Gender Identity, Masculinity, Femininity, Sex Role - United States, Self-Improvement, Relationships - Interpersonal

The Male Paradox

Name: The Male Paradox
Author: John Munder Ross
ISBN: 9780671705176

by John Munder Ross

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Overview

Men are complex, unpredictable, and ultimately mysterious. What makes them act the way they do? John Munder Ross has spent twenty years studying men, and in The Male Paradox he presents a groundbreaking new theory that explores the meaning of masculinity, going far beyond the insights of the current "men's movement." Drawing on case studies from his own practice, Ross vividly depicts the conflicting forces inside the male psyche. Men are constantly at war with themselves, fighting their own aggression and resisting their need to be with, and be like, women. Bombarded from an early age by images as disparate as The Lone Ranger and Mr. Mom, men find that their impulses pull them in different directions - and often lead them to actions that seem destructive, deviant, or simply contradictory. Ross shows us men of all ages dealing with familiar and unfamiliar problems: work, illness, divorce, infidelity, child-rearing, homosexuality, violence, and incest. We see them with their parents, children, friends, and co-workers - and most of all, with the women in their lives. We learn why they love, why they fight, and what they feel about it all. These vivid portraits illuminate the problems men have in dealing with their various selves - with "the male paradox" inside. It is only by embracing rather than fleeing the contradictions of masculinity that a man can become whole. The Male Paradox is a beautifully written account of the forces within men and how they can make peace with themselves.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Men, Ross surmises, wish for what they fear the most: love, oneness and emotionality, all of which they stereotypically associate with women. A clinical psychologist who teaches at the Cornell and New York University medical centers, Ross presents numerous case histories of men who sabotage themselves or are terrified of self-assertion. His readable, popularly written study analyzes straying husbands' hidden resentment of their wives; probes the regressive defiance of newly divorced men; incisively portrays incestuous fathers as infantile males who betray and degrade victims in whom they see their own childish selves; and sifts the angers and fears triggered by such ordeals as job loss, severe illness, persistent sexual failure and the care of a disabled child. His party-line psychoanalytic view that homosexual men subconsciously fear effeminization and pulverization by women is highly debatable, but in almost all other areas Ross unmasks the essential vulnerability behind male posturing with rare insight and sensitivity. (Oct.)

Gilbert Taylor

"Sometimes it's hard to be a woman, giving all your love to just one man," wails Tammy Wynette, but men deserve a chance to whine, too, and here is psychologist Ross to carry the tune. It's tough, paradoxical, being a man, suppressing one's feminine side simultaneously with projecting the independence, decisiveness, aggressiveness, and stoicism that stick out as masculinity. The tension manifests itself, and chapters are arranged, by crises and behavior, such as adultery, divorce, promiscuity, homosexuality, child abuse--of both the sexual and the walloping variety--impotence, genital diseases, and the job/career. One case study is flogged for each topic, Ross now generalizing his professional insights, then keeping interest up with bits of erotica, and thence to his grand examplar: a birth-to-adulthood limning of Chuck Junior's life. This reminds men of the father/son conundrum, and the unseen psychological force exerted by our preconscious first years. It's Freudian, it's memory pricking, and it rides the transient wave of male introspection. A sure circulation wherever drum beaters are heard.