ABSTRACT
With the advances of the feminist and gay liberation movements and the need for differently-skilled workers in the post-industrial workplace, men are nowadays being forced to behave differently as men. Western media often present (white) heterosexual men as ‘victims’ of these changes, with women and gays making social and psychological gains at their expense. The concept of ‘masculinity in crisis’ has entered the popular arena, with bestsellers like Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990) and films like Fight Club (1999) debating how men can ‘reclaim’ their masculinity, harking back nostalgically to an era when men were ‘real’ men. However, in feminist film theory, the concept of ‘masculinity in crisis’ refers not so much to ‘a contemporary “crisis” of manhood’, where the meaning of ‘being a man’ is assumed to be something stable and which has now been lost, but to the notion of masculinity itself as ‘theoretically and historically troubled’ (Penley and Willis 1988: 4).
