THE MASCULINE AND ITS OWN by Onyx

Foto von Craig McLachlan auf Unsplash

​When I was younger I would visit the paternal side of my family more frequently, as we would have large gatherings for events. At this one gathering, I asked my sister to put some lipstick that she had on me just because I wanted to wear it. One of my uncles saw me a bit later with that lipstick on me and wasn’t very happy. He promptly took a napkin and forcefully wiped the makeup from my lips. He has since apologized, but when he did that, there was something in his head, an idea and an impulse that made him react like that. I’ve faced comments and similar treatment for doing more feminine things because I was a “boy” doing “girl” things.

John Beynon (2002) holds that “the widely held, commonsensical assumption [is] that masculinity is a standardized container, fixed by biology, into which all ‘normal’ men are placed,” but in his text Masculinities and Culture, Beynon seeks to understand masculinity (or masculinities), how it manifests, and how to study it (p. 2). I will be using the philosophy of Max Stirner (2009) detailed in his work The Ego and Its Own to analyze masculinity as well as drawing from the writings of Beynon (2002). It is my view that masculinity is a controlling and harmful construction that should be eliminated as opposed to amended. I will use this paper to show that masculinity is not a necessary feature of our world thought it is salient and pervasive. To understand the lens I’ll be working from, we’ll first look at Stirner’s (2009) ideas.
           
Stirner’s Spooks
The main idea from Stirner that I’ll be using to analyze and critique masculinity is the spook. Stirner (2009) introduces the concept as something with “apparent body, but real spirit”  (p. 36). A spook is a concept or idea that one places above themselves and follows. To help make sense of the idea, we can contextualize the term with some examples, spoon fed from Stirner himself.

One of Stirner’s examples is family. In the first part of his text, in a section titled “the hierarchy,” Stirner (2009) is discussing modern philosophy in his day and claims that it has “only changed the existing objects, the real ruler, into conceived objects, into ideas, before which

the old respect not only was not lost, but increased in intensity” (p. 80). This is in reference to Stirner’s (2009) claim that objectivity is still revered as “sacred” for modern philosophy (p. 79). To further illustrate the point he’s making about philosophy, he brings forth the family.

In his example, Stirner (2009) posits that you can physically and verbally “emancipate oneself from the commands of parents,” but that by doing this, you fall “into the more binding dependence on the idea of the family” (p. 80). The claim Stirner is making here is that releasing yourself from the physical real world responsibilities that exist when you’re growing up and living with family actually triggers a greater dependence on the sacredness of family as an idea on its own.

What I interpret Stirner as trying to say here is that living in a family often over time reinforces the idea and importance of family itself. Obviously, when you are younger, you usually are dependent on the family to keep you safe, so there’s that physical presence and aspect there, but once that presence ceases to exist, the ideas embedded into you don’t. Your own “individual demands” may be treated as less rational in favor of what you’ve grown up with, family (Stirner & Leopold, 2009, p. 80).

Whether or not this claim that Stirner is making is true or not isn’t super important, but it works as an excellent example to highlight what a spook is, how it functions, and how it can be created. To begin with, we can use this example to fully understand the spook. A spook is any concept or idea that has become “sacred” to the individual. Stirner (2009) says:
Sacred is everything which for the egoist is to be unapproachable, not to be touched, outside his power, above him; sacred, in a word, is every matter of conscience, for 'this is a matter of conscience to me' means simply, 'I hold this sacred'. (p. 67)
In simpler terms, the spook puts the idea above the individual. This sacredness means that the idea becomes greater than the self and is sought out to be fulfilled.

Stirner’s family example highlights one important thing about spooks: non-spooky ideas can become spooked. We can see in the example how the family acts as a spook, “For 'the family' is a sacred idea, which the individual must never offend against” (Stirner & Leopold, 2009, p. 80). The individual is tied to the idea of family. Someone has importance to the individual because they are family as opposed to any bond they may share, but as is shown in the example, family doesn’t have to be a spook, but it becomes one.

The difference between the two points in time that we’re given is that when you are with your family it makes sense to listen and obey because you are dependent, that’s not being spooked, but continuing to obey the demands of family and bend to their will when you are no longer dependant and only because they’re “family” is spooked. To sum this point up, Stirner (2009) says, “Released from dependence as regards the existing family… one is ruled by the spirit of the family” (p. 80).

