The Journal of Men’s Studies

A 12-item inventory designed to assess mild, moderate, and severe forms of sexual coercion was administered to an ethnically diverse sample of 182 college men at California State University, Long Beach. Results reveal that 70% of subjects reported experiencing some form of sexual coercion within the past five years. Mild and moderate forms of sexual coercion were most commonly experienced. Younger men were somewhat more likely than older men to report being sexually coerced. An ethnic difference in response was found on one item.

Conflicts between career and family are commonly assumed, in social science and popular culture, to be women's problems. Recognition that men might have similar problems has been slower in coming, perhaps because we assume that the superior power men often have in domestic and work situations can resolve or mitigate them. John Ford's 1950 Western Rio Grande presents a male-role conflict that neither institutional power nor violent physical action can resolve. The struggle must be waged within rigid institutional constraints, a pattern commonly seen in 1950s melodrama and soap opera. These films gave us a preview of the Women's Movement of the 1960s. This article investigates the film Rio Grande qua male soap opera as a possible preview of men's concerns.

This paper describes three poets, Robert Bly, Ice Cube, and Etheridge Knight, and their poetic representations of masculinity. Their works are examined using the theoretical frame of “loudness.” Each poet's work exemplifies both a positive quality associated with loudness as well as a dangerous “silence” masked by their respective loudness.

Recently, both the popular and academic press have shown increasing interest in American fathers, portraying them as simply additive to their children's well-being. In other words, if men enact their role as social fathers (i.e., providers) then there is a net social gain for the community. Earlier surveys found that, in the majority community, men have a shared motivational hierarchy that helps determine whether they will enter into and remain in the father role. Women, in the majority community, are accurate in their perception of this hierarchical profile. In relation to fathering incentives, the present study examines the relative congruence between men from the majority community and men and women from two minority communities, namely, Chinese-American and African-American men. The relative consonance of women's perceptions with the men's divulgences is also surveyed.

The practice of routine medical circumcision of newborn male infants remains the norm in the United States, occurring to more than one million baby boys annually. This article examines the history and continuing debate surrounding this surgery, and places it within the context of gender identity. The rise of the activist anti-circumcision movement is described, as medical, moral, psychological, and legal issues surrounding this controversy are identified. The continuing practice of male circumcision is framed as an abusive wounding of males, which holds lifelong implications. A differentiation is made between the conventional medical amputation of the foreskin, from that which is solely ritual, religious-based. Further, a societal double standard is noted between the moral outcry against female circumcision and the relative silence toward male circumcision.

Two short stories from Working Men by the American fiction writer Michael Dorris enact romantic heterosexual relationships in which a woman becomes the mentor who helps carry a man stuck in delayed adolescence into initiated manhood. Dorris's stories update and make accessible the mythical and magical elements that Robert Bly has described in his Iron John as being able to renew a man stuck in his boyhood woundedness. Where Bly discusses the female mentor for men in terms of “meeting the god woman” and the wild woman guarding a sacred pond, Dorris fleshes out his female guides in the form of what Bly calls “instigating wom[en],” contemporary women who possess a certain wisdom. These women play a life-transforming role in establishing a more mature, differentiated identity in men.

For the last quarter of a century, American academics and literati have assumed that the traditional father figure was supernumerary and rather optional. This perspective viewed a child's life-space trajectory as little perturbed if a father was present or not. The present paper argues against this assumption. Available evidence clearly indicates that fathers do enhance their children's well-being. The problems aligned with fatherlessness are analyzed, and modest proposals are proffered to re-establish fathering as central to a child's growth and development within American society.