What Is Masculinity?

Ray Briggs
Does masculinity need a makeover for the 21st century?

Blakey Vermeule
Should your gender matter to who you are as a person?

Ray Briggs
Why think there’s just one thing it means to be a man?

Blakey Vermeule
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs,

Blakey Vermeule
and I’m Blakey Vermeule, sitting in for Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at philosopher’s corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Blakey teaches in the philosophy and literature program. Thanks for stepping into co host with me today Blakey.

Blakey Vermeule
My pleasure. Today we’re asking what is masculinity?

Ray Briggs
Well, it’s a tool of the patriarchy, we should get rid of it.

Blakey Vermeule
Oh, come on, what have you got against men?

Ray Briggs
Nothing. Some of my best friends are men. What I’m against is narrow expectations. Like why should men have to be strong or aggressive or bad at showing their feelings?

Blakey Vermeule
Masculinity doesn’t have to be about narrow expectations. Men can be caring fathers or shy introverts or figure skaters, whatever they want to be. And you know what? None of that makes them any less masculine.

Ray Briggs
So you’re saying that anything a man does is masculine by definition?

Blakey Vermeule
Well, isn’t that better than trying to shove people into little pink or blue boxes?

Ray Briggs
Sure, maybe it’s better but at that point, why worry about gender at all? Why not focus on what we have in common as human beings?

Blakey Vermeule
A lot of people really care about being men and they want to be good at it. Strong, honest, self sacrificing.

Ray Briggs
Unfeeling, domineering, violent, bleak, you have to admit that some of those stereotypes are really messed up.

Blakey Vermeule
Sure, we should get rid of negative stereotypes. But aren’t there plenty of positive things about masculinity? Men are supposed to be straightforward and say what they mean.

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, everyone should be straightforward and say what they mean not just one gender.

Blakey Vermeule
Okay, but upper body strength, baritone voices, and luscious beards are specific to men.

Ray Briggs
Hey, there are women with beards too.

Blakey Vermeule
Look, I’m not denying a woman’s right to grow facial hair. But most people with beards are men. And I say it’s a good thing to rock your manly facial hair.

Ray Briggs
Sure, sure. There’s nothing wrong with it. But there’s nothing especially right about it either. I mean, some men look good with beards. Some men don’t. Why should we have to lump them together under one image of masculinity?

Blakey Vermeule
We could have lots of masculinities, plural, that way people could choose whichever one suited them.

Ray Briggs
Oh, what does that even mean?

Blakey Vermeule
Well, not every man has to be a heroic firefighter. They can be stay at home dads or older gay men who lead neighborhood cleanups or nurses who comfort the sick and the dying.

Ray Briggs
Oh gosh, now men have to live up to society’s ideal of what a good male nurse is too. You’re just introducing more stereotypes. I mean, how does that help?

Blakey Vermeule
Great question, one we can put to our guest Robin Dembroff from Yale University who’s writing a book called “Real Men” on Top: The Metaphysics of Patriarchy. We’ll talk to them in just a little bit.

Ray Briggs
But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Ariella Markowitz, to talk to some people who are helping men rethink their relationship to masculinity. And a quick warning, this story does discuss sexual assault and domestic violence. Listener discretion is advised.

Ariella Markowitz
Colin Adamo is a grad student studying clinical psychology. He also educates kids about sex. When he first started going to classrooms and talking to students, he noticed he was usually the only cis male sex ed teacher.

Colin Adamo
There was something that I could provide to the young men in the classroom that maybe others couldn’t. Validation of their experience to be like, I know where you’re coming from. And a lot of the materials that we produce don’t often feel like they really take into account the perspective of young men or like all the cultural factors that they have to navigate that are really challenging.

Ariella Markowitz
Stereotypes like having to be straight and mistreating women to be a real man put a lot of pressure on teenagers to engage in risky or abusive behavior, but they’re rarely acknowledged in health curriculums, or even in conversations at home. So Colin says that it’s really powerful to be upfront about masculinity.

Colin Adamo
Sexually transmitted infections, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and homophobic bullying, all these issues that we’ve been trying to address for decades. They all involve young men, and yet they never address young men directly. You know, there’s some problems around these other issues. But really, if we help young men embody more transformative masculinities like a lot of these other problems will be solved inherently.

Ariella Markowitz
Transformative masculinity. It isn’t a new idea. When second wave feminists were fighting for equity, a lot of them included men and their vision for gender revolution. This is Betty Friedan in 1964 speaking about how a lot of men began challenging their traditional roles.

Betty Friedan
Kill bears when there are no bears to kill and napalm all the children in Vietnam and Cambodia to prove that I’m a man, you know, to be dominant and superior to everyone concerned, and never show any, any softness. Well, these boys are wearing their hair longer and saying no.

