Some academics prefer to explain gender with reference to power relations. Sigmund Freud's theories have been influential here, in using "masculine" and "feminine" as metaphors for "active" and "passive"; Freud argued that the male infant, to achieve masculinity, had to abandon his early identification with his mother and, by extension, had to sever identification with females and their femininity. These notions explain, for some psychologists and anthropologists, the male dread of passivity and energetic denial of narcissism (pleasure in one's appearance) and exhibitionism (pleasure in being looked at with desire), since these are culturally feminine positions. Other academics would not draw such a definite line of demarcation between masculinity and femininity. They would argue that one way of retaining male privilege is by incorporating a measure of the feminine into the concept of and acting out of masculinity.
The Marxist intellectual and activist Antonio Gramsci used the term hegemony to describe the condition in which beliefs that he discerned as embedded in religious doctrine and mass media content are taken to be self-evidently normal and natural. On this foundation, hegemonic masculinity was so named by R. W. Connell in 1987 to label sets of assumptions about masculinity that pass as common sense and thus cannot be effectively challenged at a popular level. Hegemonic masculinity may be best understood not as a monolith but as an ideal that shifts to accommodate changes in society. This helps to explain the social plurality of masculinities (the various inflections of masculinity affected by class, sexuality, ethnicity, for example), sometimes in competition with each other (machismo vs. "New Man" sensitivity, say) at the same time as popular belief in traditional masculinity remains.
Cults of the physical can be traced from ancient Greece and China and more recently from the early-nineteenth-century Prussian fitness cult. At the turn of the twentieth century, photographs of male nudes were usually stylized in a way that recalled Greco-Roman or Renaissance art, classical art's tradition of nudity providing a cover for prurient display of the subject matter. The strongman was later popularized in shows and photographic artifacts before films largely took over this display. In the United States, Eugene Sandow was exhibited in Chicago as the "perfect man" at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Thanks to photography, his strongman poses reached a wider public in the form of cigarette cards and illustrated tin-plate, and his image was exploited to promote a brand of beer. In the McCarthyite 1940s and 1950s the male body was permitted to be displayed in such magazines as Physique Pictorial under the guise of the promotion of fitness and athleticism, although some have associated such imagery with homoeroticism.
An obvious tension exists between the masculinity of the strongman's physique and the potentially erotic display of it, for example, in comic book renderings of Superman, Batman, and many others. The superheroes of comic books and of the 1980s movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone demonstrate not only superhuman strength but lethal aggression in a different sort of rule-bound area, the fantasy of the action genre. Perhaps the violence associated with the near-naked muscled stars of the screen and comics is an attempt to ward off uncomfortable imputations of eroticism.
Media portrayals of masculinity offer a range of types: the most potent images of the contemporary ideal appear in certain beer and automobile commercials. Beer is best sold, it would appear, in the atmosphere of all-male heterosexual bonding that downplays family ties and that celebrates good-natured competitiveness. Today's advertising usually gives consumers the choice of taking machismo as natural or as a joke. The male of advertising is more likely in the past decade to be a sex object or ridiculed for his incompetence than lauded for his strength or individualism. The hugely popular Simpsons television show blatantly questions maleness in Homer Simpson's incompetence and cowardice.
Strength and aggression are especially associated with sports, which are bounded by rules so that, to a large extent, the aggression of players and vicariously of spectators is given the legitimacy of such traditional masculine values as competitiveness, discipline, strength, aggression, optimism, camaraderie, and also individualism. Televised sports' obsession with the male body is visible in such devices as slow motion and repetitions of key moments, techniques that underline the fantasy element of its depiction of masculinity. Fantasies of masculinity are visible as well in the commercials during sports TV, which promise that masculinity can be acquired with the purchase of sporting equipment.
Hollywood depictions of masculinity mirror the spectrum of attitudes in contemporary America: Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies maintain a link between masculine identity and the male body as a site of control and power, while sports movies suggest nostalgia for an imagined Golden Age of traditional masculinity. The movies also find a place for masculinity as troubled and problematic, from the father-son angst of Ordinary People (1980) to the turmoil of Mystic River (2003).
Film and the Construction of Identity
Literature and the Construction of Identity
Religion and Religious Movements
American Masculinities Project
American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia
American Men�s Studies Association
Society for the Psychological Study of Men & Masculinity
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Masculinity" (by Kenneth MacKinnon), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=723 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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