PFor millennia, and feminist analyzes have since clearly shown, patriarchy has always denounced the “crisis of masculinity” in order to reinforce a masculinist culture based on gender asymmetry. Today, masculinism still exists, but it is not certain that it is still the expression of patriarchal domination, nor that the “crisis of masculinity” or only masculinist rhetoric. Another reading can show that, far from perpetuating patriarchal domination, contemporary masculinism is more the sign of a properly reactionary mobilization for “return to what was before”.
Indeed, feminist victories and the growing feeling of the injustice of discrimination have gradually undermined, since the 1960s, the pillars of patriarchy. This “depatriarchalization” is now observed everywhere, not without resistance.
What for a long time was considered “normal” – hierarchies and discrimination between men and women, marital violence, unequal standards of male and female sexuality, sexism and sexual assault in the professional environment – is increasingly experienced today as so much deviances whose denunciation, cultural and political, influences the law towards better consideration and more sanctions.
This reversal of the norm in favor of the principle of equality does not mean that we are done with sexism and gender-based violence. This means that in this historical moment of “post-patriarchy” (as we speak of the persistent effects of war in the post-war period) what remains of “patriarchality” in the representations, relationships and identities of Gender is in permanent tension with egalitarian values, expectations, and norms.
Social and cultural tensions
This is how we must understand the sociological reality of contemporary forms of the “crisis of masculinity”. The latter is no longer here a ruse of patriarchy but the subjective product, among most boys and men, of the social and cultural tensions which have transformed gender relations since the end of the 20th century.e century.
In other words, boys are increasingly confronted with the hiatus between a socialization which still makes them think of themselves as both different and more important than girls and the feminine and new social norms and new egalitarian subjective expectations, especially among girls and women.
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