Does masculinity have a history? Everything social has a history, and masculinity is a social phenomenon that has, like femininity, a long and surprising history. In fact, its changeability amazes those who see it as something stable and natural. Being a man in the 15th century was something very different from what it is to be a man today. But the history of masculinity also surprises those who are aware of its constructed nature, especially for the persistence of some of its most characteristic features. Now and in the past, masculinity has been in some way linked to the exercise of dominion and power, and this calls for forms that are stubbornly repeated in different contexts. However, viewed from the present, the most surprising thing may be how the relationship between masculinity and its bodily medium has changed over time. To put it another way, history shows us how much the strength of the link binding biology to gender has varied over time. In this article I will therefore discuss history, masculinities and bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Critical awareness of masculinity has largely sprung from feminism. As we know, 20th-century feminist thought challenged the view of human beings that chained women to fulfilment of a supposed biological destiny. Affirming the socially constructed nature of gender models was a venture with enormous consequences, one that affected femininity of course, but also masculinity. This masculinity supposedly linked to men\u2019s nature was in reality a set of social values that, just as they were created, could change and accompany the birth of a different, fairer society. The feminist project to transform gender was no easy challenge in a society that had made femininity and masculinity into immutable values. A modern society that believed in the existence of two sexes that were essentially, naturally and radically distinct and complementary. However, it was not always like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The transition to modernity opened up deep cracks in the way of understanding the world and human beings. Authors like Thomas Laqueur have explored with great lucidity the changes that came about at this crucial point in our history. His proposal does not aim to be a universal narrative that obscures the differences between some societies and others, but to serve to identify the broad trends that help to understand these far-reaching changes. The starting point for these changes, inherited from the past, was a hierarchical, radically misogynistic view that could be characterised as being of \u201ca single sex\u201d. As might be expected, this single sex, male, had its highest expression in men and had a defective, imperfect version in women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to this view, all human beings were to be judged according to a single code of virtue, a series of values considered universally positive and at the same time typically masculine: courage, strength, piety, loyalty, restraint, keeping secrets\u2026 Thus, there was a single chain of human perfectibility. Male and female saints, for example, as historians like Bakarne Altonaga have made clear, had to conform to a single canon of perfection [1]<\/a>1 \u2014 Altonaga, B. (2021) Cuerpos en tr\u00e1nsito. Los significados del g\u00e9nero en la crisis del Antiguo R\u00e9gimen en el Pa\u00eds Vasco.\u00a0Granada: Comares.\n<\/span><\/span>. From this point of view, masculinity was the most complete expression of humanity. And femininity was not the inferior other, but simply inferior. It is not surprising that feminism in these pre-modern societies concentrated its efforts on combating misogyny and proving that women could also be human beings with dignity and examples of virtue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In these societies, moreover, masculinity\u2014and femininity\u2014had a relationship with bodies that was far from what subsequently became dominant. In contexts that gave primacy to the spiritual side of human beings and where science was not the source of truth that it later became, bodies were more malleable, unstable phenomena. As Francisco V\u00e1zquez Garc\u00eda has made clear, nature in these societies was not a purely biological domain governed by its own laws. It was a moral order that expressed the divine will. Sex was fundamentally a social rank, a condition, and the body had a more fluid, open character [2]<\/a>2 \u2014 V\u00e1zquez Garc\u00eda, F. (2018) La invenci\u00f3n del sujeto homosexual, in M. C. Bianciotti, M. N. Gonz\u00e1lez-Mart\u00ednez and D. C. Fern\u00e1ndez-Matos (eds.), En todos los colores. Cartograf\u00edas del g\u00e9nero y las sexualidades en Hispanoam\u00e9rica. Barranquilla: Ediciones Universidad Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar, 18-19.\n<\/span><\/span>. This must not lead one to think that this was a universe that was tolerant with difference or permissive with infringements of the gender order. On the contrary, rules and punishments were clear and severe. However, both rules and the punishments for breaking these rules obeyed a logic different from that which governs our view of gender today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 20th-century feminist thought challenged the view of human beings that chained women to fulfilment of a supposed biological destiny. The masculinity supposedly linked to men\u2019s nature was in reality a set of social values that, just as they were created, could change and accompany the birth of a different, fairer society<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Thus, centuries ago it was conceivable for bodies to undergo changes for the better\u2014which from a misogynistic point of view meant shifting from feminine to masculine\u2014through extreme physical effort, a change in the balance of the humours or sudden changes in temperature which could bring out the male sexual organs women had inside them [3]<\/a>3 \u2014 Burshatin, I. (1999) Written on the Body Slave or Hermaphrodite in Sixteen-Century Spain, in J. Blackmore and G. S. Hutcheson eds., Queer Iberia Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. New York: Duke University Press, 447.