Male Socialization: A harmful colonial myth
The idea of a singular Male Socialization is not just transphobic, but colonial and harmful for many marginalized groups.
If you ever engaged with anything relating to feminism and gender issues, chances are high you encountered the idea of male and female socialization in some way.
The idea is basically that because of the gender you got assigned at birth (male or female), society has socialized you in one of two ways.
You either got socialized as a male and treated as a man because you were born with a penis, or you got socialized as a female and treated as a woman because you were born with a vagina.
It is further assumed that because of the gender you got assigned at birth, your psychology and behavior has been shaped in one of two ways. You either received male socialization, which is assumed to be beneficial and supposedly makes you more confident, entitled, dominant, assertive, aggressive etc. or you received female socialization, which basically functions the opposite way and makes you more submissive, timid, softspoken, passive, anxious etc.
This idea is so ingrained into our consciousness that even people in spaces you would assume to be very critical of this idea (such as trans spaces) often reproduce it by simply changing the terms slightly while expressing the same overall idea.
The discourse surrounding AMAB socialization vs AFAB socialization is a prominent example of this.
(For those that don’t know: AMAB means "Assigned Male At Birth" and AFAB means "Assigned Female At Birth".)
There are many things wrong with this male/female socialization idea that make it not just overly simplistic and downright wrong, but also incredibly harmful. Especially for marginalized people, who are already in a more vulnerable position.
For one, people are multiplicity of factors, traits, contexts and experiences. People aren’t static, and they are not just a binary gender category. The combination of factors like socio-economic standing, sexual orientation, disability, race, mental well-being, upbringing etc. can constitute a wide range of experiences and living conditions that fundamentally shape how a person desires, feels, thinks and acts (and to what extend they are able to do so within society).
Furthermore, it is not the case that people are just a collection of separate categories such as class, race or gender. These categories interconnect, causing them to influence each other in diverse ways. These interconnections constitute struggles, experiences and conditions that can not be understood by looking at these identity categories in isolation.
“Male socialization” and marginalized traits
Let’s look at some quick examples to get a better understanding of how male socialization negatively affects different types of marginalized people, and how it troubles assumptions that come with the idea of male socialization:
- Neurodivergency & assigned male gender
Imagine a guy that has Autism and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Because of his neurodivergency, he acts and lives in ways that go against what people expect of him on the basis of his aasigned gender.
He is very anxious, he expresses his feelings strongly, he has difficulty regulating his emotions to the point people frequently say that he "throws a tantrum" and he often misunderstands social situations, which causes him to frequently act in ways that go against what his peers expect of him (and often makes him blind to these unwritten expectations altogether). Because of that, he is also more unaware of the unwritten social codes that constitute "masculine" behavior.
Because his neurodivergency makes him "misperform" the conventional masculine role and goes against how people expect men to act, he is a lot more likely to get misunderstood, rejected, humiliated, insulted and even physically assaulted.
2. Sexual Queerness & assigned male gender
Imagine a guy that finds himself attracted to other guys. Because of his sexual queerness, he has close intimate relationships with other men and makes himself more vulnerable while interacting with them. He tends to be seen as more "soft" around other guys, rather than aggressive and competitive like a lot of his straight peers, and expresses himself in more “feminine” ways.
Culturally, manhood and masculinity are strongly defined by heterosexual parameters, because of the heteropatriarchal aspect of the gender binary. The male gender comes with a set of norms about what types of relationships men are expected to have with women and with other men, and how they are supposed to act within those relationships. Men are expected to be more rough, stoic, emotionally distanced and competitive with other men, while they are supposed to be more intimate, protective and romantic with women.
Because of his queerness, he goes against heteropatriarchal norms about how he is supposed to act and have relationships as a man. As a consequence of that, he is more likely to get degraded, humiliated and attacked. People are also more likely to tell him that he is weak and "not a real man" for being queer.
3. Transfemininity & assigned male gender
Imagine someone who was assigned male at birth and lived as a cis man throughout most of their early life, but later started identifying as a trans woman. Even before she started identifying as a trans woman, she already felt at odds with the gender she got assigned and displayed a lot of gender non conforming behavior. This frequently caused her both internal and external stress about her identity.
Because of the cissexist nature of the modern gender binary, which ascribes us a gender category at birth that shapes our lives from this point on, she was taught to understand herself as a man and was approached by the world as such, yet also punished because she never quite matched that assigned role.
The binary gender system forced her into the role of manhood, which caused her nothing but distress, as her whole subjectivity stood in conflict with images of manhood. She felt like a failure and constantly thought something is wrong with her, rather than the gendered nature of society.
