Book Review: Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short

Abstract

consistently careful not to assert that masculinity is, rather that it is constructed as, but this makes the insistence that masculinities can be grouped into open or closed forms more puzzling. Second, whilst the book deals with change, whether some of the trends she describes are either historically unique or progressive is questionable. Elliott states that “masculinities have traditionally been considered closed, bounded, unitary” (p.55). Leaving aside the issues in talking about “traditional masculinity,” the idea that men’s power has been derived solely from autonomy, rationality, and emotional stoicism overlooks how “authentic” emotional expression have also been seen as signs of freedom for young men particularly. The discussions of openness in Chapter 5 (young men realizing who they “really are” and leaving life behind to move to Berlin) echo tropes reminiscent of Goethe or Rousseau’s Confessions, 1950s beat authors’, or the 1980s “new man,” not to mention discourses around emotional authenticity, masculinity, freedom, and creativity as central to rock, romantic, or jazz cultures. Whilst this book details the complexities of young men navigating contemporary masculinities, it is primarily about the freedoms and anxieties of young, privileged men, who make up the majority of Elliott’s sample (something she notes on p.181). This is valuable. However, despite insisting that change in masculinity comes from the margins (p.27), this claim is only really substantiated by a lone German queer, working-class respondent, Manni, who is discussed in relation to “caring masculinities” in Chapter 6 and who is atypical of her sample. As such whilst she observes that moves toward openness are linked to class (p. 193), she leaves the issue of how material-cultural, rather than cultural factors alone, influence possibilities for openness, tantilisingly open-ended.