What differentiates an idea from being spooked or not is a question of it being descriptive or prescriptive. If you have people that fulfill a certain closeness and relationship space in your life and decide to call them family, that’s a descriptive idea. The idea becomes prescriptive when it tells you what to do or who to be, like a spook, or as Saul Newman (2001) puts it in “Spectres of Stirner: A contemporary critique of ideology,” a “fixed idea… a construct that governs thought” (p. 319). When family becomes the reason it becomes a spook.
 
Beynon’s Masculinities as Spooks
Now that we’ve attained an understanding of Stirner’s spooks, the next step is to unravel what Beynon posits about masculinity or masculinities and see if we can unravel any spooked nature. It’s important to understand that Beynon’s text is not a philosophical one. It functions quite like how a textbook would that you would get in high school. Macsulinities and Culture is primarily both a genealogy of masculinity and a critical look at how it functions/manifests.

What’s most important to understand about Beynon’s (2002) outlook, and what he emphasizes right at the start is that “‘masculinity’ is composed of many masculinities” (p. 1). Because there are many different manifestations of masculinities across the globe, cultures, and times, using the term masculinity doesn’t give the breadth that the concept requires. However, there is some contention with the term.

Beynon (2002) gives note to John MacInnes (1998) who claims that masculinity doesn’t exist and is only really a fantasy, a construction to order lives and tell us how men should be, and so, MacInnes (1998) posits that it doesn’t matter if we use masculinity or masculinities. This already reveals some very existentialist thinking. I don’t think we need to jump to masculinities not existing in order to view them as constructions, but the fact that people in the field already have this view shows us that we can look at masculinities as apparitions, not really there, but having impact and effects: spooks.

Even Beynon (2002) holds the “masculinities” view and still recognizes that “masculinity is cultural” not something anyone is born with, but rather taught and learned (p. 2). Now, Beynon gives us a lot of interesting information in this text, but what’s most important to my goal in this paper are three things: the construction of masculinity (spook making), the functioning of masculinity (spook proving), and the negative effects of masculinity (spook problems).
 
Spook Making
As I showed before, spooks don’t just exist, they are constructed, as with the family example. So to understand masculinity as a spook, we must first understand it as how it’s constructed. Luckily for me, we have a section where Beynon (2002) directly asks, “How is masculinity culturally constructed” (p. 10). So let’s take a look at what he has to say.

Beynon (2002) divides the factors that shape masculinity into 10 key factors which are: historical location, age and physique, sexual orientation, education, status and lifestyle, geographical (location), ethnicity, religion and beliefs, class and occupation, and culture and subculture (p. 10).  What exactly is determined and constructed as masculine depends on these factors. By changing your “class, status, culture,” or “geographical location,” the concept of masculinity you face and how you enact it changes with that (Beynon, 2002, p. 10).

The concept of hegemonic masculinity is looking at and defining “successful ways of ‘being a man’ in particular places at a specific time” (Beynon, 2002, p. 16). The hegemonic masculinity is the most “successful” one. Now what is considered the most successful and the peak of being a man is as per usual: relative.

Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) posit 3 levels of hegemonic masculinity existing at any given time:
Local: constructed in the arenas of face-to-face interaction of families, organizations,
and immediate communities, as typically found in ethnographic and life-history
research;

Regional: constructed at the level of the culture or the nation-state, as typically found
in discursive, political, and demographic research; and
Global: constructed in transnational arenas such as world politics and transnational
business and media, as studied in the emerging research on masculinities and globalization. (p. 849)

Obviously, things can get more complicated and in-depth than this, but these three levels allow analysis to be consolidated as well as cross-referenced between levels. Looking back at Stirner, family became a spook (or more/differently spooked) based on your relative position. It’s the same thing here. Based on where you occupy yourself, masculinity changes. These shifts take charge especially in accordance with time.

We can see the factors that affect what is considered masculine and that there are different masculinities, but for the last point of spook-making, we have to look at the why. Why is there a shift in what is considered masculine? Now there are many whys all throughout the globe, but looking at cultural shifts through time helps with understanding some of the whys.

Beynon (2002) gives the example of how the changing division of labor brought on by the Industrial Revolution where men entered factories and women stayed home resulted in both a patriarchy that was “based on men’s economic superiority” and “the idea that men were innately practical, rational and competitive” (p. 18). This could be be a vast oversimplification, but it seems that if you follow conventions of what power is you can also follow the conventions of masculinity not too far behind.
 
