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Madonna is the most successful female pop star of her generation – a
powerful figure whose mass appeal even triggered the phenomenon of wannabees,
girls who not only dressed like her but wanted to be her. Yet the strong
image Madonna created has produced a split in opinion among both feminists
and their detractors. The deliberate ambiguity of a sexually independent
woman who calls the shots combined with apparently dressing to feed male
fantasies has meant neither group can agree whether she is reinforcing female
stereotypes or taking a stand against them.

The elusive New Man also has a far from clear image. He has many desirable
characteristics but he still provokes anxieties about changing masculinity
– even among his advocates. Does he temper traditional masculinity with
feminity or does he defy masculinity altogether? Charges of ‘wimpishness’
suggest we are far from comfortable with the image.

The struggle to change sex roles in our society and combat the discrimination
against women faces the continual problem of how to challenge the beliefs
about those roles held over many generations. Part of the difficulty is
in the way we not only think about men and women but describe much of our
world in terms of male and female attributes.

People have been reared to be extremely anxious about being ‘properly’
masculine and feminine: it takes more than a generation to remove such conditioning.
But the polarity of our thinking suggests why the pressures are so powerful.
Polarity is a major metaphor in Western culture. This gets mapped onto gender,
so thinking about masculinity and feminity is not confined simply to worrying
about giving dolls to girls and guns to boys; it permeates vast areas of
our thinking. A challenge to sex roles is thus a challenge to large areas
of our beliefs.

Polarity implies either/or. So to be masculine is to be unfeminine.
In Western culture some polarities have become associated with male/female
polarity: such as public-private, hard-soft, active-passive, rational-intuitive,
thinking-feeling, science-arts. These metaphors are not just poetic fancies
– they express underlying theories held by both lay and scientific people.
For instance, everyone knows what is meant when an institution is referred
to as a ‘dinosaur’.

Three common metaphors further illustrate this. The polarity of active
and passive behaviour is referred to in a wide range of situations, from
the sexual act to children’s play. Masculinity is synonymous with activity
which in turn is related to mastery and control. Not only are men supposed
to be active, and to master, but other behaviours which are active and mastering
become seen as masculine. This applies to styles of leadership, decision-making,
the conduct of institutions and of war, and technology itself.

The equation of activity, mastery and masculinity is often made explicit.
In the 17th century Francis Bacon said of science, the ‘New Philosophy’:
‘By Art and the hand of Man (Nature) is to be forced out of her natural
state, and squeezed and moulded to (yield) the many secrets of excellent
use.’ At the turn of this century, Rupert Brooke’s view that ‘Maleness was
the one hope of the world’ was echoed in the metaphors of progress, control
and active expansion that supported imperialism and entrepreneurship.

A second polarity is public versus private, most superficially reflected
in the man-at-work, woman-at-home, scenario. Women in public life are defined
(especially in obituaries) by their male relatives, colleagues and teachers,
and much is written of the presumed conflict between public life and family
and sexual ties. But it is more complex than this. Large tracts of life
are inconsistent with the public veneer of masculinity – notably emotion,
and many aspects of the ‘inner person’. This is not simply the stereotype
of masculinity; underlying it is the belief that man’s public life, his
masculinity, depends upon his coexistence with a woman who serves all his
‘private’ needs. Thus, woman’s ‘privacy’ is to a large extent not to do
with her own self, but with her role as keeper of man’s privy self. The
conflict for the woman in public life is not how she gains her own necessary
private sustenance from her man, but in how she reconciles her own public
and private duties.

The boundaries between public and private life are defined with different
symbols. For women, ‘invasion of privacy’ is the exposure of their physical
selves, or manifestations of physical life: every so often Princess Diana’s
‘privacy is invaded’ when she is photographed in a bikini. Yet photographing
men in swimming costumes has no such shock value. Much art depends upon
the invasion of a woman’s ‘privacy’ by discovering her at her toilette;
the illicit access to her sexuality is titillating, and her privacy is defined
by how she is able to set the boundaries to that access. Discovering a man
naked is a matter of hilarity and loss of dignity rather than sexual access.

The Gulf War affected the boundaries of masculinity and femininity,
and the metaphors of private and public. War has always been quintessentially
a male domain and very ‘public’. heavily saturated with, and expressed in
terms of, metaphors of masculinity. In the Falklands War, as in previous
wars, heroic young men with stiff upper lips were successful in combat,
showing courage and determination. Their mothers and girlfriends were emotional
and feminine at home.

