Tori Amos once sang, "Things are getting dear desperate when all the boys can't be men."
Some have criticized the dominance of women's sexuality in feminist writing and gender studies, emphasizing that not enough time has been spent on defining masculinity. While feminist critical theory may not have explored masculinity in the in−depth way that it has with femininity, these critics should rather point to reasons that may exacerbate the lack of scholarship rather than pining for masculinity to gain centrality in fields that have allowed a feminine subjectivity to reign.
In an unequal society, those with power escape scrutiny; our patriarchal society thus renders men invisible, at least in terms of gender, for men are all too visible in other contexts. As the dominant sex, males enjoy the luxury of escaping classification; the gender spectrum considers only females, and other deviations from the male norm, as the "other." In this way, men function as a normative gender ruler with which all others are measured and differentiated. (So I guess size does matter after all.) Society genders females, while males remain gender−neutral, which thereby results in a perceived lack of literature on masculinity.
Let's ponder some scenarios in an attempt to render more apparent the privilege of invisibility conferred to men. The authors were all women in one of my English classes last semester called Non−Western Women Writers, as expected. If however, had I studied only male authors, the class most likely would have simply been called Non−Western Writers. "Men" would not have replaced "women" in the title. Rarely do words relating to the male sex appear in titles, while those pertaining to females must always be prefaced with some gendered term because the assumption exists that "man" is the like the understood "you" in the imperative mood.
Also, in all of my high school English classes in which male authors dominated, the concept of masculinity never came up. Rather, a work's rapport with women or its stance toward femininity would sometimes take center stage. Yet if I think about examples of the converse situation in which the author was a woman, femininity would either make an easy entrance into the conversation or loom in the background as a loaded topic to be discussed later. In the case that literary work includes women or is written by a woman, femininity almost never fails to be the subject of discussion, while masculinity somehow always slips under the radar. The same phenomenon has also happened at Tufts, even in all of my nine English classes and three French literature classes.
Of course, it is important to note that the resultant conversations on femininity always happen with the normative backdrop of masculinity. Women can never escape judgment through the subjective lens of masculine standards, whereas males have the privilege of expecting an objective lens. We then define femininity with terms contrary to constructs of masculinity. This polarization of the sexes supports a biological determinist view that erringly does not take into account the interaction of nature and nurture and social constructions in shaping each individual.
Furthermore, the problematic assumption of maleness as normative valorizes masculinity as the standard to which humans must behave accordingly, further fueling gender inequality in attributing a relative superiority to maleness. Thus, masculinity must be taken into account. We need to address "male" as a gender in order to better understand gender inequality and clearly see the injustices the constructs of masculinity cause if we want to see progress toward gender equality.
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Elisha Sum is a junior majoring in English and French. He can be reached at Elisha.Sum@tufts.edu.
