Essay About Masculinity

Be a man! You must be as swift as the coursing river! Be a man! With all the force of a great typhoon! Be a man! With all the strength of a raging fire, mysterious as the dark side of the moon! Most will recognize these lines as the chorus from one of the most popular songs from the Disney movie Mulan. The scene that features this song is where the drill sergeant is training the new recruits on how to be “real men” and defeat the Huns. The song is naturally triumphant instilling in these soldiers that to be real men, they must be strong, fast, powerful, and mysterious. There is irony in this song as they sing about being manly men as the recruits are not nearly as manly as they claim to be nor are they all men. Manly and masculine have traditionally been synonymous and interchangeable terms, however as this film would suggest, that is not

Peter M. Nardi notes in his introduction to Gay Masculinities that there is “a multiplicity of ways of ‘doing’ masculinity that can best be described by the plural form ‘masculinities’” (Nardi 1). While his discussion is specifically speaking to gay men, this idea can be applied across the board. He states that some embrace the most masculine of stereotypes “through body building and sexual prowess, whereas others express a less dominant form through spirituality or female impersonation. Many simply blend the ‘traditional’ instrumental masculinity” (Nardi 1-2). It is this kind of variety of different masculinities that lend support to the notion of masculinity being defined on its own continuum. Rather than the varieties of masculinities, such as female impersonation or cross dressing, that are different than the traditional stereotypes making an individual less masculine, they are included as varying types of