Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body (review)

In this engaging, sophisticated book, Christopher Forth provides a transnational history of masculinity over the last three hundred years of Western history. "Modernity" and "masculinity," he argues, exist in a state of inescapable and productive tension. Every "progressive" development in the West, such as new forms of technology, the rise of commercial society and urbanization, make possible new forms of masculinity: techno-nerdishness, aggressive stockbroking and metrosexuality, for example. However, such novel masculinities appear haunted by a past where men were harder, more physically virile and less constricted by civilization. This explains recurring efforts to escape the effeminizing tendencies of modern life by returning to something more simple, visceralandnatural, like athleticism and militarism. Modern masculinity, then, is structurally unstable, dynamic and contradictory.

Such formulations can often seem rather abstract, but Forth's history is satisfyingly, indeed ebulliently, fleshy. He explores the dynamic of modern masculinity across a broad range of bodily practices, including dueling, sexuality, fashion, manners, warfare, bodybuilding, and, perhaps most intriguingly, diet. Food, Forth argues, has for centuries been a critical site where claims and counter-claims about masculinity have been made, in multiple cultural contexts. There has never been a stable "masculine diet" but rather a series of competing masculine diets reflecting various constructions of masculinity. In the eighteenth century, for example, the British celebrated their plain and perhaps rather monotonous diet as "manly" (105) and contrasted it to the more refined, effete, modern French diet. Yet French gastronomy was itself an exclusively male practice, and gastronomes regularly used militaristic language to depict their meals (107). Consumption of meat, which rose dramatically in the nineteenth century, was firmly connected to ideals of virility, strength and violence, but 'muscular vegetarians' challenged this assumption by arguing that meat-eating was profoundly artificial, unhealthy and unmanly (112). A meatless diet would be more natural in that it would produce less violent men. Others retorted that men were naturally hunters: "true" masculinity appeared, and appears, endlessly elusive. Meanwhile, obesity, once equated with sturdy stoutness, slowly became a bodily demonstration of failed self-mastery and softness. In his fascinating discussion of the gender problems of the modern clerk, Forth depicts this quintessentially petit-bourgeois figure wedged behind a desk, enslaved by technology, surrounded by women and lamenting his slowly expanding paunch. Little wonder that men have become as dietarily confused as women.

The ineluctable ambivalences of modern masculinity have also been articulated around the issue of violence. For many modern commentators, the transcendence of violence and aggression is the mark of progress, while the capacity to neutralize pain through analgesics and anesthetics is routinely heralded as the greatest of scientific developments. Yet excessive passivity, and over-sensitivity to pain, is among the most obvious hallmarks of weakness and effeminacy. As Forth notes, this explains a notable trend (at both individual and collective levels) towards periodic renewal of masculinity through controlled violence or measured doses of pain (115-116). This attempt at rejuvenation has taken numerous culturally-consecrated forms, from the rise of organized sport and extreme leisure practices to compulsory military service. As Forth puts it, the introduction of compulsory military service in Prussia in 1813 was "gender therapy for burghers who were distanced from a warrior lifestyle" (130).

At no time (or place) in the modern West, then, can masculinity really be said to have been stable and unproblematic. Moreover, as Forth conclusively demonstrates, this instability has been lived at many levels or scales: within the individual, between individuals, and between nations and cultures. It is also experienced in profoundly bodily ways, through the sports one plays, the clothes one wears and the food one eats. Self-control and respectability were masculine virtues, but periodic, controlled, loss of control connected men with a natural core largely untouched by civilization. Thus men have the privilege of being simultaneously both modern and non-modern, and the curse of being unable to ever perfectly transcend the...