Concordia University SOCI 276 / Gender and society Professor : Salinda Hess

Wednesday, March 12th, 2002

2ND TERM RESEARCH PAPER

The male status: some supposed advantages but a lot of constraints of which we are not aware

Tristan DENCHAUD # 4989236

Most people in our Western societies consider men to have a kind of privilege of being male. It is often dealt with the dominant man, implying that it is more comfortable to be a man, but actually, isnt it often more comfortable not to be dominant? This mental association between dominance and comfortable situation comes from our social individualist values, which always emphasize dominant positions, i.e. power in the public sphere and in private life, and all that can provide this power: prestige, often linked with money and wage, physical strength, etc. In this way, we like distinguishing winners/insiders, from losers/outsiders, then glorifying the first ones and ignoring (more or less openly) the others.

Moreover, happiness usually rests on two pillars: being comfortable mentally (in ones self-perception and in ones relationships with others) and being comfortable materially (money, decent house...), but the second pillar tends to be more emphasized by our values. It means that a rich person, living in a great apartment in the center of Manhattan, is supposed to be in a better situation than a middle-class wage-earner living in Laval! Whatever the way they live, whatever their personal situation the rich one may be divorced and live alone, being hated by others and hating himself, while the other one may have a comfortable life with his wife within a happy family we judge, without knowing their real situation, from an economic point of view, while, obviously, it is only one of the components of happiness (as defined earlier).

In addition to those two mental associations we make about society in its entirety, another association is made about men and women in particular: women are meant to be weak, innocent, soft, smiling, caring, etc., while men are strong, reliable, violent, insensitive, etc. Thus, both sexes have always lived in two different social frameworks, which have been more or less flexible depending especially on social categories,

age and conjugal situation, but for women, this framework has evolved, above all for the last thirty years, becoming more flexible, allowing more and more women to follow a mans fate... while men have stayed in a much more rigid harness, as Goldberg calls it.

But actually, on the one hand, men face most of the risks and hazards women face, but in different proportions sometimes less, sometimes more and second, they have to face a couple of situations women dont know in general, related to this everlasting dominant male status. Since any status, even a social informal status, includes rights and duties, men have hidden rights and duties within the society, which are different from womens, but which dont make their lives easier. In developed countries, men dont commit suicide four times more than women and dont have a life expectancy between five and ten years lower as womens because they are biologically fragile and they like taking risks.

First, most people are not aware that men live under so many constraints. How do they show theyre not aware of it, and why dont they realize it? Second, how does this male harness look like?

Part I. People are usually not aware that men live under specific constraints.

I.1/ How do they show they are not completely aware?

The survey1: I submitted a questionnaire on line to 20 persons living in France and Canada, including 13 men and 7 women, including 13 male and female students aged between 18 and 25, and including 3 gay males. My intention was to target people who are supposed to be at least a bit aware of the issue of gender relationships, being advanced students in human science for several of them, and/or simply being women (women appear
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See Annexe 1 (questionnaire) and Annexe 2 (detailed results) for more information

generally more conscious about gender issues). The results show the respondants perceive to a certain extent that men also have to cope with difficulties. Thus, the main answer emerging from the questions is: not necessarily. Indeed, the people I asked are aware a mans life is not a long peaceful river but they still consider, on the whole, men have normally an easier fate (6 ans.) than women, even if its not necessary (14 ans.), while admitting that private life can be more comfortable for women, few persons answering it is normally (2 ans.) or surely (1 ans.) easier to be a man in the private sphere.

