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>> 67 3 Tough Guys Don’t Care . . . Do They? Gender, Freedom, and Care Engendered Responsibilities Ludovic, the young boy who is the protagonist in Alain Berliner’s 1997 film Ma Vie en Rose [My Life in Pink], presumed that he would someday fulfill his dream and turn into a girl. It is lucky for Ludovic that he is not a middle- or high-school boy in the United States today. Here, boys and young men intensely police the boundaries of being a boy, searching to weed out “gays” and “fags” or boys who they think are otherwise different either sexually, sartorially, or in terms of academic ambition (Pascoe 2007; Ferguson 2001). Some of the victims of this harassment take their own lives (Warner 2009). As Judith Warner notes, it is ironic that as what it means to be a “man” becomes more vague in the culture as a whole, boys take deeper offense at threats to their particular notions of masculinity . These developments are a sign of a time of anxiety, but it is also a crisis of caring and, ultimately, of democratic possibility. As long as masculinity continues to be constructed around the idea that “tough guys don’t care,” so long as to “man-up” limits how to care, there is no hope that 68 > 69 How do we explain this discrepancy between what men do and what people believe about men and care? Indeed, how do we explain the persistence of an ideology of “tough guys don’t care” even when the facts belie this understanding? This is a complex task that requires digging down into some questions about the nature of masculinity, or better, competing views of masculinities in society. Looking closely at masculinities will in turn reveal many dimensions of how care’s place is obscured in contemporary American life. Exploring these points clarifies how dominant ideologies about economic life, masculine superiority, the fear of dependence , and the split between public and private life distort our capacity to make sense of our current political predicament, and thus prevent us from becoming more fully democratic. But these beliefs or ideas are not simply a “misreading” of society; they also rest upon institutions and practices to which such ideas gave rise and which reinforce those ideas now. Transforming the ideas about men’s caring will require a large political commitment. We need to change values, institutions, and practices about the relationships of masculinity (and, by extension, femininity) and care. This is so great a change that it can probably be called the next phase of democratic revolution. In this chapter, I focus on an account of “hegemonic masculinity,” rather than on multiple forms of masculinity.3 As Connell and many other scholars of masculinity have made clear, there is no single form of “masculinity ”; what it means to be a “real man” varies across time and place. Masculine men care more in some cultures than in others. Furthermore, as Connell observes, some men retain a position of social superiority by constructing their form of masculinity as better; others are made subordinate by adhering to a view of men that is part of marginalized or subservient masculinities. In the United States, the interrelationships of these different types of masculinity closely follow lines of class, race, ethnic, religious , and sexual privilege. It is not that these other forms of masculinity are not important, or not worth exploring. Yet because “hegemonic masculinity ” plays the central role in defining masculinity for the culture as a whole, I will focus on it.4 The work on describing multiple and overlapping conceptions of masculinity has just begun to receive scholarly attention. I invite others to explore my findings and these broad questions within other configurations of masculinity as well. But I also do not wish to make a definitive pronouncement about what masculinity and care might mean. In the end, democratic life and public policy do not rely upon the judgments of one 70 > 71 the problem with these biological arguments is that they do not admit how humans have frequently altered “natural” processes. While artificial wombs (ectogenesis) do not yet exist (Simonstein 2006), women now sometimes bear children as surrogates for other women, a practice that increasingly occurs across national boundaries (Hochschild 2012). The practice of feeding infants foods other than breast milk has been a feature of Western culture in the past century, and before that, wet-nursing was widespread. So there is no reason why the “natural” mother “naturally ” cares...

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