By Brittany Hutson
How would you describe a masculine man? What does he look like?
Now how would you describe a hypermasculine man? What does he look like?
According to social scientists, a hypermasculine man exhibits three qualities: verbal or physical aggression, overt sexuality and enjoyment of risk taking. While these qualities are commonly perceived to be negative it’s not necessarily where the problem lies. Wherein the problem does lie however is how the term hypermasculine is casually tacked on and perpetuates stereotypes about black, Hispanic and certain homosexual men. Vanderbilt University’s assistant professor of sociology, Richard Pitt, explores this troubling field of study in a chapter titled “Revisiting Hypermasculinity: Shorthand for Marginalized Masculinities” in the book Where Are the Brothers: Essays and Studies on African American Masculinities. We spoke to Dr. Pitt to learn more about this ambiguous word and how it marginalizes minority men.
What is troubling to you about the idea of hypermasculinity?
People just use the word as if the word doesn’t have a real definition. So by using the word that has a real definition and just slapping it casually around on, for example, on black men who are standing on the street corner, then that by itself is a problem because remember, the definition of hypermasculinity says that these are men who are very violent, are likely to rape you and are risk takers.
The second issue winds up being that people tend to use hypermasculinity in literature as a way to study the behavior of men of color, gay men who are “straight” acting, working class men and Hispanics. You would be hard-pressed to find an article that says let’s look at hypermasculine behavior on Wall Street or let’s look at hypermasculine behavior in white men—they don’t do it. So these groups wind up owning the term because when we’re looking at these particular behaviors, we tend to describe their behavior as hypermasculine, but we don’t describe other populations’ behavior as hypermasculine.
Where did the negative perception surrounding hypermasculinity come from?
Masculinity itself doesn’t really have a good name. If we’re looking at masculinity as problematic and you throw the word hyper- on that, then it’s really bad. I think where we start out is those of us who study gender, because we’re often feminists, look down upon masculinity. We tend to come down hard on men and men’s behaviors and we tend not to do that for women. We could never look at men’s hypermasculinity and see positives in it. It wound up being the question of how do men become this horrible thing that is hypermasculine, not should we sit down and deal with our sort of negative issues around our sense that hypermasculinity is bad.
The way hypermasculinity is referred to in academia and the media, it seems to put men in a limited box. For example, either they are aggressive and overtly sexual, or they are possibly looked at as being feminine or homosexual. What’s the consequence of this?
I think one of the problems we have is that black men don’t have room to partake in the fullness of masculinity that I think white men are able to. There are things that I do that I think don’t come off as hypermasculine or butch. So people would look at me and say, ‘I wonder if he’s gay? He doesn’t play sports, he’s not really aggressive, he’s not hitting on women all the time…what’s his story?’ They expect me to do all those things as a black man. Or, I don’t do any of those things as a black man and though people don’t automatically go to ‘is he gay?’ they just say, ‘oh, he acts white.’ Why? Because the way that I do masculinity doesn’t look like gay masculinity—that would be even more extreme—it looks like white masculinity. But it certainly catches people’s attention and they say, ‘you’re not the average black guy.’ We make the average black guy hypermasculine.
Usually when we’re talking about masculinity it really sort of starts with white men. Then we’ve had to expand it because people ask, ‘what about black men, or working class men, or gay men, or Hispanic men?’ What winds up happening is black masculinity is something different than white masculinity. Then we start to [visualize] black masculinity as having a particular look that doesn’t look like white masculinity. I argue that black masculinity has very masculine approaches and very non-masculine approaches that look very different from the way white men do masculinity.
It also depends on how we’re measuring masculinity. If you ask someone what’s a man and they say masculinity is a man that takes care of his family. Well, a lot of social circumstances prohibit black men from being able to take care of their family, which means that we’re not hypermasculine and we’re not masculine in that case, we’re hypo-masculine—we’re not fully masculine. What you see in literature is that black men are either too masculine, too hypersexual, too hyper-aggressive, or on the other hand, they’re hypo-masculine. We don’t talk about black men as just masculine.
In your chapter, you write, “one can see scapegoating clearly with regard to the concept of hypermasculinity.” Can you extend on this idea?
One of the reasons we tend to use labels is to say that those people aren’t us and when there’s a lot of social problems in the world, it’s great to say not only are those people not us, but those people are the problem. I think what hypermasculinity does is enable people to say that the problem for the black community are those black hypermasculine men. It makes it easier to categorize a particular group and say that’s not us. That’s where the scapegoating becomes easy because we can actually label them and say it’s those hypermasculine people.
What needs to be done to start changing the discourse around hypermasculinity?
We need to get people to be vigilant about the use of the word. We’re not trying to change the fact that some black men do have something that looks like excessively masculine behavior but what we don’t want to do is to use [the term] hypermasculine to sum up what it is we think we are talking about. We have to be more cautious in our use of the word and not just slap it on as shorthand for a particular kind of masculinity.
