VAN DE VELDE, THEODOOR HENDRIK
VIRILITY AND MACHISMO
Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde (1873-1937) was a Dutch gynecologist who was best known for his popular marriage manual, Ideal Marriage, published first in German and Dutch in 1926 and widely translated and reprinted. The English edition, published by William Heinemann in 1930, went through 43 printings and sold some 700, 000 copies, while the American edition, published by Random House, sold equally well. A revised edition was published in 1965, which also sold well.
Born in 1873, he attended medical school in Leiden and Amsterdam and won recognition as director of the Haarlem Gynecological Clinic. He married his first wife, Henrietta van de Veldeten Brink, in 1899, but the marriage was not a happy one; after some ten years, van de Velde eloped with one of his patients, a socially prominent married woman, Martha Breitenstein-Hooglandt, eight years his junior. In the ensuing scandal, he was forced to give up his practice, and he and Martha wandered through Europe. He finally received a divorce from Henrietta in 1913 and married Martha soon after, settling down near Locarno. He had no children by either wife.
He himself wrote that he did not begin his book on sex and marriage until he had practiced medicine for more than 25 years and was adjudged suitably old. Some of his data came directly from his patients and their husbands, from observations of his patients, and also from his own experience. He emphasized the importance of love play, including oral-genital contact. He also explored some ten different sexual positions.
He died in 1937 at the age of 64, in Locarno, Switzerland. His book was dedicated to his wife Martha.
REFERENCE
Van de Velde, T. Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology and Technique. Translated by S. Browne. New York: Random House, 1930.
Vern L. Bullough
The anthropologist Gilmore defined "machismo" as a masculine display complex involving culturally sanctioned demonstrations of hypermasculinity in the sense of both erotic and physical aggressiveness. Hypermasculine physical and sexual aggressiveness is justified by an ideology of machismo. The psychologists Mosher and Tomkins defined the ideology of machismo as a system of ideas forming a worldview that chauvinistically exalts male dominance by assuming masculinity, virility, and physicality to be the ideal essence of real men, who are adversarial warriors competing for scarce resources (including women as chattel) in a dangerous world.
Machismo is a hypermasculine variant of the traditional gender script that is socially inherited by virtue of being born male within a culture. It permeates the gender belief system, enabling macho men to justify gender inequality: male dominance in the gender hierarchy is a natural function of masculine superiority and feminine inferiority given by the very nature, the inner essence, of men and women.
Machismo stresses norms valuing toughness, aggressiveness, risk taking, and virility, norms reflecting the dominating, coercive, or destructive power over self, other men, nature, and women; it contrasts with norms like achievement and intimacy supporting power to master productive tasks like education and work and integrative tasks like courtship and marriage. As a descendent of the ideology of the warrior, it emphasizes dominance, threat, and violence through hypermasculine physical action. Hypermasculinity is the disposition to engage in exaggerated sex-typed performances by embodying manly action physically, by displaying toughness, daring, virility, and violence in scenes that offer such opportunities or challenges or threats to masculine identity.
Although not necessarily successful by society's standards, the macho man defends his masculine honor and prestige. Honor requires that he command deference from others in interpersonal relations and that he respond to perceived insult with violence. Prestige becomes a matter of reputation, as cool, as tough, as dangerous, as a stud. The informal social structure of all-male groups, whether as gangs, teams, or military units, lacks the social controls of conventional society. A reputation as a man, as a warrior, as macho produces prestige and protection in the form of alliances with other macho men against all others. The personal prestige of a reputation as a macho man within a dangerous world warns that insults and aggression will be met with violence.
Within youth gangs, rape can celebrate machismo and establish a reputation as macho. Feminists have regarded rape as an overconforming acting out of the masculinity mystique: qualities of aggression, power, strength, toughness, dominance, and competitiveness. The anthropologist Sanday found that rape-prone societies were marked by (1) extensive interpersonal violence, (2) the ideology of male toughness or machismo, and (3) male dominance in political decision making.
When Gilmore reviewed cross-cultural concepts of manhood in the making, he concluded that manhood was a test. Cults of manhood arose wherever men were conditioned to fight for scarce resources, since men were given the dangerous jobs because of their physical strength and expendability. Gilmore believed that male honor became a code of conduct that served as an inducement to dangerous performance in the social struggle for scarce resources and that masculine honor remains evolutionarily or functionally adaptive in the dangerous struggle to protect, provide, and impregnate.
In contrast to an evolutionary or adaptive view, Mosher, using Tomkins's script theory of personality, traced the historical origin of male dominance to adversarial contests over scarce resources. The anthropologist Harris proposed that warfare conserved scarce protein resources by controlling population and spreading out paleolithic ancestors. Among warring stateless groups, female infanticide was frequent, controlling population expansion; the sex ratio of boys to girls under 14 was 128: 100, whereas among adults, due to war, it was 101: 100. Among warrior groups, boys were trained to be fierce and aggressive; they were rewarded with sexual privileges and deference from women. Gilmore reviewed many cultures where the cult of manhood demanded that men prove their toughness, courage, and virility. Intense ordeals, like the circumcision rites of the Samburu, transformed boys into men. To fail to engage in dangerous missions, to fight or brawl, to drink to excess, or to seek sexual conquests left a man's masculine honor open to ridicule as being effeminate or childlike.
