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After our “Man Up!” (1/22/09) column exploring ways to redefine masculinity, we received several responses from readers. So Doin’ It Well decided to again explore what gender means and what, if anything, it has to do with what’s between our legs.

Tastes Great, Less Filling

One reader commented on our blog:

“Please. While I totally applaud the ‘progress’ in the question and the answer, I ask loudly that the ‘answer’ NOT repeat man’s history. It’s a waste of time if you do. Do you really believe that Men changing the ‘definition’ and ‘ideas’ of manhood will change things? One swift look at sexual histories will show that changing definitions of Manhood is a constant continual way that Man maintains power. Try being fully human instead of ‘partial human’ ... I suspect male is fully human, and so is female. Start there. Just give up man and woman terms because there is no valid truth to the terms outside of social, and question opposite sex, which totally demolishes these outdated terms for humans, unless of course you want to keep the idea of Man as superior and supreme. Changing definition of a word does not disturb the practice ... we already learned that. New language seems to facilitate change.”

This is a great question, and it’s an argument that many people have (and we probably won’t solve here): Should men concerned about sexism be “men,” or should we refuse? Can we live outside of masculinity, or do we live inside of it?

We agree that in many ways, gender is kind of meaningless. As we’ve said before, gender is very different from biological sex. Sex is about “body parts,” while gender is all the stuff we assign to those parts. Certainly, there are some physical differences, but there are many more differences that we exaggerate or fabricate to maintain this gender system. Sex doesn’t wholly determine who a person is or how much they’re worth or how they should act in a certain situation. But in our society, gender is supposed to determine those things, and sometimes, it works. Gender is a lie we’re told often enough that we believe it about ourselves.

Take Bud Light. Bud Light is essentially a diet beer. When its formula was sold to Budweiser by a microbrewer, they had the Herculean task of getting men to buy something that was imbued with “feminine” meaning — a beer for someone who is watching calories, who in our culture is presumed to be a woman. But Budweiser set about an ad campaign showing manly men — football players — talking about how much they enjoyed this beverage, making it “manly” to drink diet beer. Bud Light does not inherently have anything to do with masculinity, but the meaning we assign to it allows drinking Bud Light to be a “manly” activity.

But we don’t believe gender is so simple that we can just will it away. Gender is “real” because we make it real every day (like Bud Light). Like a white person addressing racism, we can’t change our whiteness, even though the ideas we have about race are constructed, just as we can’t change our masculine gender identity, even though gender is constructed. If as men we’re going to be allies to women and trans-folks, we have to accept and celebrate who we are while we figure out our responsibility to change.

Gentlemen’s Club

Another reader wrote:

“One area (you) didn’t address is the difficulties and importance of men building support networks amongst other men. The young man who wrote the question might, with some effort, find women supportive of him (presuming he moved in pro-feminist directions). Ofttimes, however, if he had that type of a support network, eventually he might be left out as male. Until or unless he found Men he could relate to and share his feelings with, he would likely find it difficult to continue his growth and maintain ‘sanity’ in a fairly crazy world.” —GM

We agree; finding a group of men can be a real and important struggle. Men’s relationships to other men should be fairly superficial, according to the “rules,” and getting too intimate with another man can set off all sorts of homophobic alarms. Patience and trusting that other men (and women) wish to be “fully human” are the best ways to approach these relationships and work toward sanity.

We’re also cautious, though. A group of men can easily become a place to examine men’s “problems” (or even fix women’s problems) without considering men’s impact upon women. For a man to really challenge what it means to “be a man,” he has to examine his interactions with both women and men.

Stay tuned until next week as we ask, “What’s up, Doc?”