Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body

Chris Otter

Journal of Social History, Volume 44, Number 1, Fall 2010, pp.

247-248 (Review)

Published by George Mason University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jsh/summary/v044/44.1.otter.html

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REVIEWS 247

SECTION 1
GENDER ISSUES
Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body. By
Christopher E. Forth (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2008. xi plus 285 pp. $29.95 paperback, $85 hardcover).
In this engaging, sophisticated book, Christopher Forth provides a transnational
history of masculinity over the last three hundred years of Western history. “Moder-
nity” and “masculinity,” he argues, exist in a state of inescapable and productive
tension. Every “progressive” development in the West, such as new forms of tech-
nology, 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, visceraland natural,like athleticism and militarism. Mod-
ern masculinity, then, is structurally unstable, dynamic and contradictory.
Such formulations can often seem rather abstract, but Forth’s history is satis-
fyingly, indeed ebulliently, fleshy. He explores the dynamic of modern masculin-
ity 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 reflect-
ing 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 assump-
tion 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 ap-
peared, 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 expand-
ing paunch. Little wonder that men have become as dietarily confused as women.
The ineluctable ambivalences of modern masculinity have also been articu-
lated around the issue of violence. For many modern commentators, the tran-
scendence of violence and aggression is the mark of progress, while the capacity
248 journal of social history fall 2010

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) to-
wards periodic renewal of masculinity through controlled violence or measured
doses of pain (115-116). This attempt at rejuvenation has taken numerous cul-
turally-consecrated forms, from the rise of organized sport and extreme leisure
practices to compulsory military service. As Forth puts it, the introduction of com-
pulsory 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 ex-
perienced 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 si-
multaneously both modern and non-modern, and the curse of being unable to
ever perfectly transcend the opposition. This balancing act becomes, for the in-
dividual, a question of ethics, and for cultures, a broader political question.
Forth’s history is lively and compelling, but it is not without its problems. He
is, for example, clearly stronger on the modern than the premodern period. In his
brief analysis of medieval and early modern Europe, for example, he argues that
court society offered a “further refinement” of the practices of earlier chivalric and
warrior cultures, a claim which seems to echo some of the most schematic and
teleological claims of Norbert Elias (24).1 Moreover, while he is skilled at teasing
out different forms of middle-class masculinity, he is at times less convincing with
working-class and racial masculinities. He does note how the equation of mas-
culinity and strength has been particularly problematic for black men, since the
ensuing connection with the primitive almost unavoidably amplifies biological or
cultural stereotypes of race, but more on the nuances surrounding this question,
and others relating to both race and empire, would have enriched his study.
Such omissions are, however, probably inevitable in such an ambitious,
sweeping study. Forth has produced both a truly successful, and wonderfully well-
written, synthesis of the rich literature on modern masculinity, and a probing,
gendered recasting of Elias’s civilizing process. It provides abundant insights not
only into the history of gender, but also the histories of the body, war, sexuality and
diet. This breadth, combined with methodological sophistication, deserves to
bring this book a truly wide readership.

The Ohio State University Chris Otter

ENDNOTES

1. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed., trans. Ed-
mund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (Oxford, 1994).