It’s tough being a man. It’s hard to achieve the status and easy to falter, men believe. And when they’re challenged often aggression is the first answer.
Gender is social, say psychologists Jennifer K. Bosson and Joseph A. Vandello Bosson. “Men know this," Associate Professor Bosson says. "They are powerfully concerned about how they appear in other people’s eyes.” That means they can suffer psychologically when their manhood seems under threat. And that attack can come in many forms, even like being asked to braid hair in an experiment, as these researchers did.
Manhood is defined for many people by achievements, not biology. The womans role, however, is regarded as a biological state. So manhood can be “lost” through social transgressions, whereas womanhood is “lost” only by physical changes, such as menopause.
Who judges manhood so stringently? “Women are not the main punishers of gender role violations,” says Bosson. Other men are. Bosson’s research shows that gender is a social phenomenon for men. And she’s shown the powerfully negative effects including depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, or violence.
“When I was younger I felt annoyed by my male friends who would refuse to hold a pocketbook or say whether they thought another man was attractive. I thought it was a personal shortcoming that they were so anxious about their manhood," Prof Bosson says. "Now I feel much more sympathy for men."
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Bosson and her fellow researchers used hair braiding to push men to behave in a “feminine” manner, and recorded what happened. In one study, some men braided hair; others did the more masculine—or gender-neutral—task of braiding rope. Given the options afterwards of punching a bag or doing a puzzle, the hair-braiders overwhelmingly chose the former. When one group of men braided hair and others did not, and all punched the bag, the hair-braiders punched harder. When they all braided hair and only some got to punch, the non-punchers evinced more anxiety on a subsequent test.
Aggression, write the authors, is a “manhood-restoring tactic.”
When men use this tactic, or consider it, they tend to feel they were compelled by outside forces to do so. Bosson and her colleagues gave men and women a mock police report, in which either a man or a woman hit someone of their own sex after that person taunted them, insulting their manhood (or womanhood). Why did the person get violent? When the protagonist was a woman, both sexes attributed the act to character traits, such as immaturity; the women also said this about the male aggressors. But when the aggressor was a man, the men mostly believed he was provoked; humiliation forced him to defend his manhood.
The paper is published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Scienc
Source: Association for Psychological Science
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