Introduction

Abstract

In the very term “male sex roles,” there is a redundancy that usually passes unnoticed and that introduces a strong theoretical bias into what should more accurately be identified simply as male roles. A male role is one performed by a person classified as male, not female, on the basis of genital configuration. A male role, as compared with a male sex role, may or may not be one that can be performed by a female as well as a male. A male sex role, by contrast, is exclusively male insofar as its performance involves the sex organs, or more precisely, the erotosexual organs. A sex role that is male and that is genuinely a sex role is dimorphically coded as male and not as female. That is to say, it is sex-irreducible. There are three other grades of sexually dimorphic role, namely, those that are sex-derivative, sex-adjunctive, and sex-arbitrary.