Spook Proving
Okay guys, so we just made masculinity. Now it’s time to see how masculinity gets working, its control. This is what proves the spook. The main things that defines the spook is its sacred status. To attempt to prove this, we have to show that masculinity is regarded highly via the adherence to it.  Now you might see a potential issue with this if you’ve been picking up what I’ve been putting down. Namely that there are essentially an infinite number of masculinities that function in an infinite number of ways. So I’m going to approach this section by looking at various ways that masculinity is both reinforced and enacted, focused primarily on the West.

One of the best places to look in terms of reinforcement is childhood. This is where we learn how to interact with the world. Traits like “agression and competitiveness often elicit approval and are reinforced in the male child” which ends up creating a fragile masculinity that forces “men into displaying and proving it,” potentially leading to them suppressing feminine traits and turning against women (Beynon, 2002, p. 57). Kids as young as 3 have been observed to showcase understanding of gender differences in apllications to play (“girl” activities and “boy” activities) (Beynon, 2002, p. 57).

This is a clear example of how the spook is reinforced into kids, especially since these various socializing agents (family, school, media) promote and validate following these roles, boys learn that it’s important to embody gender roles (Beynon, 2002, p. 58). The individual is submerged below masculinity as you become told to fill these roles and that they are inherent to you. Masculinity becomes sacred.

In American history, James A. Doyle (1989) gives six ideal historical masculinity types. Looking at some of these we can see various specific ideals that were sought after. For example we have the “heroic man” epitomized by ancient Greece who exemplifies “physical strength, skill and courage in battle,” and “loyalty to leader and cause” (Beynon, 2002, p. 59). We also have the he-man which is essentially the boyscout kind of masculinity emphasized by male bonding and outdoor exploring in response to early feminists attacking the patriarchy in a post-civil war era.

Looking at these we can see a small sliver of the ways masculinity was meant to be enacted in various hegemonies. The spook is fully alive. We’ve socially constructed it and controlled it, but to fully grasp the issues and levels of control, we’ll have to get a bit darker.
 
Spook Problems
With the spook in hand it’s time to see the full manifestation of the negative aspects of masculinity, and they are simply numerous. We can start at arguably one of the most horrendous manifestations: rape culture. Courtney Fraser (2015) writes on the perpetuation of rape culture through supposedly benevolent means. One of Doyle’s masculine ideals is the “chivalrous man” defined by the European knight with his crusades and quests undertaken for his lady (Beynon, 2002, p. 60). It’s this same chivalry that Fraser (2015) takes issue with.

She highlights this throught the concept of ambivalent sexism which is composed of both hostile and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is characterized by the view that women are trying to control men with sexuality/feminist ideology whereas benevolent sexism is characterized by the view that women are pure and in need of protection and are necessary to complete a man (Fraser, 2015, p. 147). One of the causes of this is what we’ve already discussed at length being the differentiation of gender and the roles attatched to each (Fraser, 2015, pp. 147-148).

Benevolent sexism on its own is especially perpetuation of rape culture as it positions men as agents and women as lacking agency, therefore “establishing a paradigm wherein men assume agency on behalf of women” (Fraser, 2015, p. 152). A very telling study even showed that men who dehumanze women (relating them to objects or animals) “reported a greater willingness to engage in rape” (Fraser, 2015, p. 152).

This is only the tiniest sliver of the negative effects of masculinity on women. These effects are so bad they spawned an entire branch of philosophy and new way of analyzing the world (if it’s not clear, I’m talking about feminism), but masculinity also creates issues for men themselves.

Studies have shown that traditional masculine roles have led to increased anxiety, increased issues with relationships as well as decreased senses of self-worth (Schermer & Holmes, 2018, pp. 196-197).  A deep dive and analysis into Jordan Peterson’s subreddit has shown that an embracement of traditional values and gender essentialism breeds a great deal of anger and resentment towards a world that’s viewed as attacking men and masculinity (Nesbitt-Larking, 2022).

As stated and Schrock and Schwalbe’s (2009) text:
The consequences of manhood acts for the reproduction of gender inequality can be contradictory. Men as a gender class can benefit from the collective upholding of sexist ideology and of images of males as possessing essential qualities that suit them for the exercise of power. Yet compensatory manhood acts can sometimes reproduce inequalities in ways that disadvantage subgroups of men. (p. 288)

So with this in mind, that settles it. We need to throw away masculinity. It’s a spook that clearly harms everyone and we’d be better off without it, right?
           
