Young Men’s Vulnerability in Relation to Women’s Resistance to Emphasized Femininity

Abstract

This study uses a critical discursive approach to examine young men’s vulnerabilities in relation to emphasized femininity. Since masculinity is inextricably defined in relation to femininity, men’s achievement of masculinity is intimately dependent on, and vulnerable to, women’s complicity with traditional or emphasized femininity. Analysis centers on men’s negotiations of women’s resistance to one of three forms of emphasized femininity: (1) compliance or receptivity to men’s sexual advances and desires, (2) emotional caretaking, and (3) passivity. Rather than ratcheting up traditionally heroic and macho masculine responses, the young men managed vulnerability through self-deprecation, nonchalance, and scripting to construct an antiheroic and ordinary masculinity. Insights into the nature of men’s vulnerability in relation to women’s experience of emphasized femininity are discussed with the aim of expanding theoretical models of ‘‘men’s pain,’’ models that continue to pivot predominantly around hegemonic masculinity.