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A critique of hegemonic masculinity and developing an alternative approach using ethnographic
evidence
Hegemonic masculinity was the theory originally developed to explain the everyday processes and
practices which enabled men to maintain dominant social roles over women. Perhaps rather
conveniently the theory has also been used extensively to explain many of the disadvantages and
problems which men suffer from. If we want to know why men are more likely to commit suicide,
why they are reluctant to talk about their problems, or go to the doctors, why they don’t seek help
for depression, engage in a range of unhealthy behaviours, and so on this can broadly be explained
by hegemonic masculinity – the practices and behaviours of men.
So very broadly according to this theory there are various processes at work to establish male
dominance which have become embedded at an unconscious level in the way we do things. From
the outset boys are taught not to cry or express their emotions because this could reveal their
vulnerability. Traditional gender roles required that young men were socialised into becoming strong
independent providers, stoical, able to find solutions, always in control.
These tropes of masculinity are held to impact on men’s wellbeing in various ways. So for example
changes to social and economic systems mean that men are not always as in control as they expect
to be, this can have various negative outcomes for self-esteem and lead to depression; in extremis
suicide becomes a way of re-establishing control. Ditto the experience of dependence, which has
also found to be a cause of suicide; this causes intense distress clashing with their perception of
what it means to be a man. Unemployment is a problem basically because it clashes with their
provider role assumptions. Even loss of the paternal role has been incorporated into the hegemonic
masculinity concept:
“ We might speculate that in a climate where involved fatherhood has fairly recently developed a
certain cultural status …hegemonic masculinity could perhaps be seen to be shifting so that inability
to fulfil involved fatherhood because of relationship breakdown might be seen as much of a
challenge as losing the breadwinner role would have had in earlier times” (Shiner).
The theory has some basic flaws, there is no real discussion about causality – the argument is
circular in effect. The argument is highly culturally determinist, actual differences between men and
women are regarded as so superficial – it is what culture does with these differences which is at
issue here. Also it doesn’t explain why for example male suicide rates are so much lower in some
Muslim and other ethnic minority cultures which we would regard as having far more male
hegemony than our own.
Other ways of understanding masculinity
It is not the description of masculinity which I would like to question, rather it is the underlying
causes of the behaviours which I want to interrogate here.
It is a fact that men are less likely to go to the doctor, that they are more likely to engage in
unhealthy practices and less likely to engage in activities just to help them keep fit. According to Will
Courtney:
“A discussion of power and social inequality is necessary to understand the broader context of men’s
adoption of unhealthy behaviour – as well as to address the social structures that both foster
unhealthy behaviour among men and undermine men’s attempts to adopt healthier habits. Gender is
negotiated through relationships of power…. These power relationships are located in and
constituted in, among other practices, the practice of health behaviour”.
Put simply, if men weren’t seeking domination they wouldn’t be so unwell.
However the same set of unhealthy practices could be equally well explained using an alternative
approach. So for example I would like to suggest that the reason men don’t go to the doctor’s or
look after themselves is at least partly because they feel that they are not that important and that
the wellbeing of others is of greater consequence and that the world will actually still go round even
if they don’t look after themselves.
This would tally with the evidence. So for example we know that 99% of the majority of people who
die in war are male, 96% of those who die in the workplace, and 71% of those who die from murder
(Glen Poole). Men are very much more likely to be sent to prison and they are also more likely to
sleep rough. Their bosses expect them to work longer hours. We also find that numerous health care
initiatives are directed at women rather than men.
This is the wider context which men exist in - the disposable male – so surely the lack of attention
which they give to their own health care needs is a perfectly rational response? Men can see that
their needs are not a social priority, they internalise this and therefore see little reason to look after
themselves.
Stoical behaviour can be understood in a similar vein. Alston spent many years living in rural
Australia which has been subject to intense climate change events including a significant drought
which has lasted for over a decade. This has led to unprecedented hardship for rural families and
growing levels of debt and poverty which have impacted on everyone particularly the men who are
committing suicide at almost four to five times the rate of women. Alston tells us that “to address
the crisis of rural male suicide it is important that the dominant form of rural masculinity be exposed
and interrogated and its shortcomings revealed”.
However I would suggest that there is a rather more straightforward explanation. Firstly it should be
pointed out that despite Alston’s lengthy discussion about the stoicism of men it emerges time and
again that men are not particularly stoical:
“My wife and I are fortunate in being tough as old leather boots we’ve got each other to cry on each
other’s shoulder…” or “I’ve had two women that have come in and said ‘help me with my husband. I
don’t know what to do …he’s crying all the time”
Yet these examples are mentioned in passing without further comment or explanation.
