'No hard feelings': Resolving and Redefining Threatened Masculinity

Abstract

This project sheds light on men's choice in the face of threats to their masculinity: to compensate to appear more masculine or to revise their definitions of manhood. Research has demonstrated that men overcompensate in their displays of masculinities when faced with challenges to their dominant status. However, not all men pursue dominant displays of masculinity through heterosexuality: Older men (85+) may abandon ideals of masculinity tied to sexual dominance as they once did in middle age. This dissertation weaves together men's three distinct pursuits of dominant manhood: approval of violence against women (AVAW), changes to sexual function in old age (i.e., flaccidity or erectile dysfunction), and sugar dating (i.e., dating between younger women and an older man, in which money is exchanged for intimacy). I show that men's use of compensatory heterosexuality offers them a way to do gender when confronted with threatened masculinity in the form(s) of subordination to women, sexual dysfunction, and older age. In each project, men rely on displays of heterosexual dominance and objectification of women as a compensatory means to do masculinity. However, their reliance on heterosexuality is subject to change under such conditions as older age, which can lead to revisions of manhood.