This is my first post, and I had lofty
ideas of kick starting this blog with an amazing offering --- like a brilliant
opening chapter of a book. Well, as I waited for the perfect idea to come by, I
realized that time, and with it, motivation, was also going by. Inspiration is at no one’s command. Starting something is not easy. I always tell
my students --- do not to worry about that first sentence and just plunge into
your thoughts; just grasp thoughts in your hands while they are still babies,
or else they may slip away, and quickly put them into words. So that is what I am doing --- plunging into
my blog, putting words to a range of thoughts that have jumped into my mind
from listening to an author, whose novel, Americanah,
I am reading at this point of time.
The Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie is one of my favourite writers as well as one of my favourite speakers.
I use her Ted Talk, The Danger of a
Single Story, in my classes and workshops. Her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, is remarkable! While I read a book, I have
this habit of looking up things that I get curious about, or want further
information on. For example, as I read about Nigerian food in Half of a Yellow Sun,
I had to look up the recipe for jollof
rice, a classic West African dish. As
I am reading about hair braiding in Americanah,
I had to look up pictures of cornrows verses regular braids. That’s just me,
and of course, the internet makes it so easy to satisfy my curiosity! Anyway,
true to form, I had to look up talks by Adichie as I read her book, just in
case there are any new ones. In the
process, I ended up re-listening to her Ted Talk We Should All Be Feminists. Mind you, though I teach feminism in my
sociology classes, and do get annoyed when women are put down by men, I am not
a 'militant' feminist. My ideas of
male-female relations are more complementary rather than confrontational. That
is what I like about Adichie’s talk --- she urges us to also look at the other
side of the story, to what boys and men go through in maintaining gender
expectations. In her words, “we define masculinity in a very narrow way,
masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We
teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of
vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves ….”.
I am going to bring in a bit of sociology
here, and please, dear reader, do not switch off. The purpose behind this blog
is to bring out connections between ideas emerging from anthropology,
sociology, psychology, history, political theory, or even a combination of
these into everyday conversation. As a social scientist, I have always felt
very strongly that though our work comes out of studying lay people, once our
writings get into the realms of academia, they become too complex. They become
inaccessible to those very people who helped formulate our ideas and theories.
One purpose of this blog is to bring these ideas into mainstream thinking --- to
help link things that we social scientists teach, study and research about,
with everyday life and behaviour. That
is what being a critical thinker is all about --- appreciating and making
associations between diverse perspectives. So please feel free to make connections with
your own experiences and articulate them through your comments.
Okay, so back to masculinity. Ideals of
male behaviour are so ingrained in society that we start taking them for
granted; they are also almost universal. Sociologist Raewyn Connell suggests
that there is not one, but many masculinities that men can be categorized into.
The first in this hierarchy is what she calls hegemonic masculinity --- the
dominant form of masculinity in society as a whole. Leading capitalists, macho film
stars, prominent sportsmen--- anyone who gets looked up to as an ideal man
would fall into this theoretical category.
Barak Obama would fit into this very well as would Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg. In the Indian context, mythological
heroes like Yudhisthir, Arjun, Ram, Krishna, could fall into this category. Amitabh
Bachchan, Rahul Dravid, Narayan Murthy, the list goes on.
At the other end of the spectrum is what
Connell calls subordinated masculinity --- those at the bottom of the
hierarchy. Homosexual men, men seen as ‘mama’s boys’, men called sissys ---
these are men seen to be closest to women and hence often also discriminated
against and laughed at.
Most men however fall somewhere between these two categories. Connell
calls this complicit masculinity --- most men do not reach the ideal status of hegemonic
masculinity, but are complicit because they gain from the structures, customs
and practices of male dominance existing in society. Just being male gives them
advantages, so they accept these as social norms without questioning. Society
sees the wife as being responsible to put meals on the family table. Therefore, immediately after reaching home, a
working mother has to see to the cooking, supervising the household help,
attend to the children’s’ needs and so on, while the man can come home, put up
his feet and watch television. It does not occur to most men to question why
they get to sit and relax after a long day at work while their wife, who has
had an equally long day, is getting the household organized, supervising the
children’s homework, and so on. It is to their advantage to maintain the
societal status quo, in maintaining this as the normal way to be. Men don’t go about consciously conspiring
against women. It is just that they do not see the need to question these
societal norms, which makes them kings within their own worlds.
