ABSTRACT
The upheaval in sexual politics has mainly been discussed as a change in the social position of women. The political meaning of writing about masculinity turns mainly on its treatment of power. There are, however, some accounts of masculinity that have faced the issue of social power, and it is that we find the bases of an adequate theory of masculinity. Through the 1950s and 1960s the focus of sex-role research remained on women in the family. And the field of sex-role research remained a distinctly minor one within the overall concerns of sociology. A sociology of masculinity, of a kind, had appeared before the “sex-role” paradigm. The very idea of a “role” implies a recognizable and accepted standard, and sex-role theorists posit just such a norm to explain sexual differentiation. The sex-role literature mainly analyzes the acquisition of masculinity by means of a simple social-learning, conformity-to-norms model.
