Contemporary Men Research Articles

Toward a Complexity Paradigm for Understanding Gender Role Conflict

The well-developed body of theory and research on men's gender role conflict provides an excellent foundation for developing increasingly complex models of men's gender-related concerns. Theorists and researchers are encouraged to incorporate themes related to social structural aspects of gender as well as to examine the ways in which men's multiple identities and the intersections among these varied identities are experienced by men and boys. The complexity of men's gender-related challenges are illustrated through the exploration of the various individual, interpersonal, structural, and cultural components of gender issues faced by contemporary men in Japan.

Après The Victorians …

March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd 280 Reviews APRÈS THE VICTORIANS … Kirk Willis History / U. of Georgia Athens, ga 30602–1602, usa kw@uga.edu A.yN. Wilson. After the Victorians: the Decline of Britain in the World. London: Hutchinson; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 (hb); New York: Picador, 2006 (pb). isbn 0-312-42515-5. us$32.50; us$18.00 (pb). Pp. xii, 609. Poet, novelist, biographer, anthologist,literary critic, and cultural commentator , A.yN. Wilson is one of Britain’s most prominent and productive contemporary men of letters. Most at home with religious themes and individuals, he has written popular biographies of Jesus, St. Paul, Tolstoy, Milton, C.yS. Lewis, and Hilaire Belloc, edited The Faber Book of Church and Clergy, collected the religious writings of Tolstoy, and featured religious themes conspicuously in his many novels. Most comfortable intellectually in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he has in recent years moved into the cultural history of this periodz—zproducing a collection of his own Eminent Victorians in 1983 and a survey of The Victorians in 2003. Full of sharply drawn pen portraitures, lively anecdotes, and tartly expressed opinions, these books have won a wide audience, if far from a universally approving critical reception. Hard on the heels of his successful depiction of the Victorians, Wilson has now extended his account into the Wrst half of the twentieth centuryz—zfrom the death of Victoria in 1901 to the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. As with its companion volume, After the Victorians is more cultural sketch than academic history. Indeed, as a work of history it lacks any sense of historical causation and is resolutely descriptive and judgmental rather than explanatory and detached. Wilson, indeed, seems not so much interested in explaining the pastz—zor even in accounting for current conditionsz—zas in telling some good stories, settling some festering scores, passing some harsh judgments, praising some admired individuals , and bemoaning the fact that the Britain of the old Queen, Gladstone, and Disraeli has gone to the dogs. Not for nothing is the book subtitled “the Decline of Britain in the World”. A reader of After the Victorians therefore learns a great deal about Wilson’s own likes and (especially) dislikes concerning literature, politics, religion, and war but not much about the larger social, economic, scientiWc, and technological changes that transformed Britain in the Wrst half of the twentieth century. Possessing a nice line in invective and an enviable Xuency in presenting literary and March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd Reviews 281 political vignettes, Wilson peppers his text with bright, funny, and caustic set pieces which he leaves the reader to string together and to make larger sense of. The Liberal Prime Minister H.yH. Asquith, for example, is described as “languid , emotional, sexually obsessed and clever in a second-rate sort of way” (p. 183), while the press lords NorthcliTe and Beaverbrook are dismissed as “appalling vulgarians” (p. 186), and Lord Louis Mountbatten, to oTer a Wnal example, is condemned Wercely for his role in managing Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947: “By his superWcial haste, his sheer arrogance, his inattention to vital detail, and his unwillingness to provide the huge peace-keeping forces which could have protected migrant populations, Mountbatten was responsible for as many deaths as some of those who were hanged after the Nuremberg trials” (p. 495). Given his robustly expressed Conservative sympathies and Christian faith, it should be no surprise that Wilson does not number Bertrand Russell among his intellectual icons. In The Victorians Wilson contented himself with a mention of how the young Russell had, with the equally youthful G.yE. Moore, “broken with the Idealists and adopted the philosophy ofz ‘realism’z” (New York: Norton, 2003, p. 569). No longer believing metaphysically that “truth is a unity”, Wilson asserted, Russell had then been led ineluctably into any number of errors and had catapulted into a “career [with] a violent disjunction between the belief in vast impersonal realitiesz—zlogical or mathematical truthz—zand the vacillations of his wholly irrational, often self...

The Book of Job and Male Melancholia: A Bizarre Story about Hating Mother God and the Maternal Jesus, Featuring Mel Gibson

This article tells, or advocates, a bizarre story about male revenge. By drawing from literature in the psychology of religion that deals with the Book of Job and by assuming the standpoint of “cultural hermeneutics” in biblical studies, the author playfully takes up an issue identified by Donald Capps: the issue of repressed rage in male melancholia. The author takes his cue from a recent doctoral dissertation from Princeton Theological Seminary. Jacobus Hamman (2000) applies a Winnicottian analysis to the Book of Job and argues that the Book of Job can be a useful pastoral resource today in a number of ways, including his proposal for believers to direct their aggression toward God. Implicit in Hamman’s Winnicottian analysis, but never explicitly stated, is the fact that God is Mother. The plot here is how the Book of Job might lead contemporary American men to hate Mother God and the maternal Jesus, thereby aiding them in externalizing their repressed and self-directed rage. Mel Gibson stars, if only briefly, in this childish story that presses the limits of Christian theology.

Cognitive Differences in Dream Content between English Males and Females Attending Dream Seminars Using Quantitative Content Analysis

This study investigated if dream content differences exist between male and female dreamers in England. One most recent dream report was collected from each of the 100 male and 100 female research participants during dream seminars and a dream research project held in England between 1990 and 2004. The Hall-Van de Castle System of Content Analysis (1966) was used to score each dream report. Major findings showed that English males scored significantly higher on the Aggression/Friendliness index compared to English females. By contrast, English females reported a significantly higher Physical Aggression index compared to males. Females also reported a much higher Bodily Misfortunes percentage compared to males. Although some findings were similar to past studies using American participants, others were unique to this study and may be attributable to the particular sample used in this study (dream seminar attendees), or may suggest actual underlying cultural patterns of contemporary English men and women.

Beyond the Nuclear Family? Familism and Gender Ideology in Diverse Religious Communities

Religious familism, or ideology about “the good family,” has been central to the culture and practice of local religious communities in the United States. Recent research has suggested that the “Ozzie and Harriet” familism dominant among mainstream religious groups in the 1950s religious expansion has remained formative for many local religious communities in the intervening decades. This research suggests that religious familism shapes how gender is symbolized and enacted in local religious communities and leads to differences in the meaning of religious participation for contemporary men and women. However, this work has been based largely on studies of white, middle‐class religious communities. In this article, we analyze the relationship between family ideology and gender in three congregations chosen to exemplify those social locations where we would expect considerable distance from the 1950s “Ozzie and Harriet” ideal—one Hispanic Catholic parish, one African‐American congregation in the black Church tradition, and one white liberal Protestant congregation that has adopted an open and affirming stance toward homosexuality and same‐sex unions. We find considerable innovation in family‐oriented rhetoric and ministry, and a range of gendered practices that prove considerably more inclusive than those found in previous research. We also find considerable symbolic affirmation of the value of more traditional gender roles and practices, particularly in the realm of the family, than we expected to find. We explore the implications of these findings for how we understand the production of gender in local religious communities and for the capacity of local religious communities to become truly gender‐inclusive spaces.

Development and Split-Sample Validation of a Nomogram Predicting the Probability of Seminal Vesicle Invasion at Radical Prostatectomy

