So much for strong but silent. Loud headlines now proclaim that masculinity is in retreat. These noises are echoed by everyone from a sitting U.S. senator to an accused rapist popular on YouTube, and they are made in the apparently sincere belief that there is a “crisis of masculinity.”
The idea of masculinity in crisis is as old as this country, as sociologist Michael Kimmel noted in his 1996 book, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, now in its fourth edition. For nearly 300 years, in a cyclical manner, some segment of the American populace has expressed concern that men are too soft, too effeminate or too unfocused, compared with the “ideal” man.
This is easier said than done. My recent research looked at Twitter postings responding to a rumor that Rockstar Games would be releasing a new version of the game Grand Theft Auto this year or next with a woman as the lead playable character. I studied one tweet about this leaked rumor, and analyzed the responses. I found that—predictably, in a sometimes misogynistic cyberspace—men either were fine with the decision or they hated it.
Masculinity has been a term used through history but not deeply interrogated, as this example of masculinity-turned-toxic demonstrates. It was not until feminism rose as a movement and a scholarly subject that researchers such as Connell, James Messerschmidt, Mark Anthony Neal and others began looking into masculinity. And there are still a lot of questions for which we have no answers.