Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Men Who Are Emasculated by Recent Socioeconomic Changes, Construct Themselves As Masculine Through Their Everyday Consumption
Men Who Are Emasculated by Recent Socioeconomic Changes, Construct Themselves As Masculine Through Their Everyday Consumption
overview
- Men who are emasculated by recent socioeconomic changes, construct
themselves as masculine through their everyday consumption.
- The man-of-action hero is an idealized model of manhood that resolves the
inherent weakness in two other prominent models (breadwinner and rebel).
- These men pursue heroic masculinity in very different ways, depending on their
social class positions.
General opinion
- American public opinion takes for granted that men strive to prove their
manhood through compensatory consumption, using whatever symbolic props
are available.
Reasons of why masculinity identities of men are threatened
- major socioeconomic changes have threatened the masculine identities of many
men. 1) Jobs in certain industry sectors have become more routinized and less
secure, while, at the same time, 2) women have gained more independence as
they have entered the work force.
- Men who have suffered pangs of emasculation in this new environment have
sought to symbolically reaffirm their status as real men through compensatory
consumption.
- The dominance of the ideology of the breadwinner after the war (post-war
America) and make them become “mere earning machines” and these men use
commodities to act out their fantasies and could symbolically rebel against
identities tied to work and to family.
- American ideologies of masculinity throughout the twentieth century have been
highly conflicted, leading many men to experience pervasive anxieties over their
manhood. Kimmel traces this conflict to a historical incompatibility between the
American ideal of the self-made man and the more dependent conditions of
wage earning fostered by industrialization and bureaucracies.
- Cowboy represented a throwback to the idea of precorporate capitalist
structure. The mythologized cowboy (similarly, adventurer and game hunter)
exemplified masculine ideals, but it is threatened as middle-class men assumed
to become a breadwinner role.
Characteristics like rugged individualism, an adventurous spirit, risk-taking,
display of physical power, and most of all, the high degree of personal autonomy
are been threatened.
- The gap between original ideal masculinity and the modern breadwinner role
produces an identity crisis that men have tried to resolve through consumption.
- As possibilities to achieve breadwinner masculinity at work have shrunk, men
have invested more and more of their identity work into consumption, where
they have more degrees of freedom to shroud themselves in the symbolic cloaks
of autonomy.
- The American ideology of heroic masculinity blends together two seemingly
competing models: one emphasizing respectability, organized achievement, and
civic virtues, and the other emphasizing rebellion, untamed potency, and self-
reliance.