\n<\/span><\/span>. On the other hand, the perception of being a man or a woman tended to be more performative than simply biological. This perception, which had more to do with doing than being, lay behind narratives like those of Christine de Pizan (1364\u20131430) when, a couple of years before her major work La Cit\u00e9 des Dames<\/em> (The City of Ladies), she described her own transformation from woman to man. After being widowed at the age of twenty-five and having to support her family, Christine de Pizan was forced to earn her living in a men\u2019s world as a professional writer. She realised then that if women were weak, she had to become a man to survive. She overcame her fears and Fortune taught her how to be male. She felt stronger than before, her body rougher and more agile, her voice deeper: \u201cYou who hear me, I remain a man: I have been a man for more than thirteen years,\u201d she wrote [4]<\/a>4 \u2014 Pizan, C. (1995 [1403]). Le Livre de la Mutation de Fortune in J. C. Polet (dir.), Patrimoine litt\u00e9raire europ\u00e9en, anthologie de langue fran\u00e7aise, Vol. 6. Brussels: De Boeck, 136-137.\n<\/span><\/span>. In this way Christine de Pizan was talking to us about a way of being a man that seems strange in the light of today\u2019s dominant views. We can say that, in a context in which the difference between nature and nurture was so different from today, perceptions of gender, sexual difference and masculinity were also very different.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Thus, modern societies introduced new ways of seeing masculinity and masculinities. This is not a question of inequality and the hierarchical principle disappearing, far from it. Modern societies are founded both on the principle of equality and on the practical exercise of inequality. But the rules of the game certainly changed. While views of what we have called \u201ca single sex\u201d have not disappeared, they have lost some of their currency. They have given way to a view of gender based on two complementary, incomparable natures, each with its own virtues and faults. Two separate worlds. This new paradigm denied the possibility of comparing women to men on the basis of a shared code of values and faculties: \u201cWoman is worth more as a woman and less as a man,\u201d stated Jean-Jacques Rousseau, \u201cWhen she makes a good use of her own rights, she has the best of it; when she tries to usurp our rights, she is our inferior\u201d [5]<\/a>5 \u2014 Rousseau, J. J. (2001 [1762]) Emilio, o de la educaci\u00f3n. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 543.\n<\/span><\/span>. The so-called feminine and masculine natures were constructed at that time: the man was active, strong and rational; the woman, passive, weak and emotional. The virtues of one sex were therefore the faults of the other. The sexes were essentially different and incompatible with what Thomas Laqueur described [6]<\/a>6 \u2014 Laqueur, T. (1994) La construcci\u00f3n del sexo. Cuerpo y g\u00e9nero desde los griegos hasta Freud. Madrid: Cr\u00edtica.\n<\/span><\/span>. In fact, these two worlds, each with its own code and its own laws, neither superior nor inferior to one another, were a perverse fantasy that concealed and propped up power relations that could no longer be admitted in the context of a theoretical defence of universal rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In parallel, the sexualisation of the public and private spaces was radicalised, so guaranteeing the male monopoly of public and political life. Under the new logic, women were excluded from these spaces and these rights, not because they were inferior but because they were different, and respect for their nature required them to devote themselves to feminine tasks. The domestic sphere was set aside for them. New gender discourses offered a solution to the contradiction of denying women\u2019s political and civil rights in a kind of renegotiation of the terms of the \u201csexual contract\u201d [7]<\/a>7 \u2014 Concept developed in the late eighties by Carole Pateman in her interesting, committed study of the limits of liberalism from a gender perspective. Pateman, C. (1995). El contrato sexual. Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos.\n<\/span><\/span>. Meanwhile, science took on an unquestionable authority in setting the boundaries between the sexes. The body became something beyond question and natural laws, through those who interpreted them\u2014biologists, doctors and scientists in general\u2014set out to govern the social world, too. Natural mandates were decreed in the name of science and were therefore sacred, and the natural mission of women was motherhood. Masculinity, in all its plurality and internal hierarchies, was also indissolubly linked to the body and to a biological fact, both supposedly immutable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was certainly not a uniform, linear process; on the contrary, it is a complex story. The transition to modernity was not organised to order. But some trends in changes were consistent and proved decisive in the field discussed here. Of particular interest is the fact that the naturalisation and extreme biologisation of masculinity created the fantasy that virility was an immutable essence, linked to bodies with certain characteristics. Like this the naturalisation of masculinity covered up the tracks of the power relationship of which it formed part. Contradicting this view to show the cultural, constructed nature of masculinities is still a work in progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMasculinities in modern times<\/h5>\n\n\n\n