Over at FeMRADebates, betterdeadthanbeta recently asked:
[W]hy aren’t more men trying to deconstruct or flout male gender roles, like what many women are doing via feminism?
ParanoidAgnostic pointed out that men are more severely punished for stepping outside their roles than women, a sentiment I agreed with.
In my response, I noted that one reason why women and men face different levels of resistance towards challenging their respective sex roles has to do with what it means to be human (from an evolutionary standpoint) and the way we conceive of ‘normalcy’ in our modern industrial cultures:
(Keep in mind that the following is of necessity greatly oversimplified.) Humans evolved as hunter gatherers who by and large lived their lives with close emotional bonds to an extended family/tribe which they knew for their entire lives. With the advent of agriculture and, later, industrialization, this changed to people living in much more ‘atomized’ families and (especially in industrialized societies) frequent interactions with strangers. In such mass societies, it’s a requirement that you be able to establish functioning relationships with people with whom you don’t have intimate emotional ties. In short, one had to be able to place one’s ‘head’ in firm control of one’s ‘heart.’ Most of us think of this as normal but I think it is, in fact, very much against the grain of our evolved psychology and requires a complicated socialization process (which frequently doesn’t ‘take’ and results in many of the social ills we deal with, like addictions, etc.).
Head Over Heart
In traditionalist societies, the burden of this ‘head over heart’ thing fell more strongly on men, because a) they were the breadwinners and had to consistently have successful interactions with strangers in order to make a living, and b) they were far more frequently subjected to the male dominance hierarchy (from which women were and are generally exempt) where emotional vulnerability was a huge liability among strangers with whom (as often as not) you were competing (overtly or covertly) or who posed a genuine (violent) threat to your well-being.
OTOH, women who were relegated to the ‘domestic’ sphere spent vastly greater amounts of their time with others with whom they were emotionally bound (husbands, children, and parents). They were also spared the expectation of being capable of violence.
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