Masculinity and Male Intimacy

HAVE you ever had that feeling of wanting to chill with your boys, whether it’s catching a football match, playing video games or simply going out for a beer?

Well, that’s pretty normal among a group of male friends. But male friendships might not be the same as they were a few decades ago. Quite a number of online articles suggest that male intimacy is deteriorating in society as the need for masculinity increases, with heterosexual men in fear of being perceived as homosexual.

Professor of applied psychology at New York University, Niobe Way, interviewed high school boys over a period of four years focusing on their bonds with others of the same sex. One of the interviewees said this about his best guy friend: “We love each other… That’s it… You have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it. It’s just a thing that you know that this person is that person… I guess in life, sometimes two people can really, really understand each other and really have a trust, respect and love for each other.”

However, three years later, the response from the same interviewee changed. “[My friend and I] we mostly joke around. It’s not like really anything serious or whatever… I don’t talk to nobody about serious stuff… I don’t talk to nobody. I don’t share my feelings, really. Not that kind of person or whatever… It’s just something that I don’t do.”

Niobe credits this change of heart to society’s limiting ideals of masculinity, which define themselves in opposition to all things feminine.

Sociologist Lisa Wade wrote: “Friends are empathetic, affectionate, not afraid to leave their tower of self-reliance for occasional support. You know who else is like that? Women. Being a good friend … as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly.” Therefore most boys opt out of having these bonds with other boys.

An article on freenortherner.com on male physical intimacy explains that “touch is and always has been an important part of bonding and there is absolutely nothing implicitly homoerotic about men engaging in physical male bonding.”

Decades ago, physical intimacy amongst men was normal, the article states, and in some parts of the world where it has not been ‘homoeroticised’, it still isn’t a taboo.

“In a society where homosexuality is normalised as an accepted alternative lifestyle, and homosexuals publicly display their sexual proclivities through displays of intimacy, you can no longer safely display intimacy,” the article suggests.

“If you do, there is a significant chance that other men around you will think you are signaling gayness, you will lose your masculinity. Through this, homoeroticism colonises male intimacy. When homosexuality becomes normalised, male intimacy becomes denormalised.”

Though in almost all African countries, homosexuality is still a foreign social construct, things were not always this way. It is believed that the famous Zulu king Shaka Zulu had encouraged intercrural sex, a type of non-penetrative sex among his troops to create intimacy and loyalty. Intimacy amongst men isn’t all that strange among African men today, and also in most European countries.

According to kissingsite.com, in some areas of Italy and other Mediterranean countries, friends, both men and women, greet each other by kissing on the mouth. “Arab men kiss each other on the cheek in greeting. In France, protocol demands a kiss on each cheek, while the Dutch throw in a third one for good luck. ”

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