ObjectivesSeminal vesicle preservation may have a beneficial impact on erectile and urinary function after radical prostatectomy (RP). We hypothesized that contemporary patients, at very low risk of seminal vesicle invasion (SVI), can be highly accurately identified with an equally contemporary SVI nomogram. Materials and methodsA nomogram predicting SVI was developed in a cohort study of 666 men diagnosed with 10 or more biopsy cores and treated with RP. Biopsy Gleason sum, prostate-specific antigen, clinical stage, and percentage of positive cores represented predictors in multivariable logistic regression models and formed the basis for the nomogram. The regression coefficient-based nomogram was then externally validated in a split-sample cohort of 230 patients. This cohort also served for a head-to-head comparison of external validity of the novel nomogram with two existing tools, namely Partin’s SVI predictions and Koh’s SVI nomogram. ResultsSplit-sample validation of the novel SVI nomogram demonstrated 79.2% accuracy versus 75.6% for Partin versus 77.7% for Koh. Our nomogram cutoff of 3% or less had 96.2% negative predictive value for identifying men at very low risk of SVI. This cutoff could have safely allowed omitting the removal of seminal vesicles in 45.2% of RP candidates, if incorrect classification of 1.7% of patients was judged acceptable. ConclusionsThe potential benefits of SV preservation can be safely accomplished in virtually 50% of contemporary men subjected to RP, if our tool’s predictions are applied.

Alguns aspectos da questão sanitária das cidades de Portugal e suas colônias: dos saberes olfativos medievais à emergência de uma ciência da salubridade iluminista

O reino da podridão foi instaurado nos espaços urbanos medievais pelos detritos das atividades econômicas e pelos excrementos produzidos pelos moradores. Simultaneamente, instalou-se o reino da peste, o que os levaria a estabelecer uma interconexão de causa e efeito entre ambas as coisas. A secular convivência com monturos e esterqueiras resultaria numa arte sanitária de cunho olfativo, baseada na correlação entre maus cheiros e doenças. Essas noções estiveram na base dos cuidados sanitários adotados nas cidades de Portugal, e, mais tarde, nas de suas colônias. O iluminismo pretendeu substituir esta arte olfativa por uma ciência da salubridade urbana. Todavia, no universo português, esta nova ciência permaneceu presa aos limites dos saberes olfativos medievais, sem produzir uma nova efetividade. Gerou, entretanto, entre os funcionários coloniais, uma verdadeira obsessão pelo nauseabundo. Ao findar o século XVIII, os médicos e naturalistas formados pela recémreformada Universidade de Coimbra tornaram-se exímios cheiradores que se dedicariam com paixão ao judicioso exame do nauseabundo e à sua descrição. Não houve cloaca, pântano, poço, monturo ou maloca que não fosse cheirado na insaciável busca das partículas mefíticas que supunham contaminar a tudo e a todos.

Heroes, Metanarratives, and the Paradox of Masculinity in Contemporary Western Culture

The mythic figuration of the hero thrives in contemporary American culture, functioning as both an unattainable ideal against which contemporary masculinity is measured and a mythic means of assuring survival. This figuration places contemporary men in a double bind, or paradox, which offers two alternatives: (1) reject traditional definitions of masculine behavior and risk being labeled by culture as less than a man, or (2) embrace the testosterone-based behaviors that define the hero figure and pursue the impossible acquisition of superhuman qualities, a goal that by its nature must result in failure.

