When men tease or mock each other, they often do it by suggesting that the other guy is more like a woman than a man. They may accuse him of “not wearing the pants in the family,” or “being a bitch.” In golf, if a man doesn’t hit a putt hard enough to reach the hole one of his friends may chastise him for “hitting it like a girl.” In men’s prisons, it’s acceptable to sexually penetrate another man, but the lowest social status is reserved for men who allow themselves to be penetrated, as a woman does.
Femiphobia, a term coined by psychologist Stephen Ducat, is a fear in men about either being effeminate or being seen by others as effeminate. (The term is sometimes mistakenly used to refer to men’s fears of women, which is more accurately called gynophobia.) Men are afraid of being effeminate because in this culture to be feminine is to be less masculine. Masculinity is essentially defined as the absence or opposite of femininity. In fact, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defined effeminate in part as “not manly in appearance or manner.”
We don’t have a well-developed understanding of masculinity in our culture.
Masculinity is understood in a more oppositional way, as what it is not – feminine- than what it is. This stems in large part from the fact that most boys are raised primarily by their mothers, a fact that some feminists believe is at the heart of the patriarchy. Being raised primarily by their mothers means that growing into manhood involves separating from the woman who was their primary caregiver. Unfortunately, rejecting the mother often means rejecting many of the traits that men learn from their mothers; empathy, compassion, vulnerability, etc. If their fathers are not an active part of both raising boys and helping them transition to manhood, it is easy to see how boys might develop a sense of masculinity that is built more on what they have lost than proactively on what they aspire to move towards.
Any time your sense of self is based more on what it is not than what it is, your resulting sense of self is likely to be rather fragile. For men, this often leads to a fragile sense of masculinity and a lot of insecurity about manhood, i.e. femiphobia. Noted sex therapist Esther Perel talks about what she calls “the fragility of the male identity.” Perel points out that “When we make a girl play with a truck, we don’t think it’s going to make her less of a girl. But, when we think of a boy playing with a doll, we think it’s going to weaken his essence as a man.”
Much of men’s suffering comes from femiphobia.
All of the stereotypical hyper-masculine behaviors that we are finally beginning to call out, and object to, are efforts by insecure men to convince others, and more insidiously, to reassure themselves that they are not like a woman. When men posture as self-reliant, needing no one, it’s because they think of dependency as a feminine characteristic. When men suppress their experience and expression of emotions, it’s because they think of being emotional as weak, like a woman. When men are suspicious of relationships as a form of entrapment it is because they imagine that intimacy is something only women want.
Imagine how much fuller and how much richer the lives of men would be if they weren’t so scared of being like a woman.
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