What is the history of modern male gender roles and where did it come from?

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• spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Short answer: It’s complicated, but it likely stems from how women were historically kept at home due to childbearing, while men were often away at war.

  Medium answer: As above, but in Western culture, this dynamic was reinforced by the advent of private property, which created a need to protect assets, further solidifying male dominance.

  Long answer: As above, and as Simone de Beauvoir explains in The Second Sex, these roles evolved into patriarchal systems that have shaped society for centuries. Feminism as a whole is dedicated to unraveling these complexities, and the points above are only a broad overview of a much larger, nuanced topic.

  Layman’s answer for those without time to read massive works of analysis: If you haven’t, I always recommend reading bell hooks’ The Will to Change. It’s available as a free PDF under 200 pages on the Internet Archive but it’s also written to be very accessible to non-academics and so it’s also absolutely fine to skim and jump between chapters as suits your curiosity! The introduction and chapter 2 would probably get you a long way there 😊

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  • 1984@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It makes sense that the physically stronger gender becomes the protector, yes. Who else?

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    • spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Women would get raped or killed

      By whom? 🤔

      And yes it does make sense that the physically stronger sex becomes the protector. Feminists will agree with you on this.

      But they will take immediate issue with your supposition that men therefore need to be emotionally repressed in order to protect women from… most often, themselves.

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  • slingstone@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Just read the first section of The Will to Change. As a man, it’s fascinating and enlightening to see a feminist deal with men and masculinity rather than dismiss them.

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    • spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      bell hooks is truly a blessing! she’s certainly not the first to do so, but she’s the most forefront and accessible of feminist voices to attend to the needs and experiences of men under patriarchy.

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  • witty_username@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Thanks for the book, will give it a read

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    • Zachariah@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      happy cake day

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• FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Theres restraint and then there’s also suppression. You can find encouragements to restrain oneselves going back to proverbs in the bible or the ideals in Roman society.

  Although controlling yourself was seen as advantageous in general, men were not expected to supress their emotions, quite the opposite. It was fine to be angry or vengeful or lustful or in love etc just as long as it was directed at someone lower in the social hierarchy.

  Christianity probably had a hand in supressing those outlets, though looking at history is doubtful that the majority of the population were ‘pious’ like that.

  Where it seems to have taken a notable turn is during the Victorian era. The social expectations of ‘proper’ behaviour started to constrain the outlets men were ‘allowed’ to have. Not just on the battlefield, where controlled marching into musket fire was more important than ever, being stoic in everyday life was becoming an ideal to restrain vice. Prostitution was becoming more taboo, as was gambling, and violence in general… at least in “civilised” society.

  This was the origin of the British “stiff upper lip”, the ability to meet misfortune with indifference. The beginning of widespread supression of emotions.

  Add in half a century of industrialised warfare, the grimness of which had never been seen before. And by the 50s/60s society was dealing with very broken men who had been traumatised and given no better advice than “be a man and suck it up”. Which has disastrous consequences, not just for men but also domestic violence and abuse or neglect where things tipped over.

  The hippie moment rediscovered men’s ‘softness’ but wasn’t practical. The eighties created an outlet in the deregulated business world of working ruthlessly and making personal riches.

  It’s really only in the millennial and gen z generations that this historical trauma is distant enough and societies ideas have changed enough that we can even begin to have public conversations about men going to therapy or crying on a friend. This would have been sappy even in the 90s.

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  • canadaduane@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Thanks for posting this. I am 4th gen since my family (i.e. great grandfather) served in a war.

    I think generations that have not gone through war have a hard time recognizing war-induced inter-generational trauma, since it’s often the case that men who went through that hell didn’t want to bring it home and talk about it, for various reasons (e.g. PTSD, shame, thoughtfulness).

    Their behaviors might have caused kids and grand-kids to suffer (e.g. physical abuse, emotional abuse), but those kids might not understand why their dad, grandpa, etc. behaved the way he did, so maybe the source of the problem gets buried and forgotten.

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    • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes, your description is part of the genesis of my question. Where did this all come from because without knowing the origin of why western culture stared disallowing some important and strong emotions to be displayed by men we can strive to change it.

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• oce@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Are stupid non researched hypothesis allowed? I had in my mind: maybe those roles come from times when life was more violent, so having a strength advantage due to biology was an obvious way to hold power and impose rules that benefit your group/gender. I feel this somehow connects to emotional behaviors that may be required for war and politics, such as not showing your weaknesses. Then you have centuries of cultural development, such as religions, that created layers of justification for the social order that benefited the people in power, even when the physical strength advantage is not relevant anymore, and that’s what we consider tradition.
  Is patriarchy and the emotional difference really specific to Western society, if we compare to Arabic, Indian or Chinese traditional cultures, for example?

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  • spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    your hypothesis isn’t stupid and in fact i think it lines up quite nicely with quite a few theories put forward by feminist scholars, including the one i summarized in my own response to this post. violence and the maintenance of control is a big element tied to most models of patriarchal masculinity :) you got good instincts

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• Kaboom@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Man, you need a full on historian for this, but I’ll try.

  Iirc, the whole stoicism thing started in Ancient Greece, but there’s probably earlier instances of it. It waned and waxed throughout the centuries, growing stronger sometimes and growing weaker others. The current way of it is basically from the protestant way of thinking combined with various wars, like WW1. I seriously hope you go reading stuff outside of Lemmy, I haven’t studied this stuff in over a decade.

  Now, for a non-western perspective, the east has a similar concept in Bhuddism, and it’s just as old as western stoicism.

  Iirc, there was also some Indian tribe (Cherokee?) that also made a big deal of it. I can’t speak much on it.

  For the record, stoicism is not about being a robot, it’s about being emotional stable. There’s a massive difference.

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  • InquisitiveApathy@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You’re conflating Patriarchal gender roles with Stoicism. They are not the same thing and Stoicism is not what OP is asking about.

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    • Kaboom@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      OP literally asked “what emotions are appropriate to show come about? How far back in western history does this idea of limiting men’s ability to emote honestly go”

      That sounds a lot like stoicism to me.

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  • LookBehindYouNowAndThen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    OP, this user is a straight-up fascist so you may look to their answer for some pseudohistory and an example of fragile masculinity, but I wouldn’t believe anything they claim is true.

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    • kitnaht@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      This is Reddit-tier behavior.

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    • Kaboom@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      And this user is a liar and a creep. He makes shit up about other people because they disagree with him., and then he follows them around because he got obsessed with them.

      And for the record, I added a disclaimer that he needs to do his own research outside of lemmy.

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