Monks as Model Men: Gender Anomalies or Heroic Ideal? ()
ABSTRACT
The movie The Mask You Live In portrays gender socialization for men in the United States today as dominated
by a trajectory emphasizing ruthless competition, a never-ending search for
prestige in material wealth, and a largely self-serving quest to overcome and
control women. The movie graphically depicts all the accompanying psychological
dysfunction, legal difficulties, and emotional distress experienced by boys and
young men desperately trying to conform to such a scripted model of
masculinity. Anthropological research invites alternate ways of thinking about
the relationship between sex and gender. This is especially true among those
who claim a close relationship with the supernatural or transcendent. Can the
methodology of cultural anthropology provisionally expand the consideration of
gender variants to provide other ways of modeling masculinity without
discarding the underlying gender binary altogether? Catholic Christian monastics—men
and women who commit to communal devotional and service roles in the light of
transcendent aims and ends—demonstrate the potential for providing healthier
alternative masculinity scripts. More specifically, can monks successfully
model and communicate such an alternative masculinity for men in a higher
educational institutional setting?
Share and Cite:
Raverty, A. (2017) Monks as Model Men: Gender Anomalies or Heroic Ideal?.
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
5, 103-112. doi:
10.4236/jss.2017.56009.
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