ABSTRACT
Declining homohysteria has permitted men to express emotional intimacy and physical tactility with other men – all without fear of social judgment. This has helped free heterosexual men of orthodox notions of masculinity being predicated in the opposite of what is coded as feminine. There are a number of ways to describe the direction of travel for men’s gender. One might call it a demasculinization of men; the feminization of men; the loss of masculinity; or the softening of men. The project of masculine culture in the twenty-first century has been to demasculinize society. The progression of men identifying as less masculine is significant. Even among men who are culturally scripted to represent orthodox or hypermasculinity, research shows that this is just not true anymore. The future of masculinity studies is largely dependent on whether future youth find value in the words “masculinity” and “femininity” at all.
