Fragile Masculinity

Fragile masculinity describes the anxiety some men experience when they perceive themselves as falling short of the cultural standards their society holds for what a man should be, an anxiety researchers argue is necessary to understand certain patterns in men's attitudes and behavior. The concept is closely tied to the idea of precarious manhood, in which manhood is treated as a social status that is elusive and must be continually earned and publicly proven rather than a fixed trait a person simply has once achieved, so that it can be lost through a failure to live up to expectation in a way womanhood, by contrast, is not typically framed as being at risk. Research associates this anxiety with aggressive behavior, resistance to changes in established gender norms, and difficulty expressing vulnerability, and finds that when a man's sense of his own masculinity is directly challenged, he may respond in ways that researchers describe as unpleasant or even harmful to himself or others.