Dimitrios Tsoukalas
English 101.0800
Miss Bogacka
December 10 2010.
Men have been sharing homosocial bonds between themselves since the beginning of mankind. It's not uncommon to hear two men going out to spend the day fishing or watching a football game together. This bonding is common and we consider it normal. But mens homosocial bonds aren't only used to strengthen friendship between men, but through David Grazian's article "The Girl Hunt: Urban Nightlife and the Performance of Masculinity as Collective Activitiy", Micheal Flood's "Men, Sex and Mateship: How homosociality shapes men's heterosexual relations" and Scott Kiesling's article "Homosociality in Men's Talk: Balancing and Recreating Cultural discourses of Masculinity" it's seen that men's homosocial bonds are also used to create and strengthen their heterosexual bonds. Through the use of wingmen, a male needing an audience and the feeling of being a part of a group one can see all these promote homosocial bonds but indeed are what cause the heterosexual relationship to occur.
The process of having and being a wingman gives a man the opportunity to create a heterosexual bond. A wingman is someone who will cover another men when he wants to talk to a girl who isn't alone. To even have someone a man can trust to be his wingman, he needs to have homosocial bonds with other men to begin with. As Grazian says
"the wingman serves multiple purposes; he provides validation of a leading man's trustworthiness, eases the interaction between a single male friend and a larger group of women, serves as a source of distraction for the friend or friends of a more desireable target of affection, can be called on to confirm the wild claims of his partner, and perhaps the most important, helps motivate his friends by building up their confidence. "
Men need the assistance of other men in order to create their heterosexual bonds. In Grazian's article, in the ritual of "Girl Hunting" the men who assist, are known as the wingmen. A wingman's homosocial bonds with another man is what drives him to help that man, even if there is no direct reward for a wingman, most of them do it because they're helping a friend get a date; which is the masculine thing to do.
A man feels that the majority of his masculinity is based off of what "the boys" think, that includes heterosexual bonds. In Flood's article a young boy was asked of what does he enjoy the most, and that boy started explaining a very stereotypical masculine fantasy. But what stroke Flood as odd, was I thing the boy said at the end, " 'If the boys could see me now'. Thus, 'the boys' are the imagined audience for this man's sexual achievements, their collective male gaze informing the meaning of his sexual relations". This boy's heterosexual desire was fueled by what he thought would give him respect from the boys, it was based on the homosocial bonds he had formed with "the boys". Men's homosocial bonds determine what they consider as masculine. It's the people men hang around who make them who they are, their masculinity is based off them.
A man without other men to base his masculinity off of is hopeless, men strive to be homosocial and form groups with other men as Scott Fabius Kiesling's article explains. Men's masculinity though as shown in our society, isn't based off of homosocial bonds, but heterosexual bonds. "Homosociality is where we might find the male version of the female double bind: To be a man is to be powerful, and to be powerful in the current gender order, is in part, to be heterosexual. Affiliation can be equated with dependence, so homosociality is almost by definition not masculine." Even though men attempt to create homosocial bonds, our society tells us to go for the heterosexual bonds because it's considered more masculine. Which could be one of the reasons why adolscents and teenagers homosocial bonds are mostly about getting heterosexual bonds, as seen in Grazian's "The Girl Hunt", and Flood's article.
Masculinity in young men is unstable, and can be changed in many ways. With the help of homosocial bonds, a man is able to see what other men are like and turn himself into the man he wants to be. Homosocial bonds boost a man's confidence as well, and a man with a good amount of self confidence is able to have heterosexual relationships easier, feel masculine and be the kind of man he wants to be. Once a man is confident, theres nothing that can stop him.
Flood, Micheal. "Men Sex and Mateship: How homosociality shapes men's heterosexual relations". Feminisms : An international Woman's and Gender Studies Conference. University of Queensland. 12-16 July.
Grazian, David. "The Girl Hunt: Urban Nightlife and the Performance of Masculinity as Collective Activity". Men's Lives 8th Ed. Ed. Micheal Kimmel and Micheal S. Messner. New York" Allyn and Bacon 2010.
Kiesling, Scott. "Homosociality in Men's talk: Balancing and Recreating Cultural Discourses of Masculinity". University of Pittsburgh.
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