Just Boys Doing Business?

Abstract

For men, status competition through physical force, dominationhumiliation of the less powerful, and knowing no shame have substantial cultural support. Few societies today contain a majoritarian masculinity that sets its face against violence. In general, women's and men's social movements have failed to nurture credible competing non-violent identities for heterosexual men.2 When such identities are imagined or promoted, they are confined to men's potential to care for others in families, that is, to be loving or caring fathers, husbands, sons, or brothers. In fact, the caring masculine identities having some cultural support are more likely found within 'the family' than outside it. To suggest that masculine caring is featured in family life is expected and paradoxical. It is to be expected in light of the physical separation for men of 'work' and 'home' with the rise of capitalism (see Zaretsky 1976); historically, emotional life for men became centred on the home or the family 'as haven' (Lasch 1977). Yet, in the light of feminist research, it is paradoxical to associate masculine caring with family life. Evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the US shows that men exercised control over household members, including wives, children, servants, and slaves by physical force and violence, often with the support of the religious and secular law (Dobash and Dobash 1992: 267-9). Contemporary research indicates that women's experiences of physical and sexual violence are most likely to be within intimate relationships with men including fathers, husbands, boyfriends, and other men they know. Thus, while male identities in the family are a problem, the caring sides to those identities may be part of the solution.