Psychologist Defines Masculinity
The topic of masculinity is hotly debated, especially as gender norms and stereotypes are being challenged by progressive conversations of what it means to be a “man” and a “woman”. Typically masculinity is associated with being “male” while femininity is associated with being “female”.
However, masculinity has little to do with gender or sex, per se. As any good statistician would say, correlation is not causation.
Masculinity and Femininity are deeply interpersonal concepts.
To put it simply, Masculinity is any way of being (attitude, posture, behavior) that attempts to delineate people into social hierarchies. When you take a group of people and put them together, it won’t be long until they begin to devise ways to size one another up. Some in the group will attempt to assert themselves as “better” than others through implicit or explicit competition with other people in the group. Individuals within the group come to understand where they fall on any given hierarchy.
These hierarchies are contingent on the social environment.
For example, in a gym setting individuals may compete to demonstrate who is the strongest. This might be expressed by lifting the most weight on a number of different exercises.