Ariella Markowitz
But part of the reason transformative masculinity never became mainstream is because of a patriarchal culture of abuse and silence. And that has real consequences. A disproportionate number of men in prison show symptoms of depression and commit suicide every year. Young men are often getting a very direct and brutal education about being a man.

Galen Silvestri
My dad used to hold me down while I twisted my arm back, the pain would be piercing he would keep twisting until it would almost break. And he would say, that doesn’t hurt. Quit complaining, be a man.

Ariella Markowitz
That’s Galen Silvestri. He’s sharing stories about his past at a live event hosted by the Men’s Story Project. He grew up being told don’t show vulnerability or pain, physically hurt others before they hurt you. He suffered years of abuse and also abused others. And after years of therapy and community support, he was able to change.

Galen Silvestri
It is time for men to tell their stories, for men to tell the truth about being men and begin the healing process. Because there is no need for this pain. This legacy must not continue.

Ariella Markowitz
Josie Lehrer, a health researcher founded the Men’s Story Project 14 years ago, after leading studies on adolescent sexual health and facilitating an HIV support group.

Josie Lehrer
Back in 2008, there was very little by way of public dialogue on how it is that boys and men are taught, raised, pressured, socialized to be quote unquote men.

Ariella Markowitz
Lehrer says storytelling encourages men to let go of their suffering that’s tied to the fear of not being man enough. She believes men need spaces for solidarity and compassion, the freedom to show that being a man can mean anything you want it to be, whether it falls inside traditional gender roles or not.

Josie Lehrer
I think there are as many ways to be a male identifying human being as there are male identifying human beings in the world. If a particular guy wants to play sports, and, you know, whatever, do things that you know, eat really huge cheeseburger, well, I don’t know if I would support the eating huge cheeseburgers. But anyway, the point is, you know, he wants to do some things that have been stereotypically called masculine, because they really love those things and it’s not hurting anybody, cool. You know, I don’t have any issue with that. My only concern as a public health person and as a human in the world, is about supporting people in living lives of health, equity and self expression.

Ariella Markowitz
This kind of philosophy isn’t telling men they’re not allowed to be masculine. On the contrary, it’s affirming that anyone can be a man. There are infinite ways to be one and that healthy versions of masculinity support health and equality for all people. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Ariella Markowitz.

Ray Briggs
Thanks for the very thoughtful report, Ariella. You can learn more about the men story project at mensstoryproject.org. I’m Ray Briggs and with me today is my Stanford colleague Blakey Vermuele and today we’re asking what is masculinity?

Blakey Vermeule
We’re joined now by Robin Dembroff. They are a professor of philosophy at Yale University. They’re the author of Real Talk on the Metaphysics of Gender and a forthcoming book “Real Me” On Top: The Metaphysics of Patriarchy. Robin, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Robin Dembroff
Thanks for having me.

Ray Briggs
So Robin, what first got you interested in writing about gender?

Robin Dembroff
Oh, I mean, I was someone who was raised as a girl, but who also had a lot of deep affinity and interest in aspects of what is considered masculinity. And so as someone who occupied that position, I was very aware at a young age of the ways that gender both binds us and polices us to either masculinity or femininity, and about the arbitrariness of that binding and the way that it takes a real psychological toll on people.

Blakey Vermeule
Robin, at the beginning of the show, Ray argued that we should do away with the concept of masculinity and I disagreed. But you think there’s a legitimate critique against the concept of masculinity. Tell us about that.

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, when I was listening to your exchange, one thing that struck me was that it seemed like Ray was talking about the concept of masculinity, and you were talking a lot about the features that get coded as masculine. And while I totally agree that there’s lots of features that get coded as masculine that are really worthwhile and important and virtuous features, that’s different than in my view from the concept of masculinity, which has to do with being unlike women and being the way that a man is seen as what the way that a man ought to be or must be. And I think that any kind of idea of how someone ought or must be simply on the basis of whether they’re male or female is a constrictive way of treating people that we should get rid of.

Ray Briggs
So, Robin, you’ve said that your critique differs from the critiques of some other feminists. Can you can you say more about how it’s different from standard critiques?

Robin Dembroff
The main way it differs is with respect to the connection between masculinity and maleness on my view. So lots of people have made the point that masculinity is seen as how men ought to be, and that there are many ways in which being subject to these norms about how you ought to be even independently of the points that you were making about how those ways are often really destructive, like violence, that that’s limiting for people. But I think in addition to that, on my view, there is a dominant idea or very popular idea that masculinity has a really close tie to maleness itself, such that maleness is seen as the explanation for masculinity. It’s the essence of being a man that both explains how men must be or if they aren’t that way, how they ought to be. And I think seeing that really close connection between maleness and masculinity, clues us into how masculinity is both something that is perpetuating across various times and cultures, even as those particular norms change, as well as how the enforcement of masculinity can be really destructive to people’s lives.

