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    Plus ça change, masculinity anxiety edition

    This Salon piece looks at some recent movies through the lens of masculinity anxiety: 

    A friend of a friend of mine has big plans: quit his prestigious editorial job in New York, grow his beard a bit further out, and start working on the docks. In 2014, the sentiments behind such a decision aren’t anything new… Gender roles in the workplace and the family are blurring…

    I don't have any complaints about the analysis of the movies, just about the vast understatment of the phrase "aren't anything new." Because, let's face it, if there's anything men have been worried about the entire history of "Western Civilization" (TM; and yes, like Gandhi, I would be in favor of it), it's the decline in masculinity as soon as guys take up desk jobs.

    I would date it to Nausicaa getting turned on by the pirate, er, gangster, er warrior Odysseus when he appears on the beach, because frankly those nancy boy courtiers hanging around her dad's court just lack a certain something, know what I mean? But then again, really isn't it Enkidu teaching Gilgamesh what a real man is all about? And so on and so forth, through Plato and Tacitus and hell just about everybody, really, including turn of the century Americans. Turn of the 20th century, that is. Cf, too, for the latest in hard bodies. It's as if it were a theme or something!

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    5 responses to “Plus ça change, masculinity anxiety edition”

    1. Neal Hebert Avatar
      Neal Hebert

      I would actually widen the lens a bit, John. Your points highlighting the interconnectedness of masculinity and the labor conditions that produce/accompany masculinity are worth highlighting, but I suspect what’s going on now has less to do with masculinity and work and more to do with the idea of thwarted or “inadequate” masculinities one runs into when studying 17th and 18th century performance (see Michael Mangan’s Staging Masculinities or Thomas King’s The Gendering of Men Vols. 1 & 2). Work feeds into this problem as you point out, but the perceived threats to masculinity go deeper than work – although the upshot is work is the thing that gets trotted out most frequently because it’s the easiest to talk about.

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    2. John Protevi Avatar
      John Protevi

      I thought I had already widened the lens beyond work; “take up desk jobs” is irony (or some other rhetorical move I’m too lazy to look up and too ill-educated to have ready to use), as my examples are all about urban vs wilderness — being a courtier or even a King like Gilgamesh is not really a “desk job.” It’s actually all about war, not work. Or maybe war and hunting, if you take the Enkidu figure into account.

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    3. Robin James (@doctaj) Avatar
      Robin James (@doctaj)

      Political theorist Cynthia Enloe has an analysis of “necktie” vs “warlord” masculinity here.
      I would argue that there IS something specific about white male anxieties vis-a-vis industrialization, and then also white male anxieties about deindustrialization/post-Fordism. So there’s always male anxiety, yeah, but it takes very particular forms over history/across cultural context/intersectionally/etc.

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    4. John Protevi Avatar
      John Protevi

      Yes, thanks, I can certainly buy that. The links at the end are all to specific analyses of conjunctions.

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    5. Neal Hebert Avatar
      Neal Hebert

      John, that’s what I get for reading this before coffee – the irony went right over my head.

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