Dominance is not always seen as providing a more comfortable life: 9 persons answered a middle-class wage-earner should be more comfortable in life than a CEO, and only 5 answered the contrary2. However, according to open questions, a CEO or any dominant status is still seen as the position of a winner (not opposed to losers but to normal people), showing that we tend to emphasize these winners even if we recognize they are maybe not as happy as we are. About power within public/private life, having power in the public sphere is considered more comfortable by 8 people (versus 6)3, while concerning the private life, it is thought that having power is not more comfortable at all (12 answers versus 2). Concerning the reasons that make a man a loser (the term loser couldnt be applied to women, since women are not usually expected to win, unlike men), the first answer was getting easily manipulated/being psychologically weak (16 ans. out of 19), followed by being dependent (9 ans.). When asked about what would make me ashamed, 6 out of the 13 men answer: to be considered unreliable, then 5 of them (including 2 gays!) answer: to be suspected of having homosexual tendencies, and 5 of them would be ashamed if they lost their job. But only one would be ashamed to be seen as

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Not necessarily answers are not counted here, considered neutral. Not necessarily answers are not counted here, considered neutral.

insensitive, while 2 of the 7 women feared the same. Thus, even among well-educated people, stereotypes and fears remain the same, even if they are less systematic than within the working class, for instance. Concerning the first question asked by relatives when one meets a man or a woman, as a friend or a fortiori as a (potential) partner, the most usual question are whats his/her profession? and what does he/she look like?. On the one hand, women generally ask the same question about men and women, either profession? or looks like?, while men are more interested in professional occupation for other men and in appearance for women: if it concerns a woman, 13 people would ask first how she looks like, while 5 would ask first what her profession is. For a man, 13 would ask first what his profession is, while 5 would ask first how he looks like. Nobody answered at the same time profession? for a woman and looks like for a man. It shows again men are rather judged by professional expectations, while women have to concentrate more on their own bodies.

I.2/ Why dont we realize it?

According to the results and to general assumptions, having a dominant status is considered more comfortable in the public sphere. Although it is not necessarily the same in the private life, because of our socio-economic point of view, a status which provides power is regarded as more comfortable for life in general. People seem to consider today a mans private life is neither more difficult nor easier than a womans private life, but most people remain convinced that, at work, it is much easier to be a man than a woman. But lets try now to regard it from another point of view: taking feelings and emotions, personal relationships, etc., into account, it is much more difficult to assert a males life goes easier than a females. In our Western societies, especially in countries like Canada or Northern Europe, I could even say a mans life is potentially more difficult, in average. Not materially, but in relationships,

feelings, emotions, etc. That is to say, the issues that are deeply important for a human being. Our eyes, used to seeing the world through money and material comfort, often see poor women and rich men, supposedly linked with submissive women and dominant men... It forgets all the cases in which some women actually dominate men, and above all it forgets that being supposedly better-off 4 in average doesnt mean at all that there is a global male dominance. It really works differently for a lot of men and women, and only a broad perspective, freed from those material blinders, can allow us to regard it differently.

Moreover, the recurrent stereotypes about women and men play a big role in our perceptions. Men being stronger, less sensitive, less emotional, etc., which is quite observable in male behaviours, since socialization perpetuates these ideas in womens as well as mens minds, they feel actually stronger, more self-confident, but rarely like males. If they are discriminated against, they feel it is because they were not good enough as individuals, while when a women experiences the same, feeling first as a women, she feels she was not chosen because she was a female. Men being unconsciously defined as the regular sex, their self-consciousness is much weaker than womens, who belong to the deuxime sexe described by Simone de Beauvoir. In a way, females have a self-consciousness which resembles the way minorities regard themselves, while men, especially in the public sphere, see themselves as a normal majority. Therefore, they are much more attentive to discrimination against themselves, and men are also pay much more attention to womens problems than to their own difficulties. For instance, in the survey, 3 women out of 7 answered they had experienced discrimination based on their sex, while only 2 of the 13 men answered the same (they were two of the three gay males). While conducting short interviews with male friends, when they were asked the general issue: have you ever been discriminated against because

supposedly better-off, because most of men and women living in a couple, they share a big part of their incomes : few men are reluctant to contribute more to the household finances than their wives if they receive a higher salary than her. According to a sizeable number of analyses, talking about mens and womens average wage can be interesting for some purposes, but doesnt show their respective (male and female) life standards, since only the concept of household income is really relevant.

