![]() For example, a 2011 study led by Kristen Springer, PhD, of Rutgers University, found that men with the strongest beliefs about masculinity were only half as likely as men with more moderate masculine beliefs to get preventive health care ( Journal of Health and Social Behavior Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors. The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity-marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression-is, on the whole, harmful. ![]() Once psychologists began studying the experiences of women through a gender lens, it became increasingly clear that the study of men needed the same gender-aware approach, says Levant. ![]() Researchers assumed that masculinity and femininity were opposite ends of a spectrum, and “healthy” psychology entailed identifying strongly with the gender roles conferred by a person’s biological sex.īut just as this old psychology left out women and people of color and conformed to gender-role stereotypes, it also failed to take men’s gendered experiences into account. Most major studies were done only on white men and boys, who stood in as proxies for humans as a whole. Prior to the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s, all psychology was the psychology of men. Levant, EdD, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and co-editor of the APA volume “The Psychology of Men and Masculinities.” Levant was APA president in 2005 when the guideline-drafting process began and was instrumental in securing funding and support to get the process started. “Though men benefit from patriarchy, they are also impinged upon by patriarchy,” says Ronald F. Many researchers who study femininity also work on masculinity: Several contributors to the guidelines for girls and women have also contributed to the new guidelines for boys and men. ![]() Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.ĪPA’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Girls and Women were issued in 2007 and, like the guidelines for men and boys, aim to help practitioners assist their patients despite social forces that can harm mental health. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than girls, and they face harsher punishments in school-especially boys of color.ĪPA’s new Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Boys and Men strive to recognize and address these problems in boys and men while remaining sensitive to the field’s androcentric past. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. Meanwhile, the 115th Congress, which began in 2017, was 81 percent male.īut something is amiss for men as well. According to a 2017 analysis by Fortune, in 16 of the top companies, 80 percent of all high-ranking executives were male. And men still dominate professionally and politically: As of 2018, 95.2 percent of chief operating officers at Fortune 500 companies were men. For decades, psychology focused on men (particularly white men), to the exclusion of all others. For the first time ever, APA is releasing guidelines to help psychologists work with men and boys.Īt first blush, this may seem unnecessary.
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