Meanings of Masculinity in the United States

Abstract

During the early and middle 1970’, authors such as Jack Sawyer (who is credited with starting the male liberation movement in 1970), Joseph Pleck (1973), Marc Fasteau (1974), Warren Farrell (1974), Jack Nichols (1974), and Herb Goldberg (1976; 1979), to mention a few, began to write about the male experience in the United States. By this time there was a growing literature about the female experience and distinctions were being made between concepts such as sex, gender identity, and gender. Komarovsky’s popular work on sex roles nearly forty years ago was the forerunner of much of the literature on sex and gender emerging during the 1970s. Yet, until the above authors made their contributions, the full significance of the distinctions being made between beingmale and beingmasculine was not felt by many—not even those who had developed interests in sex-roles, gender and like study areas. Part of the reason for this oversight was the fact that males in the United States were perceived simply to have a power-advantage over females. Most attention was focused on the victimization of women, and little devoted to the disadvantages associated with the male sex role.

A saner society will flower when men liberate themselves from contrived, socially fabricated prohibition, cultural straitjackets, and mental stereotypes that control and inhibit behavior through arbitrary definitions of what it means to be a man. (Jack Nichols, 1978.)