ABSTRACT
In Western Europe since the period of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, men have assumed a strong connection between their rationality and their sense of masculine identity. They have learned to appropriate rationality as if it were an exclusively male quality denied to others, especially women. This is embedded in the very experience of language and it has become an integral part of the ways in which men blind themselves to the experience of women and children. Rationality has become a critical basis for male superiority within social life. It affects how men, especially heterosexual men, listen to others and what they are ready to hear. Since ‘rationality’ is identified with knowledge, it is denied to women. Emotions and feelings are likewise denied as genuine sources of knowledge within the culture. Rather, they are associated predominantly with weakness and femininity, and so as antithetical to the ‘strengths’ with which boys learn their sense of masculine identity. If men’s difficulties with emotions and feelings have become more visible and recognizable recently, especially with the challenges of feminism, little work has been done to show the philosophical and historical sources of masculine identity.