Ray Briggs
So this is interesting to me, both because you you are a person who was sort of raised as with female expectations, and also because who identifies with masculinity. And also because I’ve read sort of books like Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam, or Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg, that are about masculine women. Do you think that there’s room for people who were either assigned women or consider themselves women now to be masculine in the concept of masculinity?

Robin Dembroff
I think that there’s room to be a deviant while being seen as female. And one way of being deviant is by taking on different traits or features or behaviors that are coded as masculine. And we can call that masculinity we can say that that person is a masculine woman or a masculine female person. But I think that’s different than making this point about the concept of masculinity. So Halberstam thinks that masculinity can come apart from maleness and I completely disagree with that.

Blakey Vermeule
Can you say why you disagree with that?

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, it’s because I think that masculinity as a concept is defined in opposition to femininity. And so as a concept, it’s tied in this way that I mentioned before, it’s tied to maleness, as maleness as being the essence of manhood, that means that someone must not be a certain way. And those must and ought ways that you that you should be those are masculinity. And so I think that if we got to the point where whether your body was seen as a male body or female body made no difference to your access to masculinity that would be a world in which the concept of masculinity just didn’t exist anymore.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about masculinity with Robin Dembroff off from Yale University.

Blakey Vermeule
Is the concept of masculinity hurting women and men? Should we reshape our ideals or abandon them altogether? Does it even make sense to lump all men into a single category?

Ray Briggs
Tough guys, soft boys and people beyond the binary, along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

From the playboys to the gay boys, we could all benefit from talking more about gender. I’m Ray Briggs, this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Blakey Vermeule
…except your intelligence. I’m Blakey Vermeule sitting in for Josh Landy and we’re thinking about masculinity with Robin Dembroff from Yale University.

Ray Briggs
No one should be trying to prove their manhood in a pandemic. So we’re pre recording this episode from the safety of our respective homes. And we can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments@ philosophytalk.org, or you can comment on our website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Blakey Vermeule
So Robin, we’ve been critiquing the concept of masculinity, but some men have grievances about how society treats them. What are some of those grievances?

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, I mean, everyone should have grievances about the way they’re treated on the basis of gender, men included. Masculinity, as I as I say in my book is a small steel reinforced cage. It puts very extreme expectations on people that are enforced, often with things like violence. So I think men are totally right that they are often you know, sent to war and treated- their lives or treated like fodder for economic interests. They are often subject especially if they’re men of color to police brutality and incarceration, they have a lot of extreme societal expectations put on them in terms of the way that they ought to interact with other people and the kinds of aggression that they’re expected to show and then, you know, punished for showing or not showing, often, again, dependent on their race or various economic status. So I mean, I think that men are absolutely right to have grievances about masculinity.

Ray Briggs
So it occurs to me that men are kind of both advantaged and disadvantaged by sexism, which is kind of puzzling. I wonder if you can help me make sense of this idea that seems true.

Robin Dembroff
Yeah. So on my view, whether someone is advantaged or disadvantaged on the basis of gender has to do with the relation that they stand in, to cultural ideals of manhood, and womanhood. But what’s really important about those cultural ideals is that those ideals build in things like race and class and disability, such that if you’re a man of color, or if you’re a disabled man, you’re a gay man, the way you are measured up against those ideals and so also the way you are treated in light of that measuring up is going to vary a lot. And so if you’re seen as falling short of those ideals, you’re often going to be hugely disadvantaged on the basis of standing in that relation to those ideals of manhood.

Blakey Vermeule
So what about- So you’ve mentioned the fact that men are disproportionately sent to war and subjected to various kinds of state violence, especially if they’re men of color. How do you account for the fact that so many of them end up being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or presidents of universities or presidents of their countries?

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, I think, again, here, it’s really important to look at what those cultural ideals of manhood are, because it’s not disabled men of color, or gay men who are becoming presidents and CEOs. And typically, I mean, of course, there are certain exceptions. But I think the exceptions prove the rule here. The men who tend to be the ones who accrue the most power are the ones who are most benefited by those ideals of manhood.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I want to take a little bit of issue with Blakey’s suggestion that many men are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or presidents of universities, just because there aren’t that many slots for anybody there. So we have a an email from Terry in Emory, Wisconsin that seems relevant here. So Terry writes, men have been thrown into a mill of feminism, climate change, BIPOC issues — that’s black and indigenous people of color — LGBT issues, all challenging the status quo. It’s about time that we addressed men’s evolving place and role in our cultures. Perhaps, writes Terry, we will move toward focusing on ourselves as humans instead of men and women. So Robin, comments?

