Macho Culture Research Articles

Macho culture blamed for poor health statistics of men.

The macho male culture prevents many men from owning up to their ill health and seeking treatment, Congress heard.

Russian Report: Alcoholism and rising mortality in the Russian Federation

In the Russian Federation today the high incidence of alcoholism and drunkenness helps to account for rising death rates, more particularly among the male population. During the mid-1980s a significant reduction in deaths from alcohol related diseases was achieved by state action in curtailing the supply of alcohol. However, official data disclose a pattern of sharply increased consumption per head since 1987, with high proof drinks--especially vodka--now forming a larger share in the total. In current economic conditions the effects of a traditional macho drinking culture are exacerbated by a reduction of state control over the quality of alcohol available for purchase. A substantial increase has occurred in deaths from most principal causes, with a disproportionate increase in deaths from non-natural causes, including deaths caused predominantly by alcohol. Average expectation of life at birth has fallen especially sharply for men; by 1993 it had slumped to 59.0 years--that is, to below the age at which a pension starts to be paid.

Male impersonators: men performing masculinity

In Male Impersonators, Mark Simpson explores the range of male life and masculinity, posing witty and important questions about bodybuilding, tattoos, pornography, cruising, advertising, and team sports. Simpson looks at how gay men appropriate the skinhead phenomenon and why; how Marky Mark exploits the hustler mystique and what it says to gay and straight men; how the Men's movement is being sought out by men--straight or gay--who feel alienated from a macho culture, and compares the participation and reactions of men to various manly pursuits. Throughout, Male Impersonators examines the roles of homoeroticism and narcissism in the male world, and the performativity of masculinity itself.

The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment

In The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich examines men's relationship to family as shaped by and reflected through popular and elite cultural ideas and images from 1950s through 1970s, relationship of those to economic realities of family wage system, and consequences of both ideological and economic realities for future of marriage and family life. For those who have lived through these decades, reading her analysis is like seeing an old melodrama through camera angles of an exceptionally gifted director. The materials, sequencing, naming (e.g., Reisman's other-directed man as Parsonian woman or Charles Reich as the voyeur in supermarket) are sharp, often ironic, and reverberate with one's memory of those times. I did not just read this book; I viscerated it. Among images and ideas that have shaped men's hearts for past two decades are: 1950s requirement that adult male have a career, marry, and support a wife and children; resentment of gray-flannel-suited man towards conformity and his work; escape from marriage by Playboy; rejection of both work and marriage by Beat; discovery that success could be a health hazard, medical advice to men to slow down and relax; humanistic psychology and Fritz Perls (Do your own thing); hippies, androgyny and counter culture; and ethnicization of gay man, and growth of macho gaymale culture. From a moral climate in 1950s that honored men who were responsible, self-disciplined, and committed to protecting women and children, Ehrenreich argues, we have moved into one that lauds as healthy, in men, irresponsibility, selfindulgence, and an isolationist detachment from claims of others (p. 169). It was men, not women, who rebelled first from their sex-role, and that revolt has profoundly undermined breadwinner ethic and altered relationship between sexes.