What is a real (wo)man?

I found an article from November 2009 which focused on manhood and the aggression usually tied to it. Two different experiments were conducted; one using 175 undergraduate students at a private university in the Northeast United states, and another using 113 undergraduate students at a large university in Southeastern United states. The first experiment focused on how many action terms were used to describe what a "real man" and a "real woman" are. The second experiment focused on whether situational or dispositional explanations were favored when attempting to explain a persons physical aggression. In both experiments, their hypothesis were supported.

The first experiment was conducted by randomly giving each participant an open ended sentence starting with either "a real man....." or "a real woman.....", which led them to fill in the blank; the sentence fragment appeared 25 times and the participants had to fill out as many as they could in the allotted time. Most of the results were stereotyped, but still varied. An average of 10.5 sentences were filled out (both males and females averaged about the same). Also, the "a real man..." fragments contained more masculine content, and men included a lot more stereotypical content than feedback given from women.

The second experiment was conducted by randomly giving each participant a faux police report about a bar fight between two men (or women) which was caused by one of them stepping in between them and a person of the opposite sex that they were talking to. They were then accused of not being able to pick up the opposite sex, and were then surrounded by a crowd, and then followed by the fight. After reading the fake police report the participants had to answer eight questions, which each could be answered on a 1-7 scale, which determined whether the factor was dispositional or situational. The results shown that males seen the male violence as situational, while women seen the female violence as dispositional. Women stated that their violence usually came from stress, while men said their's was an exercise of control over others.

Also, they concluded that manhood was something easily lost, but hard to gain; that it had to be behaviorally approved by others, while womanhood was something earned biologically/physically. The top three ways for a man to gain approval were to take risks, perform difficult tasks, and/or to do something public.

For me, both of the results did not come as a shock. I could have guessed the results for the second experiment just because of the way my friends talk about other people.

I do not have the link for the pdf file anymore, but I do still have the pdf itself on my laptop. I hope you learned something, seeing as I have not.

-Derek Moskal =]