Hypermasculinity

Abstract: In feminist sociocultural models of rape, extreme adherence to the masculine gender role is implicated in the perpetuation of sexual assault against women in that it encourages men to be dominant and aggressive, and it teaches that women are inferior to men and are sometimes worthy of victimization. Many researchers have linked components of masculine ideology to self-reports of past sexual aggression or future likelihood to rape. Thirty-nine effect sizes were examined in this meta-analysis across 11 different measures of masculine ideology to determine how strongly each index of masculine ideology was associated with sexual aggression. Although 10 of the 11 effect sizes were statistically significant, the 2 largest effects were for Malamuth's construct of “hostile masculinity” (e.g., Malamuth, Sockloskie, Koss, & Tanaka, 1991) and Mosher's construct of “hypermasculinity” (e.g., Mosher & Sirkin, 1984), both of which measure multiple components of masculine ideology including acceptance of aggression against women and negative, hostile beliefs about women. The next strongest relationships concerned measures of agreement that men are dominant over women and measures of hostility toward women. Scores on general measures of gender-role adherence, such as the Bem Sex Role Inventory (Bem, 1974), were not strong predictors of sexual aggression. Sociocultural models that link patriarchal masculine id eology and situational factors to sexual aggression should prove most predictive in future research.

Abstract: Black churches in the USA constitute a significant source of the homophobia that pervades black communities. This theologically-driven homophobia is reinforced by the anti-homosexual rhetoric of black nationalism. Drawing on a variety of sources, this paper discusses the sources of homophobia within black communities, and its impact upon self-esteem, social relationships and physical health. Religion-based homophobia and black nationalism point to wider structures which have influenced their emergence, including racism, patriarchy and capitalism. It is vital for US black churches and communities to understand and transcend their longstanding resistance to openly addressing complex, painful issues of sexuality and embrace healthier definitions of black manhood.

Abstract: As video games have attracted more critical attention and theoretical discourse and games play a more visible part in our media landscape, the modern video game community impacts the wider world of...

Abstract: This review will survey some of the most important historical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British masculinity which have appeared in the last decade. It endorses John Tosh's insistence that it is necessary to move beyond the homosocial environments and explicit ideologies of ‘manliness’ studied by those historians who, in the 1980s, first sought a gendered history of men in modern Britain. However, it also warns that a commendable desire to ensure that men's identities are located in relationship to women, children, and the home must be accompanied by a degree of scepticism towards unproblematic narratives of male domestication. Men constantly travelled back and forth across the frontier of domesticity, if only in the realm of imagination, attracted by the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, but also enchanted by various escapist fantasies (especially the adventure story or war film) which celebrated militaristic hypermasculinity and male bonding. This commentary also insists that, in order to enrich our understanding of male domesticity, existing studies of middle-class men will have to be supplemented by further research on aristocratic and working-class masculinities, and that national, ethnic, and racial differences also need to be more fully registered.