ABSTRACT
In working on this book, I found a kind of passionate enthusiasm for tracking down the ‘origins’, historical or otherwise, of present-day masculinities, particularly the public masculinities of public men. I say this whilst being immensely dubious about the search for origins, especially those that are distant and archaic (Hearn 1987a, p. 192). This seemed different, however: it appeared immediate. I was drawn to discover where and how public men began to be as we are now in our public masculinities. I knew it had something to do with the enlargement and domination of the public domains, sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual, over the private with modernization and modernity, and particularly the creation of a new kind of universalization of experience. In this sense we now see ourselves not simply as individuals but as part of the mass collectivity of men, in corporation-produced images, words, deeds, and actions. This is easily seen as a huge burden, a massive negativity, that detracts from some essential and higher ‘man’. This is mistaken: there is no such ‘higher being’. The ever-presence of corporate, universal man is neither a good nor an evil; it is what has become. The problem of public men thus refers to both these confusions around the form of masculinities, especially public masculinities, and the intense associations of public men and power already described, and exacerbated in the technological, institutional, and organizational developments of the ‘modern world’.
