Men and the Outgrowths of Manliness
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/08/19
According to Dr. Nathan Heflick in Psychology Today, the concept of manliness comes with its consequences.
As he noted based on some of the research by experts at the University of Wisconson Madison, 117 students were studied to rate 19 of their emotions. They wanted to know the average woman’s and the average man’s emotion range and set of experiences. As it turns out, the men were more likely to feel anger, contempt, and pride.
The women were more likely to feel awe, disgust, distress, embarrassment, fear, guilt, happiness, love, sadness, shame, shyness, surprise, and sympathy. That is, the women had a predominantly wider palette of emotions to pluck from for relevant occasions. Both women and men felt jealousy and interest at the same rate.
As reported, “Now in a world where women are believed to experience both happiness and sadness more than men (along with most other emotions), it should come as no surprise really that men are in a strange position when it comes to mental health, and to expressing emotions more generally.”
Mne, on the other hand, the man who experiences a variety of the other emotions, especially those predominantly experienced by women, must run a risk of seeming or coming off atypical. Some sort of non-normal and anti-man.
“Psychologists Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson at the University of South Florida have developed the theory of ‘precarious manhood.’ This posits that masculinity is a fragile social status, that is—in their words—’hard fought and easily lost.’ Men must always be weary of coming across as unmanly, and to the extent that this status has been challenged, men will tend to act out in more stereotypically masculine ways,” the article explained.
That is, if a male feels as if his masculinity or manhood has been fundamentally challenged in some manner, then he feels the immediate need to display aggression, and often with more force than normal. When the men feel as though their masculinity is at risk, they will be more approving of negative treatment of the effeminate men – the stereotypical representations of it.
“Recent work headed by Kenneth Michniewicz, an assistant professor in psychology at Muhlenberg College (and well versed in old Nintendo culture—though he only dreams of executing a back brain kick in real life), tested how feminine and masculine men and women believe different mental illnesses to be,” the reportage stated, “Anti-social personality disorder, alcoholism, and drug addiction were found to be perceived as masculine, whereas depression, anxiety, and a variety of eating disorders were perceived as feminine. In a follow-up study, these researchers found that men imagined that they would be particularly distressed to have the feminine disorders, would be less likely to seek help for these disorders, and felt that these disorders would threaten their masculinity status.”
This points to masculinity as a fragile conceptualization – in both beliefs and behaviors. When a man acts in an aggressive way or hides tears, these men are trying to show that they are a real man. In the arena of manhood and masculinity, and mental health, it is important for us men to know this and be mindful as our mental health may be at risk if we are not mindful of the non-conscious substructure of our beliefs and actions.
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