But when they do break down we learn that the women then breakdown and cry when they report
their husband’s distress, revealing their sense of helplessness and feeling of responsibility for their
men. Surely rather than pretending to be strong in order to maintain a position of dominance, men
are simply trying to avoid causing their wives further distress. It seems to me that this is a far more
commonsensical explanation than anything theories of masculine hegemony can provide.
What about the idea that mothers socialise their sons to suppress their emotions, bury their feelings
in that assertion ‘Boys don’t cry’. Mothers may be socialising their boys in how to be male but the
mechanisms through which this happen are very difficult to ascertain. Rather than subscribing to
assumptions of masculine hegemony there could be something different going on. What if boys
were actually a tad more emotional than girls,– as a busy mother coping with the strains of raising a
family – a fragile boy would add to the stresses of everyday life. If boys were actually more
emotional than girls it would produce the same sort of outcome. We would want them to sit on their
over-developed emotions, stop bugging our pressured lives with their heightened sensitivity and we
would be very easily resort to telling them that “Boys don’t cry”. Alternatively we know that
empathy is reduced when dealing with difference – and boys being of a slightly different species
perhaps don’t elicit exactly the same response. This is why the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus could be
a very useful corrective here.
All this is sheer speculation without a shred of evidence – but it should be explored and considered
before capitulating to masculine hegemony as a cause.
Finally what about the bread and butter of hegemonic masculinity - that men avoid dependence,
rather seeking to maintain power and control. Michael Shiner and colleagues conducted an analyses
of coroner’s reports on suicides and did indeed find that over dependence on a woman was
identified a causal category and that suicide was also used as a way of re-establishing control.
However if one feels that one has to take one’s own life in order to exercise any kind of influence
this appears to be a pretty extreme loss of control.
Hegemonic masculinists can always find a way to turn things round:
“We could speculate that for men there are perhaps tensions between the ideal of autonomy that
hegemonic masculinity sets up and the reality of dependence on women. Distress might result from
this tension. Distress may also be caused by a tension between certain misogynist aspects of
heterosexual male culture and the personal experience of depending on a real embodied woman”
(Shiner p.745)
What I would like to suggest is that far from lacking control according to some normative framework
men objectively lack control and this leaves them in a very vulnerable situation where they may be
unable to fulfil basic needs. Far from being dominant men are far more precariously positioned -
this happens in two different ways.
Firstly women tend to gravitate more towards the domestic arena, local community and social
networks where they can exercise a considerable degree of control. Men by contrast are peripheral
in this domain and have an almost unmediated relationship with the impersonal forces of the labour
market or their employer, the state of the market or the weather – over which they have much less
control. This comes across if we look at a peasant village in North East France:
“The work done by women in the domestic sphere is by its nature far more regulated and controllable
than that done by men…work in the fields is subject to seasonal variations and its vulnerability to
such vagaries as weather and plant disease. Even the factory work of the men is regulated by forces
not more controllable than is the weather. This thesis of impotency outside the domestic sphere and
control within extends to the realm of political and social activities. Because of the peasant
community’s position in the larger society and internal attitudes, peasants have little control over
extra-household political and economic decisions”.
For all that women resent their sometimes peripheral position in the public realm they have an
unacknowledged, unrecognised position of privilege when it comes to the private sphere.
The other arena in which men are very vulnerable is in relation to the family, in particular their
partner and children for it is their role here, which lends meaning and significance to the other
dimensions of life. So for example the provider role is not only important because it helps establish
status and indicate success. Rather it increases men’s access to a mate or partner and perhaps even
more importantly gives them a chance to have a role in their children’s life. However if their
relationship breaks down key roles and relationships are lost in a way which does not happen in
other cultures where men have other legitimate sources of identity to which they can turn.
Why Anthropology?
So what I am suggesting is that hegemonic masculinity does not provide an accurate way of
understanding either the position of men, or the relationship between the sexes and therefore
solutions to male problems which are rooted in this theory are unlikely to have a helpful approach.
Alternative insights can be provided by turning to the sorts of societies traditionally studied by
anthropologists. There are a number of reasons why these provide a useful resource.
