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The historian John Tosh claims that in Western societies, masculinity “occurs in three arenas: home, work, and all-male associations.” Authority in the household, the capacity to earn a wage in a non-servile independent way, and the capacity to form meaningful bonds in voluntary associations, taver…

[...] Instead of pathologizing men’s behavior, we should ask what kind of social relations make possible and even desirable men’s “fear” of or lack of commitment and which cultural frames make such behavior meaningful, legitimate, and pleasurable. To clarify the emotional mechanisms of choice and c…

There are some popular explanations for this state of affairs. The most conspicuous one is that men have deficient psyches and lack the basic capacity for monogamous connectedness, for psychological or evolutionary reasons. Their psychological, biological, and evolutionary makeup makes them prone t…

Third, because there are no more formal mechanisms by which to pair people up, individuals internalize the economic dispositions that also help them make choices which must be at once economic and emotional, rational and irrational. The romantic habitus has thus the characteristic of operating at o…

Undoubtedly, along with the feminist and bohemian claims to sexual freedom, consumer culture has been the most significant cultural force that has contributed to the sexualization of women, and later of men. Writing about the 1920s, John d’Emilio and Estelle Freedman argue that “American capitalism…