What makes a man a man?
Fatherhood?
Success in business?
Athletic prowess?
A new psychological theory, built on work from sociology and cultural anthropology, has interesting implications for manhood in the 21st Century.
Sociologists and cultural anthropologists have noted that, across time and culture, the transition from boyhood to manhood is often marked with formal rituals. For example, in the Hamer people in Ethiopia have a formal rite of passage for boys before they can formally marry. They must run naked over a row of cows four times.
In the Brazilian Amazon, the Satere-Mawe tribe have a more painful--and dangerous--manhood ritual. Boys must wear a glove woven with bullet ants twenty times.
Manhood in America
In contemporary American society, we don't necessarily have formal rituals in which men must prove their manhood, but we do have social norms which suggest that manhood is social status which must be earned. For example, young men are bombarded with a message that they cannot be considered a man until they have had sex with a woman. Consider this movie poster for the 40 Year-Old Virgin, in which the title character, a forty year-old man who has never had sex with a woman is depicted as boyish, innocent.
Last year, a number of Super Bowl ads drew some criticism for their sexist memes, including this ad from Dove, whose message was a man must do certain things in order to be considered a man.
Precarious Manhood
Social psychologists Joe Vandello and Jennifer Bosson argue that manhood is a precarious social status. Manhood is both an elusive and tenuous social milestone. It is difficult to achieve, and once earned, can be easily lost. In the first empirical test of this theory (Vandello, Bosson, Cohen, Burnaford & Weaver, 2008), they asked participants about the degree to which the transitions from boyhood to manhood and girlhood to womanhood were the result of social or biological milestones (study 1b). As you can see in the chart below, there were no significant differences among the attributions to the transition to womanhood, but participants were significantly more likely to attribute the transition from boyhood to manhood to social causes than to biological causes.
They next asked participants to interpret statements about lost manhood and lost womanhood (study 2). They first read a statement ostensibly written by a man (or woman) in a biographical sketch.
My life isn’t what I expected it would be. I used to be a man (woman). Now, I’m not a man (woman) anymore.
Independent raters coded the responses on the degree to which the interpretations cited physical (biological) or social reasons for the lost manhood (womanhood). As you can see in the figure below, participants were more likely to attribute lost manhood to social than physical reasons, while the opposite pattern was found among attributions to lost womanhood.
These findings imply that not only is manhood a social status that must be earned, but it as can be lost. And it is in avoiding and restoring lost manhood that Bosson and Vandello next turned. Because manhood has historically been associated with power and access to materials goods, men should be especially motivated to avoid losing their socially-conferred status as man.
Although both children of both genders are socialized to avoid engaging in cross-gender behavior, this is especially true of boys. From a young age, males are taught to devalue femininity and to eschew any behaviors or desires with even tenuous associations with femininity. Still, it is nearly inevitable that men will encounter challenges to their manhood status. How do they responds to such challenges (or threats)?
Vandello and his colleagues (2008; study 5) presented both men and women with a threat to or affirmation of their manhood (or womanhood). They gave participants an ostensible test of gender identity. The test consisted of questions about gender typed knowledge (e.g., "Who won the Super Bowl in 1995?"; "Who has most frequently appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan?"). Immediately after taking the test, participants received false feedback about their perfomance. Half of the participants receive a gender threat. Men (women) are told that they performed poorly compared to other members of their gender (27th percentile) and that their gender identity is closer to feminine (masculine) than feminine (masculine). The other half receive a gender affirmation. Men (women) are told that they performed poorly compared to other members of their gender (83rd percentile) and that their gender identity is closer to feminine (masculine) than masculine (feminine).
After receiving the false feedback, they then completed a word completion task meant to indirectly measure anxiety. They are presented with more than 20 word fragments (words will miss letters). The task is to fill-in letters to complete the words. Key here is that seven of the fragments can be completed to create either benign words or anxiety-related words.
Consistent with precarious manhood theory, gender threatened men completed more words using anxiety words than gender affirmed men. No significant differences were found between gender threatened and gender affirmed women. In other words, the gender threat elicited anxiety among men, but not women.
If gender threats are anxiety-provoking events for men, to what ends will they go the restore their lost manhood. Bosson and her colleagues (2009) wondered if manhood threats would motivate men to engage in displays of aggressive behavior to restore their lost manhood. In this study, Bosson and her colleagues used a different gender threat. Gender threatened men were videotaped braiding hair on a mannequin while the unthreatened men were videotaped tying rope.
In one version of this study, after performing the videotaped task, men were allowed to choose between one of two follow-up tasks--a boxing task, in which they would punch a punching bag several times, and a puzzle task, in which they would make a square out of several puzzle pieces. They found that men who were videotaped braiding hair were more likely to chose the boxing task than the puzzle task, while the opposite pattern was found among men who were videotaped braiding rope (study 2).
In another version of this study, all men did the boxing task after being videotaped braiding hair or tying rope. The men who were videotaped braiding hair punched the punching bag harder than men who were videotaped tying rope. (study 1).
The Implications
There is some exciting research on-going looking at how precarious manhood can effect decision-making, risk-taking, aggression, and stress reactivity. Social Psychologists Amelia Talley and Ann Bettencourt demonstrated the implications for anti-gay aggression.
Talley and Bettencourt (2008) gave men false feedback about their gender identity (using a similar bogus gender identity test I described above). Half of the men were told they scored well below average in masculinity while the other half were told the scored slightly above average. Next, the men were told they would be doing an online collaborative task with a man in another room. Half of them were told they were working with a straight partner, while the other half were working with a gay partner.
To measure aggression, the men were told that they had to give their partners a blast of white noise every time they made a mistake. There actually was no human partner; a computer program rigged to make many mistakes responded to the participants questions and received the noise blast. The participants were able to control both the length and the intensity of the noise blast. The researchers combined the intensity/length scores to create an index of aggression.
The gender identity feedback did not effect aggression toward the straight partner, but as you can see in the figure below, the manhood threat did increase aggression toward the gay male partner, especially among those scored low in a measure of homophobia.
Conclusion
None of this should be taken to mean that men should be coddled or that women do not face paralyzing self-threats. They shouldn't and they do. This research points to the consequences of constructing manhood as a social status that must be earned and can be easily lost. The social construction of gender does present women with challenges, especially working woman who are punished for displaying the very traits that define success in the workplace. I'll write about this backlash effect at some point in the future.