Precarious Manhood and The Future of Work
That screenshot above is from this article at Northwestern, which is pretty good. Basically the article is about hyper-masculine work cultures where you constantly get told to “man up,” “sack up,” “nut up,” “be a man,” etc. Feelings in these places are nothing; “emotions” isn’t even a word. It’s just the epitome of hyper-intense male success. Eat what you kill type cultures. We all know these places. Here’s the basic hypothesis that the researchers were working off:
When their masculinity is threatened, this literature shows, men try to reassert it through aggressive behavior. In a bar, this might manifest as throwing a punch; at work, in nasty comments or petty theft.
As you’d expect, they found it to be largely true. When men get “bowed up” by other men at work, they take that anger at being challenged masculinity-wise and they go treat someone else like shit, or steal money, or do something else asinine and aggressive just because they need to recover the 0/1 binary they just lost to another hyper-masculine sales-type dude.
Phrased another way: the rise of the douchebags. And, regardless of where you reside politically, let me tell you Trump helped a lot with this, because he opened the floodgates for men to behave and act and speak in ways they had always kinda played down due to vague notions of “professionalism.” Remember when he called some countries “shit-holes?” Many white dudes of affluence (and some not) have thought that for years. But now they almost had permission to say it. It was a shift in societal norms.
Anyway, so then Northwestern goes off the rails a little bit, because we want to talk about how to deal with this hyper-masculinity stuff at work, right? And we come to this:
However, it’s important to understand how men act and react in the workplace, especially at a time when “there’s this narrative about companies and industries with really competitive cultures and ‘bro culture,’” Kouchaki notes. These kinds of environments are likely to fuel manhood threats — and therefore misconduct. “We have to be aware of what leads to this type of threat and avoid it,” she says.
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Kouchaki and her colleagues suggest that to steer clear of this danger, male leaders in particular should take care to promote positive, ethical work cultures. Human-resources professionals may want to consider framing trainings about sexism and male privilege in ways that won’t inadvertently backfire by causing men to feel threatened.
But ultimately, broader cultural shifts may be most important. Perhaps, in a world with a broader idea of acceptable masculinity, threats to manhood wouldn’t feel so significant or have such negative effects. “Thinking about the culture and the socialization process is really important,” Kouchaki says.
Let me unpack some of that for you, if I may:
These are important issues at work, but the way work is currently set up, especially around the role of men (see also: society), it’s very hard to solve for these issues short of “go find a new job.”
Some other stuff here: