In a series of studies, psychologists Jennifer K. Bosson and Joseph A. Vandello at the University of South Florida wanted to know, do modern men still use physical action and aggression to prove their manhood?
In one study, the researchers had asked participants to fill in 25 sentence stems that began either “A real man…” or “A real woman…” The results, as described in a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science:
Judges coded the sentence completions according to whether they contained actions (e.g., momentary behaviors that people do, such as “drives a flashy car”) or adjectives (e.g., enduring qualities that cannot be lost, such as “is honest”). Findings revealed that men, but not women, described “a real man” with more fleeting actions than enduring adjectives, and they described “a real woman” with more enduring adjectives than fleeting actions. When men completed “real man” sentences with gender atypical content (e.g., “A real man cooks dinner”), they still used action language to do so. Thus, men define their own gender status in terms of the active things that men do rather than the ways that men are.
This may help explain why men take more physical risks than women do — risks and physical aggression are convincing ways to prove manhood, especially when it’s been threatened.
To test whether this would translate into real-life aggression, the researchers set up an experiment to threaten men’s masculinity — by asking them to braid hair. (A control group braided a rope.) After they had completed the braiding, the men were offered a choice of punching a bag or solving a puzzle. Those who braided hair were more likely than men who got the rope to punch the bag; in a follow-up experiment in which both groups were allowed to punch a pad, the hair-braiders punched harder.
In a third take on the experiment, male participants braided hair and then either punched or didn’t punch a bag. Afterward, the researchers found, men who got to punch something displayed less anxiety than the guys who did nothing, these findings provide evidence that men use displays of physical aggression to restore threatened manhood.
Why does any of this matter? Because men perceive their manhood to be so precarious it affects their behavior in all aspects of life — at work, in relationships, in their health. Indeed, an unrelated study recently found that the more “macho” guys were, the less likely they were to seek health care, despite being highly educated or wealthy.