ABSTRACT
In this chapter, a thorough discussion is offered of why masculinity should not be recognized as an identity but rather as a striving towards an identity or as a project, a project which is doomed to fail, since it denies the conditions of human existence of helplessness, vulnerability and dependence. The striving for a phallic masculine identity is to be understood as an act of inauthenticity. As opposed to an inauthentic striving towards a masculine identity, the possibility of striving towards an authentic life presupposes the existence of an ego-identity. A significant contribution of this chapter in the sex/gender research area is therefore to bring the relevance of ego-identity into the fore. In this chapter, a discussion returns to the question raised in Chapter 1 of how to conceptualize the area of sex/gender in order to characterize the development of identity in humans. Here I argue that it is essential to introduce ego-identity into this research field. By all means, contemporary theories about gender allow for the possibility of integrating femininity and masculinity within the same individual. However, the introduction of ego-identity into the conceptualizations of this research area implies that an ego-identity not only in some way precedes gender but also transcends it as a kind of humanization of that potential human beings have of striving towards an authentic life.