Robin Dembroff
Well, I think there’s the question of whether that’s actually happening or whether it would be a good thing to happen. I totally agree that it would be great if we could be, as as this non binary person said, an interview in the Washington Post, just people wearing people clothes, I would love to just be a person wearing people clothes in the world, and not have my body constantly being scrutinized for people to guess what my genitals are, and then make evaluations of what I’m wearing and how I’m walking and how I’m talking and everything else on the basis of that scrutinization. But your scrutiny, sorry, that’s scrutinization is not a word. But I also think that one thing to keep in mind about masculinity and femininity is that they’re super wily, and they’re dynamic, they change over time in response to various kinds of social and economic pressures. So while it often might seem that masculinity is in a kind of acute crisis, and that has happened over and over and over again, what you see throughout the history of masculinity is that when it reaches this kind of boiling point of having a lot of pressure put on the current ideals of manhood, whatever those might be, the ideals just shift in order to maintain the connection between power and manhood.

Blakey Vermeule
So isn’t it the case that masculinity and femininity evolve together in lockstep? And they’re they’re both sort of equally wily? Would you say that? Or would you say that masculinity has has more wiliness to it or femininity has more wiliness to it?

Robin Dembroff
No, again, I think it’s a part of my view. And this is a view that I think is shared among many people who work on both masculine and femininity is that they’re defined in opposition to each other. So when something becomes coded as feminine and was previously become was coded as masculine, say wearing pants, what you often see is that either that thing becomes gender neutral, like wearing jeans, it’s not masculine or feminine. It’s just gender neutral, or you get a division within that thing. So now there’s men’s pants and women’s pants, but it’s not the case that you ever find something that’s both an aspect of masculinity and an aspect of femininity, and that’s because they’re defined in opposition.

Ray Briggs
So Robin, sometimes I have found it tempting. I think a lot of people I know have found it tempting to try and fight sexism by acting against stereotypes. So if you’re a man like don’t be afraid to wear frilly things or like be really involved in your kids’ lives, which probably be doing anyway. But the thing that you just said that masculinity and femininity are very wily suggests that that might not be a very effective strategy. Because won’t stereotypes of masculinity and femininity just adapt to accommodate people trying to act against them?

Robin Dembroff
Yes, I think that they do adapt. And so what’s really important is that those behavioral changes be accompanied by an insistence that it’s not a new version of masculinity, but it’s rather just being a person. And this is why I take a lot of issue with what we’re seeing now as quote unquote, feminist marketing that’s promoting a narrative of like, if like the Nike ads or the p&g ads have run like a girl or do these things like a girl where the message is something like there’s still a way that there is to do things like a girl, it’s just that that way is as good as doing things like a man. But the problem with doing that is that you still are upholding cultural ideals of manhood and womanhood. And even if we reach a point where manhood and womanhood are equally valued, those ideals of manhood and womanhood are still going to have things like race and sexuality and class and disability built into them. So that yes, maybe Amy Coney Barrett can sit on the Supreme Court and certain white cis heterosexual non disabled women can have equal power with their white male counterparts. But there’s still going to be a lot of men and women who are disadvantaged and pushed to the bottom of the social ladder as a result of upholding these ideals.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about masculinity with Robin Dembroff from Yale University. And Robin, we’ve got another email from a listener. So Matt in San Francisco writes, growing up, I found the behavioral attributes of gender to be hit and miss. Some of my attributes fit stereotypical masculine roles, and others were more aligned to feminine roles. I was fine with who I was, and thought the problem was the dumb gender divisions, how about viewing the problem, not being the wrong version of masculinity, that we have a vision of masculinity versus a bunch of human attributes that one can select from and reflect who we are? Why can’t we all be Potato Heads? So that sounds a lot like you’re saying.

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, I definitely think that one of the ways that masculinity and femininity are constructed, particularly when they’re in opposition to each other, right, is that you get important pro social traits in both what’s stereotypically masculine and what’s stereotypically feminine. And as a result of the policing of masculinity and femininity, you only get access to a non disparaged subset of those pro social traits. And that’s just a way of really constraining and reducing people in a way that isn’t helpful to anyone psychologically, even if certain people economically and politically benefit from it.

Blakey Vermule
I’m curious, you use the word ideal several times in this conversation, and I’m curious what you would say to people who do hold masculinity as an ideal or femininity as an ideal. I mean, for some people, these are not simply constraining roles, but but ideals to strive for. How do you talk to people who hold ideals of gender?