Problems With Spooking Masculinity?
While all of this laid out sounds pretty good (bad for masculinity), the jury may not be entirely out on the analysis of masculinity as a spook. Back to the start of Beynon’s (2002) book, he gives us the story of John that might bring question to the idea of essential gender categories:

Such a view appears to derive some support from the often-mentioned case of a little boy, ‘John’, who suffered a botched circumcision and was reassigned the gender of a girl in the belief that a surgical reassignment, along with firm socialization, would yield a well-adjusted girl. However, in spite of the sex-change operation, plus twelve years of social and hormonal treatment, ‘Joan’ (as she was renamed) never felt like a girl and, as an adult, had an operation to change her back into a man. (p. 5)
So what does this mean? Is there a role for essentialism in terms of gender and masculinity?
The overwhelming general consensus for this is quite hard no. Not does scientific consensus show that gender essentialism is not a valid idea, but that it also tends to lead toward anti-egalitarian thinking (Skewees & Haslam, 2018, p. 2). Even a few pages after this story is Beynon’s (2002) book, he examines leading writers and concludes that masculinity is still socially constructed, not biologically (p. 7). My personal theory about the story of John is that it’s gender essentialist ideas that made him not feel like a girl. He likely identified more with what we consider a man as, it’s just that the socialization that tried to paint him as a girl conflicted with his individual desires that resembled what a man is supposed to be (pure conjecture).

Does this mean we have to throw away masculinity? Can we not reform the negative aspects? Like in Baljon’s (2011) text, where he argues that using essentialist gender concepts can be helpful for healing men recovering from abuse, or in Bridges’s (2014) text, where men are shown to fight toxicly masculine traits by adopting gay ones. The issue here is that there always seems to be a caveat in these scenarios.

Baljon’s (2011) text dips full-on into gender essentialism and doesn’t seem to make any efforts to fight other problematic masculine attributes. Bridges (2014) full-on shows that the methods employed by these men “reproduce systems of inequality in new ways” (p. 75). In a text by Haltom (2020), even parents who allowed their sons to do a more “girly” sport like baton twirling still sometimes enforced other aspects of male gender norms (though this was mostly done by the fathers, some of the mothers were problematic in other ways).
 
Conclusion
So where does this leave us? Well as I said at the start, I think we need to do away with masculinity. No matter how we try to twist it, there will always be an unequal dynamic. Masculinity has to exist in opposition to femininity. These social categories seek to tell us who we are and how we need to be who we are. That’s what the spook does, crushes the individual. The more we do away with these oppressive structures the more I believe we’ll be able to understand our unique selves. Abulof (2017) tells us that “essentialist authenticity sees individual and social identities as predetermined wellsprings of expressions one needs to tap into,” but “existentialism regards identities themselves as manifestations of such creative expressions – you are what you make of yourself, not what you were made of” (p. 531).

Works Cited
Abulof, U. (2017). Be Yourself! How Am I Not myself?: II. Society and Politics: Between Essentialist and Existentialist Authenticity. Society (New Brunswick), 54(6), 530–532. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0183-0
Baljon, M. C. L. (2011). Wounded masculinity: Transformation of aggression for male survivors of childhood abuse. Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 10(3), 151–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/14779757.2011.599512
Beynon, J. (2002). Masculinities and culture. Open University Press.
Bridges, T. (2014). A VERY “GAY” STRAIGHT?: Hybrid Masculinities, Sexual Aesthetics, and the Changing Relationship between Masculinity and Homophobia. Gender & Society, 28(1), 58–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243213503901
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Doyle, J. A. (1995). The male experience. Brown & Benchmark.
Fraser, C. (2015). From “Ladies First” to “Asking for It”: Benevolent Sexism in the Maintenance of Rape Culture. California Law Review, 103(1), 141–203. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24758470
Haltom, T. M. (2020). A New Spin on Gender: How Parents of Male Baton Twirlers (Un)Do Gender Essentialism. Sociology of Sport Journal, 37(4), 283–290. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2019-0077
MacInnes, J. (1998). The end of masculinity: The confusion of sexual genesis and sexual difference in modern society. Open University Press.
Nesbitt-Larking, P. (2022). Constructing Narratives of Masculinity: Online Followers of Jordan B. Peterson. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 23(3), 309–320. https://doi.org/10.1037/men0000394
Schermer, T. W., & Holmes, C. N. (2018). Will to Masculinity: An Existential Examination of Men’s Issues. Journal of Humanistic Counseling, 57(3), 191–207. https://doi.org/10.1002/johc.12082
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Stirner, M., & Leopold, D. (2009). The ego and its own. Cambridge University Press.

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