Thus, masculinity begins in escape—the perceived need to separate from a feminine identity. The main demands for positive achievement of masculinity arise outside the home, and those demands reinforce the boy’s need to be what his mother is not. In the hierarchical and rigorously competitive society of other boys, one categorical imperative outranks all the others: don't be a girl. Femininity is a “negative identity,” a part of the self that must be repressed. The manhood pursued through male rivalry is more than maturity, more than adulthood; it also includes a set of qualities customarily defined as masculine. Although masculinity is defined against its polar opposite, the identification with competence and power in a male-dominated world has made it seem to be society's norm for being fully human. Femininity is seen, not merely as deviance from the norm, but as a fundamental flaw—a failure, at the deepest level, to qualify. Pondering this reality, Simone de Beauvoir described the traditional form of femininity as “mutilation.”5
We are all consumers of images of manhood. According to these images a man is supposed to be: active; assertive; confident; decisive; ready to lead; strong; courageous; morally capable of violence; independent; competitive; practical; successful in achieving goals; emotionally detached; cool in the face of danger or crisis; blunt in expression; sexually aggressive and yet protective toward women. “Proving yourself” as a man can take many forms, but all of them are expressive, and all are variations on the theme of power.
When Henry Kissinger said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” perhaps the wish was father to the thought. Surely his pronouncement on the causal link between power and sex is only part of the story. If power is sexy, sex is also power. When men fear women and seek to dominate them, one reason is that they have learned to identify male sexuality with conquest. In another perspective, however, we can see the subordination of women as part of men’s nervous efforts to repress the “feminine” in themselves, to keep their manhood visible to other men. The deepest fear of all, embedded in a never-ending drama of male rivalry, is the fear of being dominated by other men, humiliated for not measuring up to the manly ideal. * * *
The heart of the ideology of masculinity is the belief that power rightfully belongs to the masculine—that is, to those who display the traits traditionally called masculine. This belief has two corollaries. The first is that the gender line must be clearly drawn, and the second is that power is rightfully distributed among the masculine in proportion to their masculinity, as determined not merely by their physical stature or aggressiveness, but more generally by their ability to dominate and to avoid being dominated. Both parts of the ideology contribute to the subordination of groups. This function is easy to see in efforts to express the gender line in sharp definition; the ideology of masculinity will be effective in assigning power only if those who are masculine are clearly identified. The second corollary of the ideology highlights the centrality of male rivalry. By making anxiety into an everyday fact of life, it leads nervous men to seek reassurances of their masculinity through group rituals that express domination over other groups. In combination these two beliefs purport to justify power by tautology, to ground the legitimacy of domination in domination itself.
This site where the above paragraphs are from
Says it's for use in teach-ins on the military’s policy.
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/solomon/Documents/Militar...
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