Paul Clift Some time ago, and without having done anything wrong, a drunken idiot insulted me in the street. Without thinking, I punched and knocked him to the ground. Typical male behaviour - solve a problem with fists instead of reason.
Debate around sexuality within our HIV population too often strikes out into areas of morality. What this fails to do is allow us men to look without prejudice at who we are.
A South African presentation at the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok enabled some of us to do this by exploring the idea of masculinity. Although it drew on interviews with heterosexual men in South Africa, it raised questions that applied elsewhere, including here in the UK.
Women have been asking basic questions about who they are, their role in society and their relationship with men, since Mary Wollestonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 200 years ago. But men have broadly failed to match this. The nearest we come is an examination by Edward Carpenter’s of gay men’s identity and place in society in the late 19th century onwards. In recent years this appears to have been supplanted by an interest in shopping. But there is barely a word about men - regardless of their sexuality.
This is where the work underway in South Africa takes on broader importance. The University of the Western Cape focussed on masculinity and risk-taking.
It asked interviewees to define masculinity and then looked at their attitudes to taking risk, with a view to applying any lessons learned to HIV prevention.
Men defined their masculinity by what there were not: not women, not homosexual. This is more or less what we find of heterosexual men in the UK and, I suspect, in most societies. And this is what I find strange. Why cannot men define themselves by what they are instead of by what they are not? And to make things more complicated, plenty of gay men identify themselves as masculine, as possessing the quality of masculinity. So where does this leave men overall?
Dominant masculinity in more conservative societies assumes a position of dominance over what it considers feminine, be this women or men who have sex with men.
Having desires for men is regarded as a defining aspect of femininity and it is to be kept in a subservient place. Along with this is a sense that being in touch with one’s emotions is not a masculine state: women cry, men do not. This places some testing limitations on men who are expected, and expect, to contain their emotions and their emotional/psychological responses to situations, however demanding these might be.
Within this view of being a man lies the male approach to risk taking; risk taking is seen as very much part of being a man. On top of this, risk taking practices are often bound up with each other (‘another pint won’t hurt you’ ‘bet you can’t drive from Hyde Park to Brighton in under an hour’ ‘don’t bother with condoms, it’s better without’).
The South African presentation put forward some progressive recommendations, including the importance of working with men/boys around gender identity; challenging dominant views of masculinity, and inclusion of sexual orientation issues in gender/HIV work as a way of challenging and reconstructing dominant versions of masculinity. The benefits of reconstructing dominant versions of masculinity are enormous, to women as well as to men, but who is to do the reconstruction? I feel that men are the people to do this, in their own way and in their own space; above all, to redefine masculinity in a way that is constructive, sensitive and still recognisably masculine. If we can survive life with HIV, surely we can learn to trust ourselves and each other enough to listen to each other and support each other in our own spaces? But first of all we have to ask ourselves who we and each other are, and be comfortable with that. But we can still reserve the right to punch idiots who insult us though.