Guest Editorial: Reworking Work and Family Issues for Fathers

Researchers who focus their attention on some facet of the gender puzzle are faced with the challenge of making visible a set of dynamics that are often so obvious and embedded in our taken-for-granted lives that they are almost impossible to see. For example, in a simple turn of phrase, Levine and Pitt made the invisible glaringly apparent when they coined the phrase fathers in their 1995 landmark book. Our preoccupation with the work-family conflicts experienced by women as they moved into the paid labour force had blinded us to the emerging conflicts experienced by men as they sought to navigate their work and family lives. With this declaration, Levine and Pitt helped us to see what we had overlooked: that there was an important struggle for men that we needed to address. Although there has been an explosion of research on fatherhood in the past two decades, the story line in the work and family literature continues to be dominated by the challenges faced by women and mothers as they seek to reconcile the demands of paid work and their responsibilities to provide care to the family. Devoting a special issue of Fathering to the challenges of work and family for men is part of the effort to make these challenges more salient, understandable, and part of an emerging agenda for change. In the same way that the conditions of paid work were and continue to be a political issue for women, the conditions under which men provide care within the context of their working lives must be a political issue. Only when we have a better understanding of the dynamics, constraints, and opportunities that affect the ways men provide care to their children, parents, and partners can we participate fully in a social agenda of change designed to enhance gender equity at home and at work. Comparing contemporary families to recent cohorts, we see decreases in gender role specialization in achieving overall levels of waged and non-waged family work. Contemporary men and women are providing less than previous cohorts in areas of traditional gendered exclusivity and experiencing similar kinds of pressures as they tread in opposite directions toward egalitarianism. Men and women have begun to embrace greater responsibility in realms where prior generations practiced a greater degree of gender segregation. However, if egalitarianism is a benchmark, there are still significant changes ahead for both men and women in balancing work and family. There are several conditions of culture that make the work and family issue different for men. First, work and family for men have not been steeped in a discourse of choice. Work and family became an important political issue for women because they were choosing to work after decades of either being deliberately excluded from the paid labour force or told that their proper place was in the home. By contrast, it is culturally assumed that men will work and pay attention to their families (in that order). There has been a continuity in the expectation of paid work for men, with the result being that women have tended to experience more guilt, stress, and conflict by virtue of choosing to add work to their family responsibilities. For men, it has been a rise in the expectations to provide care--in a reactive fashion--that has heightened attention to work and family issues. Second, the reactive positioning of men to women's entry into the labour force has been shrouded in a discourse of deficiency,. The battle cry, as William Goode so succinctly phrased it is, Why do men resist? Women were moving into the labour force at the speed of light, and men were picking up the slack at home at the speed of a glacier. …

Portrait of an instrument-maker:Wenceslaus Hollar's engraving of Elias Allen.

Among the many engravings of landscapes, buildings, portraits and other illustrations produced by the seventeenth-century artist Wenceslaus Hollar, there are a small number of images of contemporary men of science. Of particular interest is the portrait of the instrument-maker Elias Allen, both because portraits of men of his social status were extremely uncommon at this time, and also because the cluttered mass of instruments shown in the image presents a picture wholly unlike other portraits of the period. The first part of this paper explores the position of portraiture as inherently linked to nobility, and seeks to present an explanation as to why the original oil painting of Allen (made by Hendrik van der Borcht and no longer extant) might have been made. The second part looks at the image itself, and discusses possible reasons for Hollar's production of the engraving some twenty years after the original.

‘A bit of dust on the floor’: in the absence of the Spanish housewife?

This article is about how ‘changing’ Spanish gender is experienced, negotiated and performed by contemporary women and men in domestic contexts. Seeing housework as a site at which gender identities and roles and creatively constructed, represented and contested I explore how individual men and women construct the ‘traditional’ Spanish housewife and situate their own gendered identities in relation to her.

Masculinities, Change, and Conflict in Global Society: Thinking about the Future of Men's Studies

Contemporary men's studies arises from a history of debates about gender relations, men, and masculinities, yet represents a new departure based on social analysis of gender and close-focus empirical work. This approach is now becoming worldwide and has found important practical applications in areas such as education and health. Problems are increasingly recognized in the field, including dilemmas of research method and debates about ways of theorizing masculinities. New approaches emphasise discursive and situational analysis and demand a clearer recognition of global forces. Gender relations have a global dimension that shapes contemporary masculinities, for instance emerging patterns of business masculinity. The connection between violence and masculinity is a key contemporary issue. Recent research shows both institutional bases and situational triggers of gendered violence, which are important in understanding contemporary global conflict and developing strategies for peace.

Revoluções tecnológicas e transformações subjetivas

Muitos psicólogos acham difícil acreditar que as tecnologias digitais, e principalmente a Internet, possam gerar mudanças na organização subjetiva de homens e mulheres contemporâneos. Paradoxalmente, estes psicólogos reconhecem que a organização subjetiva característica dos séculos XIX e XX - a do indivíduo - emergiu como resultado das mudanças desencadeadas pela Revolução Industrial. Por isso mesmo, este trabalho examina os aspectos que a Revolução das Tecnologias da Informação e a Revolução Industrial têm em comum. Explora, principalmente, as conseqüências humanas de ambas procurando tornar claro que algumas tecnologias podem gerar profundas transformações subjetivas, cuja compreensão é fundamental para a psicologia.

