Masculinity crisis

Listen up, all men living in Indianapolis.

You’re all very manly. That’s not a subjective observation, but rather a statement of fact – and I have a study to prove it.

Bert Sperling, the man behind the popular “Best Places to Live” surveys, has devised a ranking of the top 50 manliest cities in America, and Indianapolis finished in the top 10, a very impressive feat.

In case you were wondering, the manliest men hailed from Nashville. Cities were even docked points for being too “emasculating” and, to no one’s surprise, San Francisco and New York came in dead last.

Before you dismiss these rankings as being wholly unscientific or perhaps even offensive to the male population, I offer the methodology used to effectively categorize masculinity. Surveyors determined, among other things, the number of sporting teams and events, “manly lifestyles” including membership in motorcycle ownership groups, and the concentration of hardware stores to rate cities.

Let’s ignore for a minute the totally arbitrary nature of these categories – it’s too obvious a criticism. What, then, does it say about the state of American masculinity if we can reduce it to such tired stereotypes? Moreover, if we do indeed have such low and rigid expectations for men, why aren’t more people outraged? After all, we can rest assured that a survey purporting to determine the most feminine cities would attract the ire of feminists.

Certainly this has been one of the failings of the feminist movement. While a number of gender studies classes focus on the effect that sexism has on women, little time is devoted to studying its effects on men. This despite the fact that men are victims of a culture that infantilizes them and reduces them to one of two caricatures: the beer guzzling and intellectually deficient Homer Simpson or the slacker with grade-school humor, as depicted in every (awful) Seth Rogen film.

The trouble here is that men are receiving extremely restrictive messages about their masculinity. On one hand, they are told by liberal feminists that their status as heterosexual males affords them privilege and dominance over women, even if this may not be the case. At the same time, men are socialized to equate emotions with weakness and, consequently, femininity. Two men can’t even share an emotionally significant relationship without a cutesy label like “bromance” attached to it.

It becomes apparent that gender policing isn’t just a man-on-man thing. Women routinely punish members of the opposite sex for pushing the boundaries of gender constructs and embracing characteristics that are traditionally “feminine.” A friend of mine, for instance, once broke up with a guy for crying “too loudly” during movies.

To be sure, I am not arguing for men to band together and create an activist movement; the problem isn’t so much institutional as interpersonal. Still, we have to recognize that harboring narrow stereotypes about men hurts their true potential and self-worth.

And while we’re at it, yes, real men do cry.