Towards an Integrated Perspective on Gender, Masculinity, and Manhood

Abstract

For decades our understanding of gender, masculinity, and manhood has arguably been bedevilled by uninformative pseudo-academic gender ideology. Detached from biological reality, and crediting culture with almost autonomous causation, this ideology of gender feminist social constructionism has exhibited a dogged self-preserving reflex of disconfirmation, whenever faced with knowledge challenging its dogmatic assertions. Its unashamed devaluation of thought, through resort to propagandist mantras of global male aspersion and political correctness, underscores not only its fundamentalist nature disqualifying it from any serious consideration as a basis for understanding gender and social relations, but also the urgent need for a perspective, unfettered by ideology, that reflects current interdisciplinary knowledge, and is actually useful.