ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to fill in a major missing piece in the ongoing puzzle of gender and sexuality. As one of the founders of the academic discipline of sociology, Max Weber, pointed out, all undertakings, including the social sciences, are permeated with the personal. If gender is both constructed and assigned, it's a fool's errand to believe, as many men do, that they have a responsibility to live up to their masculinity. Masculinity seen from the inside is quite different than its appearance from the outside. According to writers such as Michael Kimmel, the “social construction” that current gender theory holds to be the entirety of masculinity—the adoption of specific clothes, specific ways of talking, and specific ways of standing and moving to perform the theater of masculinity—is not even appropriate to our time.