you were a guy?, they all first answered: no, you kidding, that just happens to women!. Then, I asked them about precise situations, such as: have you never been told you couldnt rent this appartment because the owner only accepted girls?, have you never been told you had to pay $20, whereas it was free for girls?, have you never been told you couldnt work in this shop, because if was only for women, who are better to welcome customers, but try to apply in that factory, they have night jobs for young fit men like you5, or more informal situations, such as: have you never been told by girls, even if one of them was much stronger than you: hey, whos going to carry this big heavy stuff outside?... Ah, Mike, since youre a strong man, youll do it!, and each one had to think of it for a long time to admit finally that yes, they had often experienced discrimination based on sex. In the first three cases, men accept it because they think it is normal (a guy is much more messy and noisy than a girl6, and girls dont have to pay to enter many places because they are too few compared to guys; even on the web, it occurs more and more often, finally a girl is of course better to welcome customers because she can smile and be nice, not like guys, who are insensitive and potentially violent), in an informal case like the fourth one, men even dont realize at all their situation; they even find it good, because it allows them to show theyre strong real men! But a very simple way of making men and women aware of the importance of these cases is to reverse the roles: I regret but I only make this appartment available for boys, they are cleaner and more quiet, for boys its free, but as a girl youve to pay $20, Sorry, I dont hire girls for this good job, only boys, theyre better, or ah, Jenny, since youre a girl, youre gonna make our dinner! In these cases, discrimination is obvious! In the reverse case, it is considered normal by men as well as women. Thus, discussing, explaining, men can understand they also experience situations women undergo. But most of them still dont want to complain openly, because a man who complains with his fate is not a real man!
I personally experienced that kind of situation in 2001, while I was searching a job in offices (I wasnt interested at all in these male jobs, i.e. waking up at 5am to load 50kg boxes on trucks, etc.) 6 According to several landlords I could talk with, I was told boys werent more disturbing than girls, and some even say (I was surprised, for Im also under the effect of stereotypes) some boys were quieter !
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II. What does the male harness look like?

Thus, what is to be a real man, and why dont most men dare to challenge these unwritten rules?

II.1. The male harness7

For Professor Goldberg, the harness in which a male lives has kept him out of touch with his emotions and his body. In the first chapter, he gives an example of a man who, like most of men, wasnt aware he was under such pressure: Most men live in harness. Richard was one of them. Typically he had no awareness of how his male harness was choking him until his personal and professional life and his body had nearly fallen apart. Men have to be strong (to be like a sturdy oak) and to assume all that it implies: they have to take risks, not to show emotions and any kind of weakness, etc. As Warren Farrell8 says, men are not human beings, they are human doings; then he presents how men take almost all the risks that have to be taken in our societies: when The Jobs Rated Almanac ranked 250 jobs from best to worst based on a combination of salary, stress, work environment, outlook, security, and physical demands, they found that twenty-four of the twenty-five worst jobs were almost-all-male jobs. And of course, men are often encouraged to do these male jobs, since, as the survey showed, profession is still an important criteria to define a man, and male professions are usually more encouraged than female professions, and when a profession becomes more feminine, it is sometimes said to young men well, you shouldnt do that job, you know, even girls can do

The term harness was first used by Herb Goldberg in his book The Hazard of Being Male (1976). Warren Farrell belongs to the Board of the National Organization for Women (NYC) and is the author of 4 famous books about men including the one I used (cf. references).
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that now... Farrell also deals with war9, and how men are ecouraged to kill other men to defend their country, more broadly to defend their society, their civilization, and of course their wives and children. From a personal point of view, I find it shocking that, when it is dealt with war in Iraq, many male and female journalists talk about women and children who could be killed, as if mens deaths werent as important. In these assumptions, they simply put women at the same level as kids, i.e. women are, once again, supposed to be innocent and fragile, while men (they would have sought that war!?), who are born to make war, i.e. to kill or to be potentially killed, can die quietly: they serve their country! These assumptions are sexist against women and men at the same time, implying that women are innocent and uncapable to think of bad intentions, and that men are violent and seek confrontation and war. The same sexist point of view can be concretely harmful to men when there is any catastrophe: women and children first! (implying: men can die, women are more important, since men cant take care of children and cant live without women.)