Because of her assigned gender, she is more likely to be punished, rejected and humiliated whenever she acts in ways that don’t conform to her assigned gender. This will even further her feeling that she is broken.
“Male socialization” means nothing but an oppressive force that brought with itself a life full of anxiety, stress, violence, failure and rejection for her.
There are many more potential outcomes and examples one could highlight to show how harmful the idea of male socialization is for various marginalized people. From this point on however, let’s look at colonialism and how the idea of male/female socialization reflects a colonial way of thinking.
Colonialism and the errors of some intersectional approaches
Identity categories are not something people simply have. They are not individual essences that exist in a vacuum, separate from the processes of the world and the totalizing effects of the systems we live under. Just like our bodies, subjectivities and desires, they are historical and interpersonal.
Some intersectional approaches make the fatal mistake of seeing categories of race, gender, sexuality, disability etc. as separate and self-existing. This leads them to understand oppression as something that gets added on top of each other based on how many marginal identities you have, rather than as something that creates a multitude of experiences based on the way various identities mix with each other.
A queer woman, for example, is seen as experiencing discrimination based on both her gender (misogyny) and her sexuality (homophobia). A queer man on the other hand is seen as experiencing discrimination only based on his sexuality, while structures of discrimination are assumed to be silent when it comes to his gender.
Such approaches fail to account for the ways womanhood, manhood and queerness mix together in people, creating struggles and experiences that can not be understood by looking at these categories separately. Because manhood and womanhood come with different gender norms, queerness interacts with them differently and can constitute different struggles for queer men as opposed to queer women (or increase/decrease the likelihood of certain experiences).
By treating these identity categories as simply given, these approaches furthermore ignore the historical contexts that gave rise to them in the first place.
One such context that is essential to understand in order to get the full picture of how and why gender is understood and materialized these days under global capitalism a certain way is colonialism, specifically the historically recent processes of western colonialism.
When we think about colonialism, we often think of it as a thing that mainly just concerns race and the struggles of racial minorities. We have the tendency to see race and gender as separate categories, and so we tend to treat movements surrounding race and gender as perhaps allied, but ultimately concerned with separate things.
This could not be further from the truth. Our modern conception of gender and biological sex have been thoroughly produced by colonial processes in a manner that is instrinsically linked to the racialization of populations that occured alongside it. This process constituted (and still constitutes) different norms, identities and oppressive power relations for various people.
Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System
In her essay "Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System", the philosopher María Lugones utilizes and expands on the insights from writers such as Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Julie Greenberg, Anibal Quijano and Paula Gunn Allen to offer an overview about how western colonial processes produced the modern heterosexualist binary gender system and, more broadly, how race, gender, sexuality have historically been shaped in a manner that intrinsically ties them together.
Lugones highlights that it is a mistake to think of colonialism as a closed historical event, rather than as an ongoing process that shapes our institutions, politics and social formations up to this day. She also emphasizes that colonialism did not simply impose precolonial european gender arrangements on the colonized, but rather that those arrangements were produced in relation with racialization during colonial processes.
Gender, Lugones says, is a colonial concept to organize production, property relations, social dynamics and ways of knowing in a way that serves the interests of eurocentric imperialist capitalism.
- Looking beyond "The Patriarchy"
A lot of feminist discourses and arguments about male socialization simply center their analysis on “the patriarchy” to understand gender: A binary ahistorical model of gender relations based on male supremacy. Lugones criticizes such a view by pointing out that it not only naturalizes and universalizes (binary) gender and heteronormativity, but also fails to account for the ways gender, race, sexuality and capitalism are impossible to understand separately from each other.
Furthermore, it erases the violence of coloniality that was necessary to create and establish the binary gender system on different parts of the world (which often had fairly different ways of living together and organizing society) by simply treating those gender configurations as a given.
The idea that genitals define your destiny and purpose as a being in society is a thoroughly colonial one. Lugones uses Julie A. Greenberg and her work "Definitional Dilemmas" to highlight how western institutions have the power to assign people a particular racial and sexual category.
Western laws not only fail to recognize intersex people, institutions also forcefully assimilate people whose bodies do not fit the rigid standards of the sex binary through operations and other imposed medical interventions.
This medical mutilation of intersex individuals, as Greenberg shows, is motivated by very particular ideas about manhood and womanhood. In the westernized world, the essence of manhood is understood as the ability to penetrate a vagina, while the essence of womanhood is understood as the ability to bear children.