Firstly there is such rich diversity in the way that people choose to organise their social relations
that any universals are thrown into relief. Secondly while in our own society power relations tend to
be understood largely in terms of what happens in the public realm of media, employment and
politics anthropologists have given a great deal of attention to kinship and the organisation of family
and households which provides a useful corrective to the focus here. Further there seems to be
more freedom to explore relations of power because they do not appear to have a direct bearing on
our own society. However as I hope to demonstrate a look at these other societies can be very
informative if we want to understand our own.
The consistency of maternal responsibility
One of the most consistent features across a scan of a wide range of societies is the primary
responsibility which a mother has caring for her child. This caring may often be shared out amongst
a wide range of people, the father may for example in a foraging society such as the Aka take an
almost equal role, but the primary maternal responsibility remains there. As Geoff Dench explains all
societies have found that building on the biological fact of motherhood is the most effective way to
ensure that children are cared for.
What is perhaps most significant is that this does not confer any loss of status – to the contrary – it is
a highly esteemed social role. The awe in which motherhood is held starts early as Margaret Mead
points out:
“And having a baby is on the whole, on of the most exciting and conspicuous achievements that be
presented to the eyes of small children in these simple worlds in some of which the largest buildings
are only fifteen feet high and the largest boat some twenty feet long”.
In peasant communities becoming a mother is regarded as more important than becoming a wife
(although ideally this two roles go together) and that the mother child relationship is the most
important tie in their life. So for example if we look at family life in a Bolivian mining community
where the men die young both men and women agree that the mother child relationship is the most
enduring relationship. The self-sacrifice by the mothers, many of whom worked two shifts of six
hours to keep their children fed and clothed, even eking out money to educate them, gave children
a rare understanding of the human potential for love and devotion. Long after their mothers had
died, adults especially men, could hardly speak of their passing without crying . “My mother left me
an orphan”, said one miner whose mother died when he was 45 years old.
The place of the provider role
However imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and the esteem in which the maternal role is held
is reflected perhaps in the way in which men try to recreate this role. Various forms of this can be
found across a whole range of societies however perhaps the clearest example is demonstrated by
Ian Hogbin’s ethnography of the Melanesian Wogeo – the book is called “The Island of Menstruating
Men”. The entire construction of ritual and symbolism, the gendered division of labour, the cultural
context is structured so that the processes of reproduction can be shared by men.
Firstly there are a whole series of initiations carried out by the older men, beginning in babyhood
when the boys’ ears are pierced and ending in late puberty. The purpose of these various rites is to
grow the boys into men. In this way while women can reproduce children, only men are capable of
making men. A crucial part of the whole ritual is the playing of flutes and teaching the initiates to
play flutes – these would appear to have some mystical powers through which the whole process
can occur. It is also fundamental to the division of labour as one male respondent summed it up:
“Men play flutes, women bear infants”. Also crucial is that the flutes are allegedly kept secret from
the women – when they hear them they are supposed to believe that it is some strange monster
which will eat their sons. This theme of having secrets from women is a reoccurring one perhaps
providing a balance which helps men to deal with the mysteries of female reproductive success.
There are various ways in which the men help the boys to reach manhood. Crucial is sleeping in the
clubhouse. In many different societies, including this one, the club house is at the heart of the ritual
– boys go in uninitiated, and come out as men, after lots of feeding and rituals. In some societies it
is even called a womb.
Many rituals are involved in magically growing the boy. They are given lots of unpleasant things to
eat and drink which will ensure lofty stature and freedom for skin disease. It is said that by the end
of all the initiations they will have consumed some portion of every useful tree creeper or plant
found on the Island – in this way the milk provided by women is somehow outdone by the nature
harnessed by men. The symbolism of this is strengthened by the mythology where the tribal hero
Nat Egare survived underground in his dead mother’s body by eating the roots of the plants and
trees.
But most crucial of all the rituals is bringing about menstruation in men. This happens initially when
the boys are about 13 through the scarification of the tongue. This serves the dual purpose of not
only bleeding the boys but by doing it through the tongue it cleanses them of the feminine pollution
which they would have imbibed in their mother’s milk. In later puberty they are taught how to
menstruate properly. They go into the sea, find a small crab and incise the penis using the crabs
claw. This ritual is repeated at frequent intervals throughout the man’s life. I can’t help thinking that
while this may maximise cultural reproduction it might discourage reproductive success!
While all the processes are accompanied by severe restrictions and discomforts for the boys – for
those who do the initiating endure privations which are even worse. The result is that the men refer
constantly to enduring such pain, hunger and thirst that they expect in the years to come the boys
will make a fitting repayment with offers of daily assistance. In this way we can see how the rituals
mimic the child’s obligation to his or her mother.