Going Against the Historical Grain: Perspectives on Gendered Occupational Identity and Resistance to the Breakdown of Occupational Segregation in Two Manufacturing Firms

This article discusses a process of restructuring of working practices within two manufacturing firms with respect to its implications for gendered occupational segregation. A contextualized, historically situated analysis is presented, which is cast within debates on the nature of gendered occupational identity, equality initiatives and arenas of power and influence for women and men, within what were traditionally male‐dominated organizational contexts. Such an analysis serves to highlight the significance of the new restructuring in sweeping away 150 years of practice and embedded ‘ways of doing things’ and offers explanations for the actions of contemporary men and women in opposing what were seen by management and the trade union as emancipatory changes.

Why Is Literature: A Coevolutionary Perspective on Imaginative Worldmaking

Since prehistoric times literature has been serving two complementary functions: to expand the cognitive, emotive, and volitional horizons of human awareness and to integrate our beliefs, feelings, and desires within the fluid mentality required for survival in the complex social environments of human organisms. Frequent participation in protoliterary transactions may have made some early humans more astute planners, more sensitive mind readers, and more reliable cooperators than their conspecific rivals, thereby increasing their chances to become the ancestors of contemporary men and women. Such a view of literature's role in the coevolution of human nature and cultures helps explain its worldwide presence and perhaps even some of its shared characteristics across cultural divides. Three features respectively associated with the cognitive, emotive, and volitional dimensions of mental functioning appear to be universal and will be discussed in detail: (a) the verbalizing of semantic and episodic memory and of ego-centric and participatory orientation through thematic, narrative, lyric, and dramatic modes of discourse; (b) the polarization of literary entertainment into thrilling and gratifying types, inclining audiences toward recognizable subvarieties of either crying or laughing; and (c) the motivating impact of fictive stories about imagined characters on the will of actual people to change themselves and their worlds.

Herbal medicine of Wisconsin Indians.

In this chapter we will familiarize the reader with selected aspects of the herbal medicine of Wisconsin Indians. We will concentrate on the Menominee, Potawatomi, Ojibwe and Meskwaki tribes. We will address the following topics: (1) selected methods for research in the existing literature to reveal both the identity and the chemical composition of plants which Indians used for medicinal purposes; (2) some aspects of Indian medicine, such as the mode of delivery of herbal drugs, extensive use of plant mixtures, and other practices; (3) selected literature resources on comparison of uses of medicinal plants among different North American Indian tribes and contemporary white men.

A Content Analysis of Contemporary Men's Health Books Marketed to the Health Professional

The concept of "men's health" per se has followed on from the development of substantial social theories that coherently supported the women's health movement and women's health policy. Subsequently, literature on women's health took a variety of forms and has had time to meet the growing needs of that market. While men's health literature is a burgeoning area the needs and derivations of the market are yet to be fully understood. This review of three men's health books intended for health professionals and easily located in Australian bookshops or on-line marketing, shows that there are numerous gaps in content that are likely to frustrate the health professional who is wanting salient knowledge and appropriate guidelines on social and health practice. We argue that the reason for the mismatch between what is supplied and what is demanded by the health professional can, to a great extent, be attributed to two important factors. That is, the domination of the biomedical model as a means of structuring and presenting information and a rhetorical approach that attempts to extrapolate theories about masculinity to men's health issues. We further suggest that a more vibrant rhetoric is about to take place with the emergence of a more critical appraisal of where the men's movement is heading.

Low bone mineral density in the femoral neck of medieval women: a result of multiparity?

