Some emotions can only be felt by people in certain categories. Emasculation is one of these, an emotional affliction felt by people with male gender identities.
The word emasculate comes from the Latin word for castration, but emasculation is almost always an emotional experience, not a literal physical transformation. The man who feels emasculated still has all his Y chromosomes. His genitals are still intact. It’s his psychological identity that’s taken a hit.
Masculine gender identity is always subject to challenge, because it’s part of a hierarchical, competitive ideological system. “Man up,” people say, but what does that mean? The identity of a real man can only exist through the exclusion of others who fail to meet the demands of the masculine ideology and thus are judged to be not man enough.
There’s a lot at stake. According to the ideology of masculinity, a man who doesn’t follow its codes and match its standards is a legitimate target for abuse, including outright violence. Real men do the job of enforcement, and sometimes women who believe in the ideology of masculine hierarchy join in the attacks. The goal is to make the targeted man feel emasculated, to strip his manhood away from him, and to make him serve as an example to any other men who are tempted to step out of line.
If that’s what being a real man is all about, though, maybe it’s time for men who don’t like this vision to articulate an alternative, to man down and declare themselves to be unreal men.