Another interesting feature is a ritual process which involves drinking a cleansing water with one of
the other boys. The unrelated boy then becomes a blood brother and their relationship is now closer
than that of real siblings. They can refuse each other nothing. In this way the male initiation acts to
create a new form of kinship which maybe outdoes the one of which women appear to be in charge.
In many societies, for example the Aka, the training of young boys in the men’s secret society is
combined not only with witchcraft and herbal healing but with learning to hunt. In this way the
provider role is subsumed into and becomes part of the rituals which facilitate social reproduction
and here we get to the crux of what the provider role is all about. Far from being a way of gaining
status, power and domination, by becoming a provider a man is simply finding himself in a place in
processes of reproduction so that he too can share in woman’s reproductive role. This link between
male providing and male reproduction is found among the Wogeo – the scarification of the tongue
takes place once the boys are becoming economically useful.
Thus just as through giving birth women become responsible for a dependent other and through this
play a key role in building up the social networks which facilitate the exchange of services which
make up the heart of society, the providing role too gives men a key place in processes of
reproduction, gives them (a little bit anyway) the experience of having others dependent on them
and the sense of responsibility and experience of being useful and needed which flows from that.
In fact if we turn to the Bolivian mining community discussed earlier where the key relationship was
between mothers and their children, we find that men also have a very important role to play. For
most miners the family provides the object and motivation for living and working. Men feel no need
to disguise the fact that their ability to earn money and hand it over to their wife forms the basis for
their maintaining a position in the family:
“The miner knows how to work for his children, knows how to support his children but life is bought
at a high price. Eight people died in Colorado. Why? To support their children. Three men stayed up
there and escaped. They could’t get the others out. We expose our life and our soul to buy the daily
bread for our children. A miner works with his love not with his bad intentions”.
The miner’s devotion to his family is underwritten by priests:
“There is no difference between the sacrifice that you workers make and what the priest makes. You
workers who bring food home to feed your children are in your sacrifice acting as a minister of the
Lord ”.
So as Geoff Dench observes, providing is in fact a way in which men can become more like women; it
is not about accumulating status and power among men.
The economic social and political importance of the private realm
We assume that women’s greater connection with children means that they are excluded from
arenas of power however in simple societies this is far from the case. In peasant societies the
domestic unit is of primary economic, political and social importance so that women’s power in this
sphere extends to the village at large. So if we look at such as Riegelhaupt’s studies of Greek and
Portuguese peasant societies of Roger’s ethnography of a village in North East France we find that
women will be responsible for the marketing the family farm’s produce plus extra money earned by
the husband is managed by her. Women will make all the marketing and household economic
decisions and are always consulted in ‘male’ agricultural decisions. As one farmer said “My wife is
my minister of finance”.
Women are virtually in control of information dissemination because of the division of labour men
work individually in the fields while women come into contact with each other through their
household work in the village. Women develop excellent inter-household communication networks
through which they are able to influence public opinion and influence the outcome of local elections,
including spreading ugly rumours about those they don’t want to win. They are more likely to be
involved in rituals surrounding birth and death which helps to maintain distant kin networks. In
various ways they use mens fear of female sexuality and pollution to obtain the things they want.
While men have the positions of authority for example in the local chapter of the farmers union or in
the municipal council the members will say privately that the local chapter is powerless and that the
capitalist farmers are really in control. Where organisations are actually useful for example in the
machine co-operative it again emerges that this was set up on the insistence of women, and while
men find running it a nuisance and would like to give it up it is the women who insist that they make
it work.
Women do defer to men in what anthropologists refer to as ‘the myth of male dominance”.
However letting men believe that they are powerful enables women to stay in control . While men
know that they are not particularly powerful, they do believe that women think they are and so go
on doing what is expected of them. This works out for both of them very well. It is good for men in
relation to the outside world, to appear to be in charge of their family, meanwhile women have
someone to blame for foolish or unpopular decisions, and being able to call on the authority figure
of the father helps the woman to stay in charge of her children.
