ABSTRACT
The twenty-first century has seen a significant shift in how men construct and perform masculinities, both inside and outside of sport. This chapter explains how masculinities have changed in sport and youth culture over the past thirty years, starting with the 1980s and moving through to 2015. It examines both the impact that this has had on adolescent rugby players, and the positive effect that adolescent rugby players have had on inclusive masculinities. Brent Anderson's Inclusive Masculinity Theory (IMT) explains how gender behaviours change when men no longer denounce homosexuality. Anderson's IMT was born from his earlier ethnographic data on US collegiate male cheerleaders. Although Anderson firmly believed sport to be highly homophobic, in his ethnographic study he found men being somewhat inclusive of gay teammates and even embracing feminine elements of the cheerleading subculture. Paul O'Connell explains that masculinities are hierarchically stratified in something she terms the 'gender order'.