Sanday viewed male dominance, manifested in the exclusion of women from economic and political decision making, as an aggression toward women, as a response to the stresses of endemic warfare, famine, and migration following wars or famine. In cultures where the sexes were equal, there were fewer wars and less food stress than in male-dominant cultures. That men faced death in violent conflicts explained why men have become the dominating sex.
The sociologist Rustow summarized the historical and ethnographic data supporting a thesis of superstratification. Superstratification refers to the multiple historical waves of multiple invasions of planting cultures by nomadic warriors that established hereditary inequality by installing monarchs and ruling classes in high civilizations. First, the war chariot, and later horse cavalry, permitted a massing of mobile force that instilled panic and terror in the infantry of planters. Religious or political ideology justified war, domination, slavery, and stratification into classes.
Thus, it was multiple historical scenes of perceived scarcity that produced warfare, a cult of manhood, ideological justification of warrior violence, harsh socialization of males, and male dominance over women. These repeated changes in a culture's history created by warfare generated dense affect within those victorious and vanquished cultures that scripted both their worldview—myths and narratives, including the ideology of machismo—and their cultural personality (national character). The worldview of the culture was instilled through the socialization of children; given an ideology about the superior nature of men and the inferior nature of women, gender socialization of men as dominant warriors and women as vanquished submissives continued until today.
After citing Rustow and Sanday, Tomkins posited that the superstratification of patriarchal warriors over matriarchal agriculturalists produced a splitting and invidious contrast between the innate discrete affects. The victors in adversarial contests differentially magnified the importance of the warrior affects: surprise, excitement, anger, disgust, and contempt. Only the vanquished, the oppressed, the Other were to tremble in fear, weep in distress, and hang their head in shame; they were weak because they had basked in their dubious, seductive, and relaxed enjoyment of the earth and its bounty. Once the affects were stratified into the victor's "superior" and the vanquished's "inferior," the bifurcated affects were extended to include not only the defeated and the slaves, castes, and lower classes, but also women.
This split in affects was associated with a polarity of ideology: right-wing normative and left-wing humanist. The right identifies with the oppressor and the status quo; the left identifies with the oppressed and change. The normative ideology maintains that human beings are basically evil, they must guard against alien emotions, hierarchies must reward the good and punish the bad, science discovers the true reality, government must maintain law and order, parents must decide what is best for children, and humans deserve love only when they conform to norms. The humanist ideology maintains that human beings are basically good, openness to feelings is enlightening and rewarding, a world of plenitude permits pluralism, creative science fosters self-realization, government must promote human welfare, play and children are fulfilling and lovable just for themselves, and, above all, humans should be valued as ends in themselves.
Normatives socialize children to conform to gender norms, dividing the affects into so-called superior masculine (e.g., surprise, excitement, anger, disgust, and contempt) and so-called inferior feminine (e.g., fear, distress, shame, and enjoyment). Humanists rewardingly socialize all affects as essentially good and human in both sexes.
Tomkins's theory of affects, ideology, and scripts, as well as his insight into the historical stratification of affects following superstratification, led Mosher to the crucial insight that differential magnification of "superior, masculine" affects over "inferior, feminine" affects powered the socialization of macho men and the enculturation into machismo.
The personality scripts of macho men are created by socialization and acculturation. Seven socialization dynamisms increased the differential magnification of "masculine" over "feminine" affects: (1) unrelieved and unexpressed distress is intensified by the socializer until it is released as anger (boys should not cry; they should get mad); (2) fear expression and fear avoidance are inhibited through parental dominance and contempt until habituation partially reduces them, activating excitement (force a boy to stay with danger until he seeks it out); (3) shame over residual distress and fear reverses polarity through counteraction into exciting manly pride over aggression and daring (shame is left behind as the proud and excited boy fights and flies into the face of danger); (4) pride over aggressive and daring counteraction instigates disgust and contempt for shameful inferiors (the now proud boy lords it over sissies, wimps, faggots, and girls); (5) successful reversal of interpersonal control through angry and daring dominance activates excitement (revenge turns the tables on authorities and bullies who are now excitingly bested in dominance struggles); (6) surprise becomes an interpersonal strategy to achieve dominance by evoking fear and uncertainty (enjoying a reputation as "loco" and wild, the boy keeps others off balance by surprising outbursts of angry and daring action); and (7) excitement becomes differentially magnified as a more acceptable affect than relaxed enjoyment, which becomes acceptable only during victory celebrations (careful not to be seduced into passive, weak, relaxed enjoyment, the excitement-seeking boy limits enjoyment to triumphant celebrations of victory).