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, I mean, that’s a lot of people, right. And I think that it’s important to think about what you’re saying, and saying that there is an ideal of masculinity or femininity, because what that’s really saying is that there’s an ideal way for people who were born with a penis to be or people who were born with a vagina to be, which, you know, you are the one that has to give a good story about why that’s not completely arbitrary. Why should just a biological feature of a body when it’s born, set up this huge, massive, all encompassing set of expectations for how that person ought to be? And, you know, historically, and still, I think that’s so wrapped up in heteronormativity, that when we really start looking at where those ideals come from, and why they’re so policed, we can see that they go through and through all the way down with ideals that have to do with an idea of the complementary-ness of maleness and femaleness where we see the world as divided into two sets of social roles that people are destined to fulfill or if they don’t fulfill them, we get to punish them for not fulfilling.

Ray Briggs
So I can imagine somebody objecting here. Say you have you might have like a masculine gay man or a femme lesbian, saying, well, I’m masculine or feminine, depending on which they are. But I’m not invested in heteronormativity because I’m not even invested in heterosexuality. I’m not straight. Do you think that, like what would you say to that objection?

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, here, I want to go back to my definition of masculinity as cultural ideals of how men must or ought to be. And ditto for femininity of how females must or ought to be. Because you can have a masculine say, presentation, or you know, preferences or ones that are feminine presentation, so on. But that’s going to be only a subset of the things that within our society is deemed to be the things that men must or ought to be your women must or ought to be. And I think it’s undeniable that still in our culture, being solely attracted to cisgender women is something that men are considered either biologically destined for or if they fall short of that, it’s how they ought to be, and they get to be punished for it. And ditto with being solely attracted to cisgender men or women.

Ray Briggs
Right. So I wonder, so this is an alternative to, to getting rid of gender roles that some people have defended. So another thing you could do is you could broaden them to the point of being almost contentless, so you say to be masculine as to be anything that a man does or wants, rather than an ideal of what men should be. So we just broaden in the ideal until it’s got no content anymore. And similarly, for femininity. It’s whatever, whatever a woman does, or wants to do is feminine. That seems like a way of getting rid of stereotypes. Do you think that it would be adequate?

Robin Dembroff
I don’t think it’s possible. But I think there’s a number of things to say about it. Okay. So if you actually just treated this as a descriptive sociological endeavor, where we were going to take all the people that we code as men, and we’re just going to talk about all the features that they have. And all of those things count as masculinity, that thing is going to be I mean, I think ideals of masculinity are already internally contradictory. But that list is going to be hugely inconsistent, it’s going to be all over the place, it’s going to be massively overlapping with the same set of descriptive features that women have. And so a totally non normative sense of masculinity is one that does no explanatory work, it’s kind of unclear what even what the point would be of having such a concept. But I think there’s an even deeper issue here, which is what are people assuming that maleness and femaleness are when they go about the world looking for how males and females are. And here again, I think we find normativity coming back into the picture, because we live in a society where just by virtue of being human, you are thought to be someone who must or ought to be either male or female, and people who have bodies who don’t fit that binary are punished, they’re marginalized, and sometimes their bodies at birth are even surgically change to make sure they fit one of those ideals. So I think even if you take this descriptive approach to what masculinity or femininity is, you’re still building in normativity at the level of maleness and femaleness.

Blakey Vermeule
So we have a an email from Carl in Portland that I think actually goes directly to this question about normativity and punishment. So Carl asks, I don’t see how we can reach a real goal for us all as equals in our gender groups, when some or most folks remain oppressed, not free from stereotyping because of what they do, or present to the world. If a man likes to knit or crochet, then he is not the less of a man for that preference. Similarly, if a woman prefers football or wrestling as her sport, why would or should she be designated as less feminine in other circles? It’s a good question.

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, I mean, I think the answer again, has to do with power, who are these ideals serving? And again, I think you look at the content of these ideals and how they are valued in relation to each other, you find that both ideals of manhood and womanhood are thoroughly intersectional. So that means they’re shaped by things again, like race and sexuality and disability. And also manhood as an ideal is valued over and above womanhood. And so no matter how you match up to the ideals of womanhood, if you’re seen as female, you’re going to be devalued. And if you’re a man who’s seen as falling short of the ideals of manhood, you’re going to be devalued. And what that means is that there’s a small subset of people in our society, who gain the most and are disadvantaged, the least, by virtue of their relation to these ideals. And I think they’re, they’re the ones with a lot of power, and they’re really invested in maintaining the system.

Ray Briggs
So Robin, you’ve mentioned a couple of times that our ideals of masculinity and femininity are sort of not just gender, they’re also sort of inflected with like race and ableism. Can you give some more concrete examples of how that works?

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, so the first thing I would say is, I don’t think there’s any such thing as just gender. I think that there is no ontological, there’s no distinction in the world between gender and things like race and class and disability. But we can just, you know, just to give some really obvious examples, think about the ideals of masculinity that you mentioned earlier in the show about being strong and athletic. Those are really ableist ideals, as are the ones has to do with say, think about things like paying for dates. That’s a real a lot of class built into that. But in addition to the ideals being intersectional, at the level of the content, they’re also intersectional at the level of enforcement. So if a black man and a white man are accused of the same act of violence, the white man is likely to have his violence or accusation of violence dismissed as boys will be boys that’s inevitable for him, given the fact that he’s male, whereas the black man is going to receive often very different treatment, and perhaps be subjected to incarceration or other forms of violence or even violence against his community, as a result of that accusation. So we have to look at both what the ideals are, and also how they are played out in the world in terms of how people police men on the basis of those ideals.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re asking what is masculinity with Robin Dembroff from Yale University.

Blakey Vermeule
What does positive masculinity look like in the 21st century? How can we foster collaboration between men, women and everybody else? Will we ever achieve gender justice?

Ray Briggs
Masculinities for the modern era, plus a discussion with host emeritus John Perry, prompted by a question from one of our listeners when Philosophy Talk continues.

Who gets to decide what a real man is, who the real men are? I’m Ray Briggs and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Blakey Vermule
…except your intelligence. I’m Blake Vermeule. Our guest is Robin Dembroff from Yale and we’re asking what is masculinity?

Ray Briggs
So we’ve got a email, Robin, from our listener, Henry, who is actually the first to propose this show topic. And Henry asked about a book called Age of Anger, which argues that the Enlightenment triggered a system of war of all, against all, hence the anger. He says his concern is that the result of this system in the areas of economic instability and cultural change has caused an anxiety in many men about being emasculated and that such anxiety leads to an obsession with a traditional view of masculinity, like Mussolini or Trump, emphasizing violence, always winning total autonomy, freedom to do anything, and no need for concern about the welfare of losers. He says he hopes that a serious examination of the true nature of manhood will attenuate this unhealthy anxiety and reduce the seduction of unrestrained economic activity, violence, efforts toward political domination, racial supremacy, and gender injustice. So Robin, what do you think of that?

Robin Dembroff
Well, there’s a lot there. I mean, I think the the phrase that I would pick up on is the phrase the true nature of manhood. And I would want to know, what is there? Or is it simply a vanishing point? When we look at the concept of manhood, does it disappear into just the connection between ideals of the male body and ideals of masculinity? Because I think there’s actually no there there. And I think seeing that can be really helpful at attenuating, the sort of violence and freedom to harm others and lack of empathy that it seems like Henry is pointing us to.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I wanted to follow up a little bit about some of the anxiety that he’s writing about. So if I’ve got you right, on your view, this anxiety is partly the result of thinking that masculinity has to have a true nature in the first place. Have I got that right?

Robin Dembroff
Yeah.

Blakey Vermeule
So Robin, we sometimes like to make our guests tsar for the day. But in your case, we’re going to make you king among men with the power to issue any edict to like, what’s the first thing you would do as king to create more gender equality in the world?

Robin Dembroff
That is a difficult question. Mostly, because as I mentioned before, I think that masculinity and femininity and the inequality that exists between manhood and womanhood are adaptive, they change in response to pressure. And so because of that, I think that there’s nothing any given individual could do that would undo the inequality in our society, it’s going to take a huge collaborative collaboration between different groups that understand that they have a common basis of solidarity, in the fact that they’re all treated badly on the basis of gender. But that said, I think that maybe the one thing that a certain individual with a lot of power could do and so I guess it would be the thing that I would do is undo the gendering that exists within formal institutions. So undo things like having automatic birth certificates that gender people on the basis of a binary undo things like having different rules for men and women across policing, across incarceration across schooling. And I think that’s something that would have to even as as czar in the way that you point to it would have to be done gradually, right? Because if we did that suddenly might have a lot of negative impact. But I think setting up a kind of plan for phasing out the gendering of our formal institutions, and particularly the state would be the thing that I would focus on.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so one thing I have noticed about documentation and traveling is that my legal state gender marker has to have one of two letters on it to mark my gender. And also, I think that some people, but not everybody knows this. If you fly, not that anybody is flying these days. But if post pandemic you fly, and you walk through one of those TSA X ray machines, there are two buttons that the TSA agent can push, depending on whether they think you’re a man or a woman. And then they interpret the body scan differently.

Robin Dembroff
Color coded buttons.

Ray Briggs
A pink one and a blue one. I just I am not sure I have a question about that. But it’s just such a striking tidbit. And I’m amazed that like it’s not more widely known.

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, I think once you start paying attention to the way that gender shows up in formal institutions, I mean, obviously, it shows up in informal institutions, like our families, and friendships and social groups everywhere. But it really also shows up in informal institutions. And once you start looking for it, you’ll see it everywhere.

Ray Briggs
So I’m imagining, you said, you said some things about gradual change. So imagining that one kind of objection that you might have to degendering sort of all of your formal institutions, is a similar kind of objection to the one you might have against race blindness, where there’s a lot of existing gender injustice in the world. And some formal institutions include things like scholarships for women to study in fields where women are underrepresented. And so degendering your institutions would mean getting rid of those things. And it’s sort of hard to know how to get from here to a place where gender really doesn’t matter.

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, I totally agree. And that’s because as long as those ideals are enforced, and they’re seen as things that people must or ought to be simply on the basis of their perceived genitalia at birth, they’re going to create systemic inequality. So you have to make an intervention at the level of having these things that marked people as either male or female, and therefore have this set of things that they must or ought to be. And it’s really hard to do that without also, as you said, harming some of the attempts to undermine the existing inequality. So there’s just kind of and that’s one of the things also in addition to adaptability that makes this system so difficult to change.

Ray Briggs
So, we’ve been asking now about gender categories, male and female. And I might also wonder, like, what is the relationship to masculinity and femininity.

Robin Dembroff
Between maleness and femaleness?

Ray Briggs
Right, so you might think like, these are at least separable in principle, like you could have categories of male and female without categories of masculinity and femininity, or vice versa, since people can be like, maybe you think a masculine men are on feminine women or feminine men or masculine women. So I was still trying to get a handle on what exactly the relationship is between those two sets of common concepts.

Robin Dembroff
Yeah, great. So again, I think it’s, I think, here, it’s important to think about, what are we talking about when we talk about maleness and femaleness? Because the most common way of thinking about those things that people will say is that they’re just talking about biological sex where they mean something like clusters of physical features of bodies, things like chromosomes and hormone levels, and gonads and genitalia. But when you actually look at how maleness and femaleness play out in the world, they’re not just clusters of bodily features, the bodies that people have, and the features that those bodies have vary widely. And you can even have different so called sex chromosomes across different cells of a single body. So the way that maleness and femaleness actually play out in the world, and I had mentioned this earlier, but coming back to it is as themselves as ideals of ways that every human body must or ought to be. And when a body doesn’t fit one of those two ideals sufficiently enough to be coded as male or female, then often those people are marginalized, or again, there’s kind of medical and surgical interventions that are medically unnecessary but are imposed on infants in order to make sure that their body fits one of these two ideals. And what’s the reason for that? So then it brings us to the next question of why do we care so much about every body being able to be quickly and easily seen as unambiguously male or female and I think that has to do with masculinity and femininity. We use masculine and femininity as the two robust lenses through which to see every single person that we interact with, and ourselves importantly, that shaped how we evaluate everyone else and how we think about what to expect from them, or how to react to their different behaviors or features. And I think we can’t disentangle masculinity and femininity from femaleness and maleness because those are themselves the created conduits or ideals that funnel people into these sets of expectations.

Blakey Vermeule
So, I have a question about, it goes back to Henry’s email, it’s a question about power, given that gender, for some people is a source of worldly power power in the world, and some people get very attached to what they take to be a kind of traditional masculinity or traditional femininity. How do you ask those people? So I’m thinking of various members of the Trump family, for instance, to give up the kind of power that’s associated with extreme sort of gender self fashioning, in a in a very hierarchical landscape?

Robin Dembroff
That’s an excellent question, I think it really has to come down to creating are inducing a kind of silence a sort of inward looking and even a sort of existential crisis as it were. Because if you look at the statistics, straight white men are over represented and things like violent deaths, drug abuse, suicide, and other very bad health outcomes. They’re not happy. So I think it’s important here to distinguish between power and well being. And the fact is that gender doesn’t contribute to anyone’s well being even those and perhaps in some ways, even especially those to whom it gives a lot of power. So I think the only way to get people who are really attached to the power that comes from gender, to give up on that attachment is to shift their focus away from power to think about what it means for them to be flourishing as human beings.

Ray Briggs
Robin, thanks so much for joining us today.

Robin Dembroff
Thank you for having me. This was fun.

Ray Briggs
Our guest has been Robin Dembroff, who’s a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and the author of Real Talk on the Metaphysics of Gender. And thank you Blakey, for co hosting with me today.

Blakey Vermeule
Thank you, Ray, it has been a real pleasure.

Ray Briggs
We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Blakey Vermeule
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog.

Ray Briggs
In fact, let’s check in with our host emeritus John Perry, to see if he can help us with a question related to recent events here in the US, from a listener in our community of thinkers. John, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

So David asks, as a philosopher myself, it would arouse interest to have trained philosophers discussing some of the major issues online, such as what constitutes incitement?

John Perry
Yes, I checked my Oxford English. No, actually, I didn’t, I checked my Wikipedia dictionary. It is to encourage or stir up violent or unlawful behavior and violent or unlawful is in parentheses, I suppose you could incite someone to do something good. But what do you think Ray? I mean, is does the First Amendment free speech does that mean the federal government can stop you from inciting a riot?

Ray Briggs
So it turns out that the Supreme Court has had a lot of things to say about that over a year over the years. So I guess one major landmark case is Brandenburg versus Ohio in 1969. This is where the Ku Klux Klan, led a rally and made a bunch of inflammatory speeches and then got arrested and fined and sentenced to prison time. And the Supreme Court said this was actually the wrong decision. This was unconstitutional. Because what they did actually didn’t count as incitement like we can agree that it’s morally bad, but it is protected speech.

John Perry
I’ve heard of the Brandenburg test. Yes, that’s a word came up with that, right?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s right. In order to count as the illegal kind of incitement, you have to have intent to speak. So you have to be trying to address a crowd. So if I just like tell a crowd that they should go commit satanic murders that doesn’t necessarily count as incitement even if I do it on purpose, because it also has to be like probable that the crowd would listen to me.

John Perry
Yes. Isn’t that’s where the phrase clear and present danger comes from? Right?

Ray Briggs
I think that’s right. Yeah. So there has to be both imminence of lawlessness and likelihood of lawlessness.

John Perry
So if KALW were to cancel Philosophy Talk, and we had a protest, and I say, this is terrible, you know, to burn the place down. And then they burn the place down. I could plead with that. That wasn’t at all probable. No one would guess that that bunch of nerds would burn the place down. So I should be innocent by that test. Right.

Ray Briggs
Right. And also, if you told me that a bunch of nerds were about to burn the place down, and like you knew that there were fire starting nerds outside, waiting to burn the place down but but you didn’t intend for them to hear it. Also wouldn’t be incitement. So you couldn’t you couldn’t get constitutionally punished for that.

John Perry
But but if I went outside and and all the all the Philosophy Talk protesters, were wearing T shirts that said, Philosophy Talk owns KALW? Or then there probably would be a clear and present danger.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So I think that there is like a question also about what constitutes telling somebody to commit violence, especially if you’re speaking in kind of vague or roundabout ways.

John Perry
That would be fun to talk about, because we could get into the philosophy of language and Austin’s distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and [unintelligible] illusionary acts.

Ray Briggs
Wait, so what’s that?

John Perry
Well, suppose I say, burn it down. Well, I’ve committed a locutionary, I’ve used English with its ordinary meaning and thereby expressed the proposition. And the illocutionary act is what you do in expressing the proposition. Suppose I say, please burn it down. That would be a request. That’s what you do by performing a locutionary act, usually. Then a perloctuionary act is what you actually achieve. So if they go burn it down, that would be my perlocutionary act.

Ray Briggs
So how does this help us understand incitement? If somebody asks me, what did John Perry say that we should do to KALW? And I say, well, burn it down, because that’s what you said. And then people burn it down because they think that I’m an authority like, is that really on me?

John Perry
Well, I don’t know. Ask my defense lawyer.

Ray Briggs
Cuz I don’t have to ask my defense lawyer.

John Perry
Yeah. So it does sound like the Brandenburg test in Austinian lingo is it’s got the perlocutionary act has to be a riot or something unlawful, can’t just be the locutionary react, or even the illocutionary act? By the way, listeners, there’s no sign that KALW intends-.

Ray Briggs
Please don’t burn it down. Please don’t burn it down, guys. Yeah. Thank you so much, David, for writing in with your question.

John Perry
Yes. Thank you, David.

Ray Briggs
And thank you, John, for joining us.

John Perry
Thanks to all of you for allowing me back.

Ray Briggs
If you’ve got a conundrum that’s got you in a bind, a dilemma in your personal life that might benefit from some philosophical insight, send it to us at conundrums@philosophytalk.org and maybe we can think through it together.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2021.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytalk.org, where you can subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening,

Josh Landy
and thank you for thinking.