Fathers and care
Although all primate males can nurture infants as well as women can there is huge variation in the
amount of care men do. This would appear to be largely a case of path dependency; women breast
feed, they are more responsive to certain cries of babies and what with one thing leading to another
they end up doing most of the care. Fathers seem to be most likely to do caring when they spend a
lot of time with the mothers so for example among the Aka there is very little gendered division of
labour so husbands and wives share in a great many of the tasks. This is perhaps carried to its
extreme in the Titi monkey where the mothers only breastfeed the baby, it is then handed over to
the father who in fact does most of the care. In the case of the Titi monkey the parents are
monogamous and spend their whole time together. This sort of partnership appears to be necessary
in order to get the male so involved in the care.
While it appears to be essential to reproductive success for a mother to take responsibility for her
child, and certainly no society appears to have survived without it, for men actually caring for
children appears to be one of a number of strategies pursued to achieve reproductive success. So for
example while it used to be assumed that males would be most likely to care when they could be
sure of the paternity of their offspring this has turned out not to be the case. In foraging cultures
fathers and men in general may enhance their reproductive fitness by providing food, care, defence
and other forms of investment to children who are not biologically related to them. Men may invest
in children in these contexts to attract new mates or keep an existing one. Or for example hunter
gatherer fathers will favour genetically related children over step children, but this level of care
decreases when the number of reproductive women in the camp goes up.
But the main point to take away is that caring for children tends to be bound up with providing and
mating – it requires a more extreme situation, for example when the mother has died or abandoned
the child for a father to take over the care.
So what would I take away from these other societies when thinking about ways in which we can
improve the wellbeing of men?
In peasant or foraging societies relationships between men and women appear far more egalitarian
than our own because there is no superordinate powerful public realm through which women can
come under male control. These societies are incredibly different from our own but they draw our
gaze to the private, the household, the domestic the community realm. It is true that men
dominate in politics and generally earn more than women and are more likely to have jobs which
confer power and prestige. But in our everyday life how important are these symbols of power?
Perhaps they are like the capitalist farmers in the little French village whose presence means that in
everyday life men exercise little control. After all it is our social interactions, our friends and our
family, our homes, our leisure pursuits or the daily grind of work which makes up our everyday life.
If we look at who makes decisions about housework, or spending, or children or what we do with
our leisure time – it would be difficult to arrive at a portrait of male control. An understanding that
male dominance is as mythical as it is in peasant societies could do a lot to ease the pressure off
men.
So what would I take away from these other societies when thinking about ways in which we can
improve the wellbeing of men?
These societies are incredibly different from our own but they draw our gaze to the private, the
household, the domestic, the community realm. It is true that men dominate in politics and
generally earn more than women and are more likely to have jobs which confer power and prestige.
But in our everyday life how important are these symbols of power? Perhaps they are like the
capitalist farmers in the little French village whose presence means that in everyday life men
exercise little control. After all it is our social interactions, our friends and our family, our homes, our
leisure pursuits or the daily grind of work which makes up our everyday life. If we look at who
makes decisions about housework, or spending, or children or what we do with our leisure time – it
would be difficult to arrive at a portrait of male control. If we understood that male dominance is as
mythical as it is in peasant societies this could help ease off the underlying distrust which afflicts
relations between women and men.
We have seen that men’s contribution to reproduction is culturally constructed rather than rooted in
the directly biological processes of birth and nurturing. This means that the male role is far more
vulnerable when it comes to social change. And it explains why economic upheavals provoke
tremendous fluctuations in suicide mortality. In such a context I would suggest that it is much more
likely that men will adopt a negative culture of masculinity during times when their roles and
positions in society are insecure. The theory of hegemonic masculinity by corroding and
delegitimising the few roles that men have is much more likely to contribute towards the
development of a negative culture of masculinity than do anything very positive for men.
As we saw the provider role was important as it gave men a part in the reproductive cycle of life. In
our own society men are still significant providers and research suggests that, within reason, both
men and women value them having this role. However providing gets it’s meaning from the role it
plays in partnering and parenting. In contemporary culture it is frequently separated from partnering
and parenting and this makes it meaningless in itself. This happens through relationship breakdown
where either the mother may make it difficult for a father to have contact with his children or the
state makes unreasonable demands on the father in terms of providing child support.
It is because of the way in which relationship breakdown separates providing from partnering and
parenting that it emerges so consistently as a trigger for suicide in the research. We need to think
about ways in which when relationship breakdown happens the links between providing and
parenting and possibly also partnering can to be maintained.
There is also a very consistent link found between unemployment and suicide and I would suggest
that this is because of the way in which unemployment can disrupt the providing and therefore
opportunities for parenting and partnering. Unemployment does not have this same effect in
relation to women; as the risks are greater for males we should be more concerned by
unemployment in men.