Concerning males dependency on women, Herb Goldberg, in his chapter Earth Mother Is Dead, describes how men are emotionally dependent on women, which would explain in a large part why widowers commit suicide much more than widows. In The Manipulated Man10, Esther Vilar explains how, according to her, men have beein trained and conditioned by women, not unlike the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs, into becoming their slaves. Vilars point of view is, of course, quite extreme, but it is however very interesting for it provides a very different way (from the usual one) of thinking relationships between women and men. Are men trained and conditioned to live in a dependency on women? It could be true, but certainly not intentionally.
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War Hero or War Slave : the Armed Prostitute . The book was published in 1972, therefore it has to be taken with much caution, for she bases that conception of slavery on the fact that men work outside while women stay at home.
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In any case, why dont most men dare to challenge the unwritten rules that maintain them under a subjugation towards women, maybe, but more certainly towards society in its entirety?

II.2. How males are led not to try to escape from these constraining forces?

Males who dont follow the rules, that I would define as atypical males, are regarded as not real men, bad fathers, bad husbands, etc. Unconsciously, a strong social pressure is put on men so that they respect the social informal conventions that enclose them in defined roles, while atypical women are regarded by most of us as modern women, liberated women, etc.

Usually, males who challenge the rules are considered losers. Thus, as the survey shows, a man who is dependent, either psychologically or materially, on someone else (his wife, in particular), is considered a loser. The same thing occurs for men who are unemployed and stay at home: they are seen by most people as losers and lazy guys, while a woman in the same case is considered hardworking, since she cares for children or at least the household (of course, unemployed men dont pay attention to their households and children and keep watching TV all the day!). A small or a not very sportive man or boy usually suffers the same outlook: at school, not sportive boys are generally considered gays, in the best case, or fags, wimps, or any type of degrading words like those ones. Gays (the real ones, this time!) often endure the same kind of response: you gay, youre not a real guy, since you desire guys That means each boy or man who dont respect the standards of the real man, heterosexual, sportive, independent, courageous, active, etc. is a loser. He loses his dominant status. That split between the winners 9

and the losers, or between the normal ones and the outsiders, occurs with every supposed dominant status: when you cant maintain your status, you fall down in the lower one. But, as we saw, the dominant male status is only hypothetical, and is not always true. Moreover, women talk of losers as well as men (although a women couldnt be characterized as a loser, for she isnt meant to win like men), and they contribute widely to the bad image atypical males have of themselves.

As Farrell wrote, women are not the only victims of this supposedly patriarchal system, men are the victims too, within a system that is both matriarchal and patriarchal, and they share it with women in quite an equal proportion. But women as victims are much more visible, since they are not afraid to show how they suffer of sexist behaviours, while men are still either unaware or scared at the idea of confessing they have already been discriminated against, deliberately or not. To analyse it through extreme cases, there are the battered males, or the males who have experienced sexual assault. The taboo remains very strong. It is demonstrated by some studies that they exist in a sizeable proportion, but that only very few of them dared to declare it, why women had less fears to say it, once again because the image of the independent dominant guy (who cant be seriously hit by a woman, since women are weak, and who cant be victims of sexual assault, simply since theyre not women), opposed to the dependent devoted woman (a female is usually seen as a potential victim by both men and women), is omnipresent. Dominance is emphasized in our societies, therefore, the image of dominant males make most of us consider a guys life is more comfortable than a womans life. I dont know any other group of people whose members, in addition to being less educated, commit suicide 4 times more and die 7 years earlier in average, which is considered more powerful, or even happier than others. As Farrell explains, a lower life expectancy and a higher suicide rate inside a group usually shows a lack of power compared to the rest of the society. 10

References

Mens Lives (handbook) Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power, New York: Berkley Books, 1993 Herb Goldberg, The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege, New York: Nash Publishing, 1976

Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972 Violence Conjugale, statistiques 1997, Gouvernement du Qubec. Gillian C. Mezey, Michael B. King, Male Victims of Sexual Assault, Oxford Medical Publications, 2000

Next pages

ANNEXE 1: Questionnaire (submitted on line) ANNEXE 2: Table of data collected through the questionnaire (answers)

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