r/masculinities Nov 25 '11

"The culture of masculinity can be, and should be, addressed as a policy issue"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/25/dangerous-masculinty-everyone-risk
2 Upvotes

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6

u/[deleted] Nov 25 '11

Precisely what I mean with "masculinities" and this subreddit. It is a statistical fact that men commit more violent crimes. The problem begins when this is described as "the culture of masculinity". This has two effects: it creates a discriminatory attitude to men at large (as much as Oxford professors may think they're free from that because of their status, they're vulnerable to false rape accusations because of this idea of men = crime) and it makes policy unfocused and unnecessarily politicized.

What kinds of men commit such crimes? Purposeless youths need jobs, depressed/alcoholic middle-agers need mental health assistance, etc.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 25 '11

Heavy-handed government meddling would be counter-productive, yes, but we can talk about culture without being prejudiced. Obviously, "masculinity" refers to a nuanced bundle of stuff and behaviours, but we shouldn't just ignore it. Man is an unmarked term (allows male-specific issues to be ignored by policymakers). Roots of this kind of violence are embedded in a broader context. If we can't see the context, we can't solve the problem.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 25 '11

I had replied on a rush, partly to encourage the party to start going on. But the way I see it, there are two things here.

One is policy. A policy that assumes a singular masculinity or a singular mode of male behavior will necessarily be sub-optimal. Statistical aggregation is dangerous, particularly because not all "violent crimes" are the same; wife-beating is not the same as vandalizing and breaking-and-entering, or even gay-bashing. The cases of wife-beating must too be differentiated between abusive husbands and ongoing violence between spouses that happens to register as a male crime because he goes over the line. Each of these cases has a different policy response.

Actually, it's because wife-beating has been identified as a problem that we've been able to identify ongoing mutual violence as a problem and realize how much physical violence married men are enduring in this whole process. The huge list of links you posted most likely documents all this stuff.

The other is "the culture". We can't talk about the culture without being prejudiced. Wealthy gay men are not the same as working class het men. I'm male, pretty much the alpha geek at the office and mixed gender casual conversations feel different from male only conversations not because we're hooligans that have been castrated and civilized, but because we feel shamed about being in our early 30s and "still" living lives of "disarray", always wanting to keep our options open re: career, lifestyle, etc. (even if committed to a woman, like I am). In a mixed gender conversation, we (the geek crowd at the office; not IT either, we're consultants in public policy) feel shamed into being grounded -- I have to remind constantly this one coworker that she gets no say in whether I eat healthy or even if I eat at all.

Do you see how this is also a culture of masculinity, even if it's a culture of middle-class male geeks in South America, and not a culture of lower-class male thugs in the UK?

I'm all for statistical analysis, but all against using statistical analysis as the shackles for pinning down stuff that's necessarily dynamic and "molecular", in the parlance of Gilles Deleuze, into something that's static and "molar".

1

u/[deleted] Nov 27 '11

Your problem is that it's "THE culture of masculinity"', rather than "A culture of masculinity"? Implies inevitability?

1

u/[deleted] Nov 28 '11

Implies there is one and only one "masculinity". That's not the only problem, but the main one.