The Gulf War as seen on British television had three distinct elements.
The first, supremely masculine, was the marathon studio discussion of strategy,
tactics and high technology, with news insertions showing the perfectly
functioning war toys. Insofar as any people were involved in this, they
were skilled technologists, wholly in control. The second element was the
expression of sorrow, fear and stress among the frontline soldiers; for
perhaps the first time, men whose masculinity was not in question were permitted
to express such emotions in public. Were we seeing an extension of the acceptable
domain of masculinity, or a fundamental challenge to it?

The third element was indeed a challenge. This was the presence of women
including women with children at home – in the battlefield. The discussion
of their presence, both by those in favour and those opposed, reflected
the profound interrelationship between concepts of masculinity and femininity
and war and peace, and made explicit the assumption that war is about the
public protection (by males) of the private domain: women’s active presence
in battle contravenes that metaphor as much as it does the metaphor of women
as passive and peaceful.

My final polarity, rationality versus chaos, has a long history and
is deeply embedded in our conception of civilisation. It is also embedded
in conceptions of science. Part of the appeal of the Cartesian revolution
was the idea that the chaos of Nature might be controllable, and that laws
could be found to understand it. Today we are in the interesting position
of believing on the one hand that rationality (and science) have triumphed
over chaos, while at the same time being very alert to the possibility that
forces of unreason might be unleashed; the vigour of attacks on anything
smacking of ‘pseudo-science’ attests to this. At the same time, those who
want to challenge the ‘mastery’ model of science use the metaphor of chaos
and the unleashing of dangerous natural forces through the misuse of technology.
Much science fiction has used this metaphor.

The link between the polarities of rationality-chaos and masculinity-femininity
has two strands: assumptions about sex differences in mental functioning,
and a darker side in which the forces of sexuality are equated with the
forces of chaos. Beginning with Aristotle and Plato, rationality was mapped
onto masculinity and chaos onto femininity – the argument being that females
were closer to nature, which was chaotic and subject to unpredictable and
uncontrollable forces. Furthermore, women were believed to have uncontrollable
sexual desire: the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 claimed that women consort
with devils to assuage their insatiable lust, and so become witches.

When the organic metaphor of the relationship with Nature (where knowledge
was aided through collaboration with Nature) was replaced with the metaphor
of the physical world as mechanical and subject to objectivity and reason,
the equation of masculinity with rationality continued, long after belief
in witchcraft had declined. If anything, it was strengthened by the post-Enlightenment
enthusiasm for rationality. Yet in the nineteenth century, conceptions of
female sexuality changed from insatiability and chaos to chastity and virtual
asexuality, and the male became the locus of potentially chaotic passions.
But women’s lack of passion did not gain them the crown of rationality.
Instead, women became, in effect, the referees and constraining force in
men in an internal war between rationality and chaos. Good, ‘feminine’ women
performed this civilising role; fallen women (who were seen as degenerate
– note the evolution metaphor – or sick) unleashed male chaos.

Nowadays, for most people the metaphors of sexuality reflect mutuality,
equality of pleasure and sex as beneficial, healthy and positive. The exceptions
are rape and pornography, where chaos and inequality of power are explicit,
and where women are either innocent and vulnerable, or else temptresses.
There is an uneasy tension between creating New Man, and recognising the
darker side of male passion. Many anti-feminists subscribe to the metaphor
of Man torn between the forces of reason and the force of phallic power;
the philosopher Roger Scruton sees feminism as a profound threat to civilisation
precisely because in his view it undermines women’s constraining role on
the male potential for sexual chaos.

Trying to change traditional conceptions of masculinity therefore challenges
widespread beliefs about how humans make progress and how we can best interact
with our environment – a challenge coming also from the Green movement which
argues that we should replace the metaphors of polarity with one of harmony
within an organic universe.

To create New Man and to resolve the paradox of Madonna, requires confrontation
with the interwoven metaphors of gender relations and the metaphors that
overrun our view of the world at large. Denying sex difference is a rational
strategy, supported by much scientific evidence, but there are larger cultural
issues. Scruton and his colleagues are probably right when they see feminism
as a major threat to civilisation as they see it; challenging the metaphors
of gender is part of a wider contemporary challenge to some of the cherished
metaphors by which we categorise, dichotomise and explain our world.

Helen Haste is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of
Bath, and was President of the Psychology Section of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science last year. This article is based on her presidential
address.