ABSTRACT
The role of competition and rivalry has become all the more dominant in today’s society and as a consequence should be taken into account when we endeavor to understand gender problems. This introductory chapter explains how “phallic masculinity” corresponds to rivalry, competition, individualism and achievement as well as a life style that threatens the whole of our planet’s existence. This chapter provides a presentation of the perspectives from which masculinity, and in particular phallic masculinity, is to be studied in the following seven chapters, namely psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This book uses psychoanalysis as a theoretical tool in order to obtain a psychological developmental understanding of phallic masculinity, whilst phenomenology plays a significant role in chiseling out the distinction between sex and gender as a basis for further discussions on phallic masculinity. But even with regard to relevant questions of a more existential nature, phenomenological thought offers considerable help in delineating phallic masculinity. The content of the book’s seven chapters focuses on the following questions: What characterizes phallic masculinity? How can it be explained from a psychogenetic angle? Why is the idea of masculinity so alluring? Why for many men is the desire to appear masculine, such a crucial aspiration? What alternatives are there to striving towards a phallic masculinity? And what does phallic masculinity disregard?
