitely have tangible results, when someone accepting an idea acts on it. If you want to change men’s behaviour, it may be necessary to change their broader ideologies as well. If particular groups of men tend not to help with child-care, is that simply due to economic factors or individual choice? Or is there also a common mind-set that says ‘real men don’t change nappies?’

I also think that even if masculinity is purely an ideology then it can be seen as a characteristic of people (in two ways). One is that many individuals will subscribe to a particular ideology or identify with it. Christianity and socialism may simply be ideologies, but you can legitimately talk of ‘Tony Blair’s Christianity’ or ‘Tony Benn’s socialism’, to express both their adherence to an ideology and their individual takes on it. Secondly, an ideological label can be applied to someone else because they seem to have the attitudes or behaviour I think of as characteristic of that group. If I say someone shows a very Christian attitude, that doesn’t necessarily imply that they have specific theological views, but it does say something about how I perceive Christianity. In these senses I can talk about ‘Fred Astaire’s masculinity’ or say ‘in his films Fred Astaire is not particularly masculine.’

MacInnes sees the concept of masculinity and the whole idea of gender as a creation of social contract theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth century (although the actual terminology only comes in later). Gender (as the social construction of men and women from males and females) was a way of getting round a big theoretical problem for a social contract theorist for Thomas Hobbes, according to MacInnes. Hobbes started from the position that all humans were equal and that power relations between them were made solely on the basis of freely entered contracts. Kings were created because men chose to give up their freedom to them in exchange for protection. Hobbes was faced with the problem of why, if all humans were equal, women always ended up subordinate to men. He couldn’t say this was due to natural differences, because that undermined his theories about universal equality. (Some groups of men might also naturally be suitable only for inferior positions). So Hobbes had to fudge the issue by implying that there were characteristics of men and women that made it suitable that women were subordinate to men, but that these characteristics were not naturally but socially acquired. This created the concepts of masculinity and gender, but meant that they were incoherent from the start, since there was no solution to the problem of why normally only males became masculine and only females became feminine.

Hobbes does seem to have fudged discussions of marriage and relations between the sexes in his work, but I’m unconvinced that he and his like invented masculinity. The fact that the word only developed later is a serious blow to MacInnes’ theory and he also doesn’t provide convincing quotations to suggest that the concept is clearly there in Hobbes’ work. I see there being two main routes for the development of the concept of masculinity.

The first might be called the ‘statistical’ approach. This is the claim that there are some characteristics that more men have than women (or vice versa). These characteristics are then called masculine, and masculinity thus becomes the sum of these characteristics. This approach is in theory rooted in observation of natural difference, but in practice is often strongly influenced by pre-existing ideology. Aristotle, for example, says that true courage can be shown only on the battlefield, and therefore only free men (not slaves or women) can truly be brave. This approach to manliness is at least as old as classical Greece, but is still influencing views today.

The second is the ethnographic approach to masculinity. This starts from the observation that in all known societies men and women have different roles, but that these roles aren’t consistent across cultures. Such observations lead fairly directly to a view that gender and masculinity exist as common concepts, but are socially constructed. It’s this ethnographic approach that has been taken up by historians of masculinity and in that sense it makes perfect sense to study the masculinity of a particular era/location.

MacInnes is sceptical of the existence of any sex differences other than the purely anatomical, so it’s obvious why he rejects the concept of masculinity in the ‘statistical’ sense. I suspect the reason he’s not interested in masculinity in the ethnographic/historical sense is that his interests are in present politics. He wants to return ‘from the politics of identity and the misguided attempt to politicize the purely personal to a more vigorous pursuit of a classic material politics of equal rights.’ Whether a focus purely on equal rights would improve women’s social position sufficiently is unclear, but deciding to ignore the influence of gender ideology completely seems to me a pretty barren approach to studying societies.