Trying to be Objective, Striving to be Fair...

Andreas G. Philaretou and Katherine R. Allen together wrote an article for the April 30th, 2001 issue of the Journal of Men's Studies, entitled "Reconstructing Masculinity," from which I quote the beginning of the authors' Summary: 

"This paper attempts to synthesize general issues pertaining to masculinity and male sexuality using essentialist and postmodern theoretical ideologies.  According to essentialist ideologies, the construction of male gender requires one's molding into a masculine role, which presupposes autonomy, competition, and aggressiveness, and the suppression of the innate human needs for connectedness, intimacy, and self-disclosure, which have been traditionally devalued as feminine traits...."  Our gentle authors then go on to postulate what they call the "alternative" postmodern ideology, which would entail the deconstruction of those "essentialist notions of male sexuality" and the "reconstruction of a more balanced androgynous ideology drawing from the historical, social, and cultural determinants of sexuality...."  They do go on, saying sillier and sillier things, derived apparently from the then still flourishing idiocies of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault of course; but let us stop here and consider what our authors have so-far achieved in the way of Fairness and Balance.  Beginning with the statement, "According to essentialist ideologies"--might it not have been appropriate to say here which "essentialist ideologies"? or to say, "generally speaking"?  Then the kicker, anyway, according to those essentialist ideologies (whosoever's they may be) "the construction of male gender requires one's molding into a masculine role...."  Just a fucking minute.  (1)  Only in the imaginations of women and the unmanly do essentialist ideologies hold that "male gender is a construction," or that it "requires molding into a masculine role."  That's a lot of horseshit in a little space.  In fact, essentialists believe--or, more precisely, intuit--that male gender is a given, not a construction.  And there is (2) no "molding into" (with connotations of force and coercion) a masculine role, but rather the spontaneous and effortless adoption of masculine roles as the natural consequence and expression of our innate masculinity which is coterminous with our biologically determined male gender.  That said, our gentle authors have a gratuitously inhuman, nasty and weird notion of what an essential masculine role "presupposes."  "Autonomy"--all right, though I think (maybe with just a smidgen of insincere chivalry) it's more of a human thing than specifically masculine.   But "competition, and aggressiveness, and the suppression [?] of innate [Who's the essentialist?] human needs for connectedness[?], intimacy, and self-disclosure [!?]"!?   What the fuck are "competition and aggressiveness"?  They sound like bad manners to me.  And the funny little list of "innate human needs," which sounds more like "ethics for immodest parasites," would certainly give women a bad name ("de-value" them) if those were their characteristic "needs."   But enough already. 

If you dig back through today's blog, you'll see that I've pretty well outlined what I believe to be the the correct essentialist view of men and masculinity--but almost, as it were, in silhouette, and, once again, by demonstrating that what men are, and the masculinity that informs and animates them, is inconceivable to women and unmanly men.