Though complicit masculinity seems to be
the ideal place to be, Adichi and others have pointed out that it often puts a
lot of pressure on boys and men to keep up the with the masculine ideal. For example, being a woman, I always had a
choice whether I wanted to work or not. If I had decided not to work, and just
be a housewife, enjoying my husband’s income, society would not have had any
problems. However, if my husband had decided to stay at home and become a
‘house-husband’ while I worked, eye-brows would have been raised. I do know
several men who, given the chance, would have loved to be at home, cook,
organize things around the house, be a part of each moment of their babies’
lives ---. If this sounds strange, it is probably because men have learned to
mask, disguise and hide these sides of themselves --- just as women have
learned to hide their ‘macho’ side.
Years ago, one of my students, a boy of
class 11, decided to take aerobics for Physical Education (PE), instead of
football. Though there was a choice between aerobics and football, there was an
unspoken acceptance among students that football was for the boys and aerobics
for the girls. The school never encouraged such a division --- it was the
students who just drifted into their choices based on what their peers did,
which was very based on their gender. Until this brave boy decided to change
this tacit division. Though he was openly taunted by both boys and girls, he
was strong enough to take it in his stride, even decided to enjoy the situation.
So much so that at his urging, we had an open discussion among his classmates
on gender stereotypes, where he defended his choice and stood his ground.
Not all boys, however, are that valiant. I
had another student, who, though very good at academics, would not devote
enough time to his studies. He was into sports, music, spending hours hanging
out with friends --- a typical teenage boy.
Studying too much was what girls did, and wimps; it was not ‘cool’. He
was not a hegemonic male --- though he played sports, he was not the sport icon
of the school; though he was good looking, he was not the class ‘hot guy’ among
girls. He was a regular boy, complicity falling into and embracing all the attributes
that society conferred on boys and men. I kept telling him to put in more time
into studying, that it pained me to see such an intelligent mind like his going
waste, especially since the board exams were around the corner. One day, I was pleasantly surprised to see him
quietly studying in a corner of the library. When I walked up to him and
congratulated him on turning a new leaf, he asked me not to tell his friends where
he was, if they asked me if I had seen him. “I don’t want to jeopardize my
image”, he said. We laughed about it, and I sat down in a nearby table to do my
own work. A little later, his friends did find him there. “What are you doing,
man?! Studying?!” I was of course pretending to read, but shamelessly eavesdropping.
His immediate response was that he had several assignments that he had not turned
in, and hence needed to complete them. I was stumped --- I know that all his
assignments had been turned in! The friends told him to hurry up and finish and
not linger over them. They saw me sitting nearby and assumed that their friend had
no choice --- he was not there out of his free will, but was coerced by me into
finishing his assignments. And he kept
up the pretence. After they were gone, we both looked at each other and he gave
me a sheepish smile. Since he was a
sociology student, and since I cannot let go of a teaching moment, we had a chat about it later.
I brought in complicit masculinity, which was a topic we were doing in
class anyway. He agreed that he was complicit. He did not want to be ridiculed by
others, did not want to be a 'nerd' and hence, ‘uncool’. But his thought provoking comment stayed
with me. “It is easy being complicit” he
said, “and a lot more difficult going against the grain and against popular
expectations people have about you, especially your peers.” Though the situation saddened me, the teacher in me, however, rejoiced. No amount of textbook reading would have given my student such an insight into life! And over the years, I did see him occasionally stand up to his peers.
I have given two examples of two teenage
boys, one who broke away from social expectations and did aerobics ---
something girls do, something closer to subordinated masculinity. But this first
boy was in some ways, always different --- quiet, fond of books, a philosopher.
So perhaps it was easier for him to break away. The second boy, however, was very much a typical boy, a ‘cool dude’.
He had bought into the existing societal value system, which we all unconsciously
do in some form or another, and felt the need to keep it up, even to the detriment
of his studies. It is in the category of this second boy that most boys fall
into and unconsciously learn to keep up with expectations, whatever those expectations may be at that point of time. Over the years, they
too start seeing these expectations as the normal way to be, just as my students saw playing basket ball 'normal' for boys and aerobics for girls.
In her talk, Adichie goes on to state that if
we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, a hundred years,
boys will no longer have the pressure of having to prove their masculinity. By
making them feel they have to be strong and hard (not wimpy and emotional), we
leave them with very fragile egos. And then we do a greater disservice to
girls, by raising them to cater to these fragile egos of men. We teach girls to
shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller --- they can have ambition, but
not too much. Perhaps many of us can relate to what she says.
Much more than a decade has passed since the
boy who chose aerobics finished school. He is a man of the world now; but whenever we
meet, we still joke about his ‘deviance’, its repercussions, and what it taught
all of us about how difficult it is, especially for boys to break the mould.
Girls have already broken the mould in many
aspects. But unless we encourage boys to
bravely break the mould too, we will continue doing them, and society as a
whole, a disservice.
