ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the key debates around the concept of masculinities, chronicling the emergence of particular ideas around masculinity ranging from essentialist to post-structuralist positions. In discussion of the Beatles' films, an examination of the Beatles takes place in both a retrospective and contemporary context. Barbara Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men offers a number of examples of the flight from commitment by 1950's man, and, despite its emphasis on the US experience, is a key text in understanding debates around men and masculinities in the late 1950's. Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the male revolt preceded second-wave feminism and that, by the late 1950's, men were increasingly coming to see the traditional masculine role, particularly the 'breadwinner' role, as a trap. Laqueur's Making Sex outlines the way in which the mapping of the body and the production of an anatomical atlas in the period of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century created a two-sex model.