An archaeological investigation of a medieval cemetery gave us the opportunity to investigate 49 Danish skeletons dating from 1000 to 1250 A.D. and to compare them with 298 contemporary Danes (aged 19–79 years) and assess the millennial trend in bone mineral density (BMD) in populations considered genetically closely related. BMD and bone mineral apparent density (BMAD) of the femoral neck were measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) and transformed into z scores. BMD zscore was significantly lower in medieval women (−0.54 ± 0.25, p = 0.04), whereas BMD zscore in medieval men was significantly higher (0.55 ± 0.22, p = 0.02). In medieval women, BMD zscore tended to increase with age ( r = 0.42, p = 0.07), whereas no change was seen in men ( r = 0.19, not significant [n.s.]). Also, BMAD zscore was significantly elevated in medieval men (1.00 ± 0.28, p < 0.01), but in medieval women no difference was found (−0.28 ± 0.21, n.s.). However, the correlation between BMAD zscore and age was significant in the medieval women where it increased with advancing age ( r = 0.49, p = 0.03). In conclusion, medieval women had lower BMD when compared with contemporary women, but this relationship was reversed in women who survived to older ages. In contrast, medieval men had significantly higher BMD as compared with contemporary men at all ages. The observed lower BMD in medieval women can be explained by the well-known selective mortality among the younger women. A high birth rate and prolonged periods of lactation are the main reasons for the observed increased mortality, and therefore can also very likely explain the associated low BMD. The increase in the incidence of osteoporosis in modern elderly women could possibly, or partially, be explained by the survival of women who would have died prematurely had they lived in earlier centuries.

The Holy Spirit and Mission in Some Contemporary Theologies of Mission

AbstractIn 1990, Pope John Paul II spoke of the Spirit as "the principal agent of mission," a statement that can provoke a variety of perceptions of the contemporary practice of mission. In this article I wish to show how the mission of the Spirit enjoys chronological and spatial priority over the mission of Jesus through an examination of the work of some contemporary theologians. An emphasis on the chronological and spatial priority of the Spirit opens up, first, new possibilities for those who favor interreligious dialogue rather than an emphasis on proclamation and proselytization as privileged ways of being missionary. Second, it offers support to women who have long experienced the negative impact of androcentric Christologies in both church and society. Third, the universal presence of the Spirit in creation is an invitation for contemporary women and men to redefine their relationship to the rest of creation, for the Spirit's immanence in all creation should call for a retreat from exploitative attitudes to nature. Fourth, the energizing and vivifying power of the Spirit could challenge that institutional inertia that can encourage the church to think of church expansion and growth as the legitimate goal of missionary activity. But to speak of the Spirit as "the principal agent of mission" also requires that we need to redefine our understanding of the relationship between the Spirit and the Jesus of history. This redefinition is important, for to move from a narrow Christocentrism or theocentrism to a theology of mission that could appear to delink the Spirit from the Father and Son in favor of understanding the Spirit as a "cosmic force," a "cosmic energy" is as limiting as the problem it tries to resolve.

Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man

In Writing Men, Berthold Schoene-Harwood develops a trajectory of masculine emancipation from the monstrous imagery of nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary men writers' experimental new discourse of ecriture masculine. Looking at 13 individual case studies, Schoene-Harwood outlines the historical development of literary representations of masculinity from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Ian McEwan's The Child in Time. Subdivided into four parts, the study's first section takes a journey into the nineteenth-century pre-history of post-war and contemporary British men's writing, introducing readers to literature's capacity to both consolidate and unsettle traditional conceptions of femininity and masculinity. In Part II, detailed readings of modern classics such as Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange, Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top reveal the persistence of patriarchal gender hierarchies in the 1950s and early 1960s. The third and central section explores the influence feminist thought has had on some men's contemporary re-imaging of themselves beyond the confines of traditional gender formations. The final section discusses Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall as an attempt to subvert patriarchal masculinity from a gay male perspective. Inspired by feminist theory and the new academic discipline of Men's Studies, Schoene-Harwood analyses men's writing both in relation to women's writing and as a literary genre in its own right. Arguing for a new discourse of ecriture masculine, Writing Men makes a challenging and theoretically ambitious contribution to current critical debates on the literary representation of gender. Key Features: * The study comprises detailed, innovative and original readings of 13 works of literature * It historicises the literary representation of masculinity by outlining its development from the nineteenth century to the immediate present * Its introductory, yet sophisticated approach will appeal to students, academics, specialists and non-specialists alike