A fascinating discussion has broken out in the world of men’s blogs, based on the question “What is masculinity?”
I read Jack Donovan‘s many projects because unlike most writers, who specialize and then add a worldview to match, Jack has a complete view of the world and can apply it to any specific area. This is why anything he writes offers a point, and then context, which gives you more to think about.
Here’s his most recent stab at a definition of masculinity:
Masculinity is that which is least feminine; femininity is that which is least masculine.
I like this because it puts everything in the world on a spectrum which runs from one to the other. My own tendencies are to try to find a discrete definition, but what’s good about the type of definition you can see above is that it covers everything.
You know what else covers everything regarding gender? Language. Many languages use gender on their nouns. This means that maybe a chair is masculine, but a fork is feminine; it takes a long time to understand how the genders “work” in that language, but generally at that point, you know a lot about the culture.
I have an addition to Jack’s term for consideration by the MRA blogosphere, “man-o-sphere” (sounds like an angry ben-wa ball) and the gender blog world in general:
Masculinity and femininity are complementary opposites. That which is not masculine is feminine, and vice versa, such that a completed whole emerges only through the two parts.
When you think about it this way, the masculine and feminine roles are different approaches that balance each other and by doing so, enhance each other’s understanding of the other. Additional complementary opposites: hot/cold, dark/light, smart/dumb, fast/slow, wet/dry.
Complementary opposites are a product of a relative universe. To know what is hot, you must know what is cold, because without the other to define it in contrast, neither term means anything. If you lived in a climate where the temperature was 80 F year-round, you probably would not think of hot and cold as terms to describe a day.
It is the same way with gender. What is feminine defines the limits of masculinity, and vice versa. This enables each gender, by being distinctive, to strengthen the other. Much as we need night to have day, we need masculinity and femininity forever playfully wrestling in order to have a whole vision.
I almost threw in a yin-yang reference when I was writing that. And damn, you write fast.
I like the addition you came up with, though if we go much farther in this direction we may get a little too Jungian. I thought about name dropping him when I wrote the word “shadow,” but then we get into the whole man-inside-every-woman-and-woman-inside-every-man scenario that gets instantly overstated and misunderstood (and is aesthetically distasteful). Your push and pull, wrestling perspective here reminds me a bit of Paglia, which is not a bad thing.
This
“Complementary opposites are a product of a relative universe. To know what is hot, you must know what is cold, because without the other to define it in contrast, neither term means anything. If you lived in a climate where the temperature was 80 F year-round, you probably would not think of hot and cold as terms to describe a day.”
is well put.
Thanks, Jack. This is a topic the men’s rights activist blog community (or “manosphere,” although again that term seems ludicrous) probably should have tackled head-on years ago.
The one Jung work I’ve managed to retain is his “Synchronicity,” which strikes me as a book cutting to an issue under the issues we commonly worry about as humans. I think he would appreciate the relativity argument, which is that the two define each other. This explains also how when one or the other term gets bastardized, it influences its opposite to be more like it. Think of a tug-of-war over a middle-line; when one side contracts, it pulls the other over into its territory.
Because I drank the whole pot of coffee, I fired off another one on this topic. It seems to me one of the more vital arguments currently in the “manosphere” and one we shouldn’t slight.
[...] one that addresses the injustices both men and women complain about — by giving men and women each a complementary, sacred role in which they have a guaranteed place of value in [...]
From my own ideology it’s best described as the poles of a magnetic field of life.
[...] what people have known for time immemorial, which is that the interaction between the genders is more complex than a simplistic concept like “equality”: Masculinity and femininity are complementary opposites. That which is not masculine is feminine, [...]