Under the Microscope/Prof William Reville: I was recently speaking to a feminist who is convinced that masculinity is socially constructed, i.e. it is formed and developed by social interactions This position features prominently in feminist publications.
I cannot accept this and I will outline evidence to the contrary today, largely informed by an article by John Archer in March's edition of the Psychologist.
If masculinity were largely a social construct, one would expect to see major differences between cultures that differ largely from each other. But, many studies show consistent features in masculinity across a wide variety of cultures. One study compared male and female characteristics across 27 countries in all parts of the world and found similar male attributes across the board.
Another study examined 186 societies from the ethnographic record and found a consistent pattern of division of labour between the sexes.
One common feature of manhood in different cultures is that the status requires a courageous act for its acquisition.
Even when societies abandon the widespread practice of initiation rites, these rites resurface in masculine subcultures such as the army, boarding school, and so on. Other common features of masculinity across a variety of cultures include the urge to dominate women, importance of sexual prowess, and avoidance of feminine ways.
Masculine honour is another trait that is widespread across different cultures. You have high masculine honour if you enjoy a reputation for effective violent retaliation if you or yours are interfered with. In modern society we have handed the right to engage in legitimate violence over to the state and we restrain ourselves from violence by moral codes and the rule of law. However, masculine honour is not far beneath the surface. We all remember the school playground, and in sectors of society where constraints are weak or absent, e.g. deprived inner city ghettos, masculine honour is all too evident.
It is postulated, credibly in my opinion, that masculine honour is a psychological adaptation that originated when herding societies began. In such circumstances where there was no effective rule of law, a man could lose all his wealth including his family through theft unless his reputation for vicious retaliation preceded him.
Masculine traits, including toughness, sexual prowess and avoidance of feminine attributes, were evolved to deal with a highly competitive social world. They can be viewed as default settings to which modern males revert when inhibitions such as rule of law, morality codes, education, and the regular company of women and children are absent.
Perhaps the clearest evidence that masculinity is not simply a social construct comes from studies that are biologically orientated. When young monkeys are presented with a selection of toys, some stereotypically male (e.g. a police car) and some stereotypically female (e.g. a doll), male monkeys spend more time with the "masculine" toys and female monkeys spend more time with the "female" toys, paralleling the behaviour of young humans.
Gender behaviour differences are also apparent in human infants before any notions of socially constructed gender could be present. Babies, aged about 36 hours, have been studied to see whether they prefer looking at human faces or at mobiles. Males looked at mobiles longer than at faces and females behaved vice-versa. Boys are generally more active than girls and prefer more active play from an early age.
Animal studies clearly show the masculinising or feminising behavioural effects of pre-natal exposure to male and female sex hormones. In the uterus of a pregnant mouse up to 12 foetuses are arranged side by side. Each has one or two neighbours depending on position in the womb and these can be either male or female.
Each foetus creates a hormonal gradient around itself, either of male or female sex hormone depending on the genetic sex of the foetus. These gradients affect their neighbours. Thus, a female foetus with a female on either side (0 M female) experiences slightly more female sex hormone than a female with a male on either side (2 M female). Later in life 2 M females are more aggressive than 0 M females and less attractive to males. Similarly, 2 M males are more aggressive than 0 M males.
And finally there are dramatic illustrations from real life history that masculinity is far more than a social construct, for example the Canadian boy who had his penis accidentally burned off in 1966 at the age of seven months when a circumcision procedure went wrong. Psychiatric advice counselled that his crotch should be surgically remodelled into an artificial vagina and that he should be raised as a girl. The generally prevailing theory at the time was that our sense of being male or female is primarily the result of environment, not genetics.
The boy was raised as a girl and nobody knew any different, except his parents. The case was a total failure. The boy always had an inner knowing about his gender identity and the whole affair had devastating psychological costs for him. Eventually his true gender identity was revealed to him and he is now living as an adult male, with a family of his own. The case is described by John Colapinto in As Nature Made Him (Quartet Books, 2000).