Men and Masculinities

This article examines how middle-aged urban men in South Korea relate to age-relevant ideas of beauty in a society in which youthful muscular bodies are increasingly presented as the ideal or, arguably, even as a norm. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 13 male participants aged 36–56 years residing in the Seoul metropolitan area, it seeks to outline what role grooming and aesthetic labor play in their everyday social interactions. The findings suggest that men’s aesthetic practices in the workplace are strongly linked to considerations of in-group harmony, competency at work, and maintaining social hierarchies. Rather than being motivated by a desire to emulate hegemonic masculinity embodied by male celebrities of similar age, men in this age group engage with body work primarily for the homosocial gaze of other men in their workplace in order to embody their membership and belonging to it. These micro-contexts of men’s aesthetic labor help to illustrate how not all aesthetic labor can be explained in terms of considering the body simply as an object of investment. The participants’ reflections also illustrate how men’s bodies as neoliberal objects in the contemporary Korean workplace are not interpellated by societal or cultural influences in identical ways. For white collar workers, the role of aesthetic labor was clearly seen as more significant than for those in blue collar roles, suggesting a degree of social stratification of body work. Despite the relatively easy access to affordable technologies of the body in Korea, for workers in lower-middle class jobs where grooming and fitness are not considered an essential part of their job, partaking in aesthetic labor came with the anxiety that it might be encoded as “excessive” by others. This suggests that Korean beauty cultures continue to be highly class- and context-specific rather than relatively uniform as often (mis)understood in existing literature.

To date, the body image literature has largely ignored older men, as the bulk of the research has focused on young and middle-aged women. Where studies have been conducted with older men, they have tended to only consider the perspectives of men in their 50s and 60s or to include older men as part of mixed gender or diverse age samples. Thus, little is known about how older men perceive, experience, and feel about their aging and changing bodies, even as the body is central to older men’s understanding and practice of masculinity as well as their position in age- and gender-based systems of inequality. Addressing this gap in the research, we conducted in-depth interviews with 22 community-dwelling men aged 67–90 years (average age of 77 years). Drawing upon age relations and masculinities theorizing, we asked the men about how they evaluated and felt about their appearances, health, physical abilities, and sexual functioning. Our thematic analysis revealed that the men were largely satisfied with their appearances and physical functioning, particularly their approximation to masculine ideals of youthfulness, healthiness, and independence. Whereas half of the men identified their weight as a source of body satisfaction, all of the men disparaged obesity and stereotypical older men’s enlarged stomachs in particular. That said, the men discounted appearance as an unimportant and feminized concern. In contrast, they emphasized the salience of health and body functionality, expressing concern about how changes to their physical abilities and sexual functioning had already affected, and might in the future increasingly delimit, their daily lives, and hence they preferred social and physical pursuits. We consider our findings in light of age and masculinity ideals, which collectively privilege youthful bodies and subordinate older men.

Peter Pan Syndrome is a concept that used to characterize the “never-growing” men who have reached an adult age, but cannot face their adult sensations and responsibilities. Individuals with Peter Pan Syndrome have difficulties in social and professional relationships because of their irresponsible behaviors and narcissistic properties. The purpose of this study is to develop a scale in order to measure the level of Peter Pen Syndrome in male individuals. In accordance with this purpose, the draft form was sent to experts to get their feedback, and some statements have been revised in accordance with the feedback. The Peter Pan Syndrome Scale is a twenty-two-item self-report measurement, and each item is evaluated on five-point Likert Type scale. Construct validity of the scale was determined by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and a three-factor model was created, namely, “Escape from Responsibility”, “Power Perception,” and “Never Growing Child”. EFA results shows that these three factors were describing 47.05% of the variance. Results of EFA were verified by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The internal consistency coefficient and the confidence coefficient of the split-half were used to determine the reliability of the scale. The Cronbach’s alpha value was found to be 0.88 for the total scale.

