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I started using online dating sites in 2005, after I met a woman on a plane who told me she met her boyfriend on a site called The Nerve. She was attractive and cosmopolitan, and I thought that she might be on to something. Since I first visited online dating sites in a search for love and companionship (and continue to do so), I did not expect that my experiences would inform my research. But I’m a feminist philosopher. So when I started having a troubling sense while I looked through profiles, I took it seriously. These men had crafted profiles filled with signs of their own masculinity as well as their love of all things masculine. They were in a position fraught with https://kissbrides.com/pt-pt/dominicana-mulheres/ contradiction. They had signed up on a dating site with the clear intent to meet women, perhaps even women who would become their partners in long-term, committed relationships, but they seemed compelled to perform from a script of hegemonic masculinity that requires a disavowal of all things feminine.
I was especially struck by the insistent masculinity in these profiles because leading masculinities theorists have claimed that what Raewyn Connell called hegemonic masculinity is on the ple, in Inclusive Masculinities, Eric Anderson, has claimed that at least white, university-attending men are losing orthodox gender patterns and demonstrating more “inclusive masculinities.” Anderson argues that the notion of hegemonic masculinity fails to comprehend the terrain of masculinities in the twenty-first century, when “homohysteria” is on the decline. Anderson advocates a new, more inclusive theory of masculinity that examines the effects of three stages of homohysteria on masculinities in Anglo-American societies: “elevated cultural homohysteria, diminishing cultural homohysteria, and diminished homohysteria.” In the first period, homohysteria operated to reinforce a hegemonic, homophobic masculinity. In the second, which Anderson considers the epoch in which we live, two forms of masculinity are dominant, neither of which exercises hegemony. In inclusive masculinity, Anderson argues, heterosexual men display increased “emotional and physical homosocial proximity”; the inclusion of gay men; the inclusion of heterosexual men’s femininity; and decreased sexism. Finally, in a future age of diminished homohysteria, he forecasts that gender stratification would greatly reduce, as would sexism and patriarchy, and there would be a proliferation of expressions of masculinity and femininity.
Michael Kimmel agrees, announcing in Manhood in America that a new type of masculinity that exhibits “increasing comfort with gender equality – both at home and at work” – is appearing in the twenty-first century. Kimmel claims that we have two competing images of masculinity in dominant positions today. Along with red and blue states, we have something like red and blue gender politics, with half of men subscribing to more traditional notions of masculinity and half to the new, more inclusive ones.
Kimmel offers Barack Obama as a model of the new type of masculinity. Criticized by his opponents as not masculine enough, Obama rose above the insults. Kimmel points to Obama’s “even-tempered affability coupled with his sharp intelligence,” his strong relationship with his independent wife, and his unapologetic commitment to and prioritization of his family.
While Anderson and Kimmel do seem right that expressions of masculinity are proliferating, my experiences online have not indicated that we are witnessing the creation of a space for the feminine. The disdain for the feminine persists in both traditional and newer masculinities, and a sexist form of masculinity has maintained hegemony. In addition, the newer masculinities, while appearing more egalitarian, often remain sexist.
