Crossing into Manhood: A Men’s Studies Curriculum
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Crossing into Manhood: A Men’s Studies Curriculum By Christopher ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction
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Pleck’s view was that the Masculine Sex Role Identity (MSRI) paradigm has dominated the scientific and popular conceptions of sex roles since the 1930s and has been taken for granted. His sex role strain paradigm asserts that modern gender roles are contradictory and inconsistent and that there is no unifying structure for a monolithic gender role identity. In fact, pressuring males into a stereotypical male identity invites dysfunctionality and other psychological consequences. “The MSRI paradigm has helped to generate sex role strain,” Pleck concluded (p. 160). He wrote,

The concept of sex role identity prevents individuals who violate the traditional role for their sex from challenging it; instead, they feel personally inadequate and insecure—the subjective experience of sex role strain. The deeper the experience of the MSRI paradigm in the culture, the more widespread the experience of strain. Through this process the MSRI paradigm paradoxically sowed the seeds of its own demise. As sex role strain continued to build, the women’s and men’s liberation movements arose in response, providing individuals a way of understanding the strain they experience, analyzing its sources, and reducing it. (p. 160)

The Myth of Masculinity sounded the clarion call for the reexamination of masculine gender roles in every aspect of male life and identity. The unexamined ideology of patriarchal masculinity that defined men, as well as women and the institutions that nurtured them, came under attack by the scholars of the feminist movement (Kimmel and Messner, 2004).

By the 1970s, there had been a tremendous growth in women’s studies programs, advocating a new model for the study of gender and rejecting the traditional assumption that masculinity was the norm by which both males and females were measured (Kimmel and Messner, 2004). Against this backdrop, the so-called “men’s movement” emerged. Just as women began questioning their gender stereotyping, men started asking similar questions about masculine stereotypes. Erving Goffman (1963) made the following observation about an overarching, monolithic American male gender ideal:

In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports.