‘Traditional masculinity’ doesn’t exist

Because men are from Earth, and women are from Earth.

Growing up in the ‘90s, I remember getting the sense that adults were certain that men and women were fundamentally different.

Every Seinfeld episode had some punchline about men being all about sex and women caring about emotions. The book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus was the decade’s highest ranked work of non-fiction, selling 15 million copies.

I remember feeling a little weird about it all—like it didn’t exactly match how I perceived my parents and other adults in my life.

So, as I read and learn more about gender, I’m continually blown away by how wrong all that stuff was. Not only how wrong, but also how the perception that there are natural and permanent differences between men and women has been manufactured throughout history, usually to serve the interests of the rich and powerful in a given society.

Colonization relied on ‘traditional’ gender roles

The latest example I’ve come across is the Yoruba people, one of the three largest ethnic groups in what is now known as Nigeria. They were colonized by Europeans in the mid-1800s and required to convert to Christianity. They were also forced to convert their economy to capitalism, which had begun to take over the world.

Nigerian scholar Oyeronke Oyewumi has documented how the British brought gender discrimination to the Yorubas. Before colonization, Yoruba women held leadership positions and owned land. Rather than doing so-called “women’s work,” like household chores and cooking, they could choose to trade or work in the fields. They weren’t forced by law to give their husband rights to their work or property.

To the Yorubas, gender was almost meaningless. They recognized differences in anatomy between those born as male or female, but this didn’t determine much of anything. “Women could be at the same time rulers, mothers, children, priests, and occupy any position in social structures, depending on their situational status,” Oyewumi writes.

The British quickly introduced new rules for gender relations. They assigned property to men, barred women from government, forbade sex outside of marriage, and turned previously genderless gods in the local religion into men.

“Christianization and the imposition of the European economic system led to [women’s] exclusion from the public sphere,” Oyewumi writes. “Women were forced into the household and became dependent on men.”

There’s no such thing as “traditional masculinity”

There is so much more complexity to the Yoruba story than I can get into here. My point is that the ideas we have about “traditional” gender roles are based on a cartoon version of history. And that cartoon version has been imposed on us by the rich and powerful.

We’re seeing it play out right now with the right wing’s attack on the LGBTQ community. Florida Governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis said recently about trans people, “Asking us to be complicit in a fraud [that is] not true … we are not going to accept things that are not true in this country.”

They want us to think that it’s a fundamental truth that men and women are different, because it serves a particular way of organizing the economy, who owns property, who gets what jobs, etc.—a way that serves them. Anything that cuts against that threatens their strategy. Just like it threatened the British colonizers when Yoruba women fought back.

And it’s not just the Yorubas who used to be vastly different when it comes to gender. As recent archaeological studies suggest, women have been leaders, warriors, and hunters in a number of places across the world for thousands of years—including in pre-capitalist, pre-Christian Europe.

Yes, there are a few small biological differences between people born with male and female anatomies. But the vast majority of what we think of as “traditional” gender roles for men and women are completely made up. The ideas about what makes a “real man” and a “real woman” are not only made up but also distorted to serve an economic system that allows a small group of people to hoard most of the wealth and resources.

This makes me feel both sad and excited. Sad because women all over the world have had to put up with violence and discrimination. And because men’s development has been stunted by the extremely limited idea of “traditional masculinity.”

Excited because, underneath all these ideas about gender, each of us is actually, absolutely free.

Now, a question for the comments below (or email me: jeremy@jeremymohler.blog): Which aspects of so-called “traditional masculinity” would you like to keep about yourself, and which aspects would you like to let go of?