Acculturation through participation in male-only groups teaches the boy the ideology of machismo. Three acculturation dynamisms are repeated within such groups as well as the larger culture: (1) celebrations, (2) identification and complementation, and (3) vicarious resonance. Celebrations are male rituals, like finishing military boot camp when macho men get drunk, "get laid," act crazy, and get in a fight. Such macho action celebrates the ideology; the ideology justifies manly action. By identifying with macho men and by receiving deference from other men and women who act as submissive complements, the macho man adds elements to his script and justifications for his belief system. "War stories," myths, and mass-media narratives permit identification with macho heroes, illuminate a worldview, and justify male honor and the cult of manhood. Since vicarious scenes generate less dense affect than lived scenes, vicarious experience informs more than it motivates. Still, when a man has a macho script, that personality script vicariously resonates with the ideology and action of a macho hero in folklore or the mass media.
Mosher and his associates developed a Hypermasculinity Inventory (HMI) to measure (1) violence as necessary, (2) sex as an entitlement, (3) danger as exciting, and (4) toughness as self-control. The subscales measure hypermasculine power over men, women, nature, and self. The HMI serves as a proxy for a macho personality script. A number of psychological studies have demonstrated the construct validity of the HMI as a measure of macho personality.
Macho men reported needs for play, impulsivity, exhibition, aggression, autonomy, and dominance; they do not need to understand, to avoid harm, to structure their thinking, to nurture others, to be orderly, and to do the socially desirable. Macho men described themselves as reckless, tough, aggressive, cruel, adventuresome, courageous, and rigid. They denied being cautious, gentle, sensitive, mild, and softhearted.
Interpersonally, macho men manifested unilateral power strategies of persuading, persisting, demanding, threatening, expressing anger, and angry withdrawal. Their interpersonal style is hostile-dominant. In dating and sexual situations, the HMI was correlated with interpersonal styles described as assured, dominant, competitive, mistrusting, cold, and hostile. Macho men in college samples reported engaging in more minor delinquencies and more serious fights or gang fights. Macho men, whether in college, rock bands, or alcohol rehabilitation, reported a pattern of frequent use of alcohol or drugs. Following alcohol use, they reported more dangerous driving, fighting, and coercive sexual behavior.
Macho men endorsed a double standard, denied the importance of love, and endorsed both sexist attitudes and prejudice against gay men. They prefer Mosher's role enactment path to sexual involvement, which emphasizes "hot" sex by exciting novelty in partners, acts, and settings. Macho men preferred the following sexual fantasies: being a sexual master punishing a slave, overpowering a woman and forcing her to submit to his wishes, delighting many women, being in an orgy, having sex with young girls, doing the sexually taboo or forbidden, having an audience watching sexual performance, making love to more than one woman at a time, and being a male stripper or sexual performer for women.
Macho men hold the woman responsible for contraception, avoiding condoms. They will not interrupt their chance for scoring by inquiring about birth control. They have stereotypic attitudes about birth control as unmanly. Macho men used five styles of coping when jealous: verbal aggression against the rival, physical aggression against the rival, verbal and physical aggression against the partner, acting out, and seeking sexual revenge. Women attracted to macho men showed a similar pattern, whereas, when jealous, most women sought social support and made negative self-comparisons.
Macho personality was associated with self-reports of aggressive sexual behavior across several samples. Although exploitation is most commonly reported by college men, scores on the HMI were also correlated with coercive and assaultive sexual behavior. In the laboratory, macho men report a higher likelihood of using force to gain sex with an attractive and desirable confederate. Macho men reported less disgust, anger, fear, distress, shame, contempt, and guilt while imagining committing the brutal and realistic rape of a stranger. While imagining the rape of an acquaintance, macho men reported less fear, shame, distress, and guilt. Two studies of the guided imagining of marital rape revealed that macho men were even more accepting of marital rape than stranger rape. Marriage created a duty and an entitlement for macho men.
Thus, virility in macho men encompasses a view of women as property who owe sex to men as their duty corresponding to the males' entitlement. Callous sexuality is an integral part of machismo. Seduction is a game played and won by macho men - a seduction that shades into exploitation, that shades into coercion, that shades into assault. Both casual and intimate partners are fair game; after drinking, macho men become even more aggressive. Having a hostile- dominant interpersonal style, using unilateral power strategies, and believing that sex is necessary, their right, and women's duty, the macho man exhibits a callous sexuality that expresses power over women, justified by machismo. Given the ideology of machismo, to be a real man is to be a tough, violent, daring, virile man. Virile manhood requires sexual conquests as a marker of prestige, reputation, and gender superiority.
REFERENCES
Gilmore, D.D. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990.
Mosher, D.L. Macho Men, Machismo, and Sexuality. In J. Bancroft, éd., Annual Review of Sex Research, Vol. 2 (1991), pp. 199-247.
Mosher, D.L., and S.S. Tomkins. Scripting the Macho Man: Hypermasculine Socialization and Enculturation. Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 25 (1988), pp. 60-84.
Pleck, J.H. The Myth of Masculinity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981.
Donald L. Mosher
