Manhood in Media

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But there is only a minuscule sliver of that library that has anything about the experience of masculinity and maleness. And just like people who think they speak with no accent because that’s what’s “normal,” many men and women are unable to see the degree to which their beliefs and perceptions are shaped by their unthinking adoption of “normal” male gender roles. We have such an iconic, closed view of what men are supposed to be that people say, “Be a man,’’ without thinking they need to consider what that means. No one would say, “Be a woman,” and assume the same universal understanding of what a woman is supposed to be. Women have more latitude to be androgynous in our culture; they can step outside traditional female roles and not lose their femininity — and that’s a good thing. We don’t think Hillary Rodham Clinton less feminine for pursuing the presidency. But we wouldn’t have the same feeling about Bill Clinton’s masculinity if he were to pursue the traditional role of First Lady – decorating the White House, say. In many ways, masculinity remains a very tight box.

At Stanford, I couldn’t approach the matter directly; I had to come at angles. I took courses on the sociology of gender and a class at the Graduate School of Business on how women’s entry into the labor force was changing the workplace. I studied gay history and women’s history. I studied the psycho-social development of boys, and I created independent study topics to try to get at how society and the media build our ideas of maleness. In a project I did for a women’s history course, I catalogued every issue of Esquire, between 1950 and 1955, when it was the quintessential men’s magazine, analyzing the stories and cartoons to see how they constructed maleness in that most “normal” of decades. It was striking how many of the cartoons (about 70 percent of the several hundred cartoons I analyzed) were about gender; there were virtually 		 
  "Did you have a tough day at the office, dear?" asks the wife, while the secretary asks, "Did you have a tough night at home, dear?" in this cartoon from Esquire's January 1955 issue. Neither of the separate spheres of a 1950s man’s home or work lives are models of honesty or intimacy.
none about sports, friendship, growing up, politics, or growing old, all things one might think were central elements of men’s lives. In the cartoons, you didn’t see men happy; you saw them mechanically fulfilling roles – breadwinner, husband and father, as if masculinity was more about the suit of clothes than the life within. While the pages of Esquire in that most marriage-centric decade were crammed with cartoons of couples getting married, there was not a single cartoon showing a happy man at the altar. You might as well have expected a cartoon of a happy Communist. And the Cold War language of Communist “contagion” echoed in stories and cartoons about the anti-male: in the “contamination” of homosexuality. It was a striking lesson to me about how men could have power but not freedom. The exemplary outward role of husband and dad was a mockery of the inner sadness and loneliness many men secretly felt.

Gender roles continue to morph in our society, and this is one story the media should cover better. In a course at Stanford’s elite Graduate School of Business, it was remarkable the degree to which a group of young women – who will no doubt be some of the most powerful and influential people in America two decades hence – felt the weight of old gender roles. Early in the course, the professor asked for a show of hands in the predominantly female classroom of those who considered themselves feminists. Perhaps half raised their hands. Feminism was an anachronism, they argued. You didn’t need it anymore. Later, the professor asked the class how many had thought about freezing their eggs in order to delay parenthood until after the critical career-building years of the late 20s and early 30s. The idea: Yes, you can have it all, both parenthood and power. At least as large a share raised their hands as who said they were feminists. Don’t call us feminists, the class said, but I was struck by how many of these very bright young women were worried about how prospective marriage partners would react to the likelihood that theirs would be the larger paycheck. “Will the kind of man that I want – ambitious, smart – still want me, if I make more money and have a better career?” Ultimately, the class concluded that it is impossible for both members of a couple to have high-powered, time-demanding careers and have children – even given a big income that allows a couple to “out-source” childcare and housework. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the future partners of these MBAs – and millions of other American men – will have to accept more of the grinding compromises between career and kids that woman have faced for so long but that many men have been spared to this point in time.

Gender, I came to believe in the course of my year at Stanford, is a great but largely unrealized opportunity for the media to connect with readers and viewers. While gender is so central to our relationships and our sense of self, relatively few newspapers cover it as a beat. It is one example about how today’s media continues to parse news the traditional way we always have, while ignoring how people’s lives are changing, and how we have to change to fit them. As a staff writer with the San Jose Mercury News covering demographics and gender, the job I began this past year at the conclusion of my fellowship, I hope to make some of the invisibilities of gender visible.
 
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