Sometimes it's hard to be a man: A Paper by Dr Nicola Ingram discussed in Times Higher Education
23 May 2013
A recent study has found that working-class students struggle with ‘composite masculinity’.
While bourgeois students can “seamlessly integrate” many types of masculinity, a study at two universities concludes that their working- class peers find squaring the many demands placed on the modern man more challenging.
Working-class students, interviewed as part of the Paired Peers project, stress that “ physicality, strength, toughness”, the ability to provide for one’s family and independence are crucial to masculinity. Middle-class students also rate physical appearance but are happy to mix a “ well-groomed” “metrosexual” look with a “gym body”.
Both groups say that brainpower is a part of masculinity, but as Nicola Ingram, lecturer in sociology at the University of Bath and one of the project leaders, explained, working-class students stress “physicality” and being a “provider”, on to which they add a “degree of intelligence”.
“They are partially struggling to pull [together] different forms of masculinity,” she said. “ The middle-class men on the other hand seamlessly integrate [them]…to create a ‘composite masculinity’. This…allows them to be many different types of men at once, although they emphasise ‘ intellectual masculinity’.”
Dr Ingram co-authored the paper Not the Place for a Person Like Me: On Being Middle-Class at a Post-1992 University in England.