Such definitions of manhood and womanhood reveal the extent to which compulsive heterosexuality shapes our gendered understanding of biology, bodies and our roles in the colonial binary gender system. Lugones puts emphasis on how heterosexuality has been naturalized and made compulsive (alongside the binary gender system) in a demeaning and violent manner by eurocentric capitalism for the sake of social and reproductive control.
Lugones uses Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí’s work "The Invention of Women" to highlight that gender itself is not universal and ahistorical. In it, Oyěwùmí shows that prior to western colonization, gender was not a structuring principle in Yoruba society. In fact, there wasn’t even a gender system in place.
She tells us that the assumption that gender was always essential to Yoruba life is an example of how the west uses its global dominance to impose its logic onto the rest of the world through its language and scientific institutions. A direct quote from her text puts it quite well: "researchers always find gender when they look for it".
Paula Gunn Allen’s work "The sacred hoop" is also utilized by Lugones to further challenge the idea that a binary heteropatriarchal gender system is natural and universal. Lugones emphasizes how Allen shows the centrality of a gynecratic spirituality and egalitarian social structures in Indian life.
Homosexuality was also recognized in positive terms and common in many Indian tribes, such as the Apache, Navajo, Winnebago, Pawnee, Choctaw and many more.
Allen also points out that the gender system of Indian tribes were not strictly binary and that gender was not primarily understood in biological terms, but rather "on the basis of proclivity, inclination and temperament" as she puts it.
2. The connection between gender and race
Lugones essay helps to shed some light on how the modern gender system is thoroughly racialized.
The hegemonic understanding of gender is based on white bourgeois ideas of masculinity and femininity, while racialized minorities had to and still have to deal with different gendered relations.
Darker skin generally came to be associated with a more animalistic and destructive nature.
The idea of women as passive, soft, timid and gentle is a white bourgeois idea of femininity that has not been applied to women of color in the same way. Women of color have come to be seen as more animalistic and primal. They were seen as sexually female, but without femininity. Unlike white bourgeois women, women of color came to be seen as more aggressive, assertive, combatitive and primitive.
Something similar applies to men of color. The idea of the man as civil, rational, logical and enlightened is a white bourgeois idea of masculinity that has came to be seen as the norm for bourgeois white men. Men of color, however, often came to be viewed as a lot more destructive, primitive, hostile and dangerous.
It is important to mention that there are of course differences in how different groups in different places have come to be racialized and gendered. The general point that is to be derived here is that gender can functionally not be separated from racialization in colonial contexts.
People of color (black and indigenous people in particular) came to be seen as more primitive and underdeveloped, which is why they were viewed as lacking many of the “civilized” masculine and feminine traits that white men and white women were assumed to have.
Additionally, the colonial inferiorization of people of color has been used as justification to treat them as lesser beings and to use them as slaves. This has been done not just by white bourgeois men, but also by white bourgeois women.
Only looking at things through the idea of the patriarchy makes us blind to the historical instances in which white bourgeois women had (and still have) social, cultural and economic power over men of color through colonial relations.
The final verdict on “Male Socialization”
The insights offered by Lugones and the authors that she references in her essay help with understanding how deep the problem with the idea of a singular male socialization really goes.
Not only does the idea of male socialization as something that is inherently beneficial and a universal experience obscure the way gendered expectations that come with being assigned male at birth become a burden for various marginalized groups, it also fails to account for how gender can functionally not be separated from other factors such as race, gender, sexuality, class, neuronormativity and many more.
The male/female socialization narrative presupposes ahistorical binary gender configurations separate from significant historical contexts such as capitalism, colonialism, racialization and compulsive heterosexuality.
Through this, it also naturalizes and universalizes the patriarchy and all its characteristics (binary gender norms, male dominance, heteronormativity etc.)
We can now see how a binary gender framework (on which the idea of male socialization rests upon) is not only thoroughly heterosexualist and cissexist, it is also racist and reproduces colonial and eurocentric ideas about gender as a stable, homogeneous and universal category more generally.
The narrative of male and female socialization assumes that we can deduce a universal stable truth about someone’s personality and experiences based on the genitals they were born with. This idea is shockingly close to the way european colonizers came to define people’s gender and personal essence on the basis of their genitals and reproductive organs.
Manhood and womanhood are not homogeneous categories, but diverse. There is black manhood/womanhood, gay manhood/womanhood, trans manhood/womanhood, working class manhood/womanhood and many more. To talk about manhood and womanhood alone and to frame them as categories that come with universal experiences is to erase all context and diversity.
It’s time to drop the male socialization idea. It does more harm than good and participates in a bourgeois, colonial, heteronormative and cissexist discourse about gender and sex.