The pastrycook Aron Forss was a well-known person in his hometown Uppsala in the 1840’s and 1850’s, famous both for his popular café and for his femininity. This article analyses the rumors that surrounded his person, using paintings, newspaper clippings, and memoirs written by his former customers. Through his business, Forss could lay claim on normative masculinity through the rousing bourgeois ideals of financial success and craftsmanship. Being a successful businessman was a way of securing social acceptance and respectability. However, it was apparently not enough. In order to sustain his business, Forss was forced to put up with harassments. Some of his costumers treated him much like other women in public places were treated—as objects of sexual advance. Several of Forss’s contemporaries describe him with particular fascination. By describing Forss as a spectacle, he is made an exception to the rules of social appropriateness.

I recall a time as an undergraduate student in Sydney, Australia, when I was on a night out with other university students. A bartender asked me what I was studying, and I replied, “I’m becoming a primary school teacher”. Without much expression in her voice, she responded: “I can’t imagine they would let you teach the little ones. That would be a bit risky”. There was a sting in her words and I knew immediately that she was referring to my gender; I was one of only three male students in my cohort. I wondered if others might share her view. As it turned out, the “little ones”, Kindergarten and Year One, were my favorite grades to teach. That one fleeting interaction stayed with me and became the focus of my scholarly work. Ten years later, and having since left the teaching profession altogether, in this essay I return to the question: Is teaching “too risky” for men in Australia?

This work aims at investigating gendered embodiment in fathering practices in a national context, Italy, where understandings of fatherhood, at the institutional as well as the individual level, are still more centered on the provider ideal than on a model of nurturing and caring fatherhood. This qualitative research on Italian first-time fathers of children under three years of age focused on men’s participation in routine, instrumental, and material childcare practices, exploring the potential for a transformation in both the meanings attached to fatherhood as well as to aspects related to embodiment and constructions of masculinity that sustain inequalities. The findings show that, while participation in hands-on childcare plays an important role in the construction of intimate father-child relationships, a legitimation of men’s bodies’ involvement in interaction with children is still missing, especially for care practices that overlap with constructions of motherhood.

This article explores the contradictions of the failed masculine stature of South Asian male migrants in Greece. Transnational migration provides low-class rural Indian and Pakistani men an opportunity to socially re-inscribe their adult breadwinner stature. It discusses relational hierarchies of masculinities that shape these men’s encounters with Greek employers, compatriots in Greece, and transnationally located families. Discriminatory state migration and labor regimes intersect with discourses of racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia to reinforce these racialized men’s sense of failed masculinity. Relative powerlessness to a range of local and co-ethnic men further emasculates them. Consequently, they adopt a series of compensatory strategies that include self-valorizing their masculinity relationally vis-à-vis co-ethnic males and Greek male workers. Strategically repositioning self as indispensable to the Greek nation and accentuating personal sacrifice for families notionally transforms them into mythic heroes. Notwithstanding, precarious migrant status in Greece renders hegemonic masculine stature elusive to them.

Globally, there is limited research exploring the positive role men play in reducing HIV vulnerability or in the care and support of women living with HIV. This paper draws on interviews conducted with men and women in heterosexual HIV serodiscordant relationships as part of a longitudinal qualitative study exploring the social aspects of biomedicine among serodiscordant couples in two high HIV-burden areas in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Findings highlight that some HIV negative men in heterosexual relationships are resisting hegemonic masculine norms they see as harmful and are embracing caring masculine identities as they seek to support their HIV-positive wives. We suggest that understandings of masculinity in the context of the HIV epidemic in PNG should be broadened from simplistic discourses and representations of men as largely uncaring and violent to incorporate deeper understanding of how men can and are embracing caring masculinities.

Coined in late 20th-century men’s movements, “toxic masculinity” spread to therapeutic and social policy settings in the early 21st century. Since 2013, feminists began attributing misogyny, homophobia, and men’s violence to toxic masculinity. Around the same time, feminism enjoyed renewed popularization. While some feminist scholars use the concept, it is often left under-defined. I argue that talk of toxic masculinity provides an intriguing window into gender politics in any given context. However, feminists should not adopt toxic masculinity as an analytical concept. I consider the term’s origins, history, and usage, arguing that it appears in individualizing discourses that have historically targeted marginalized men. Thus, accusations of toxic masculinity often work to maintain gender hierarchies and individualize responsibility for gender inequalities to certain bad men.