Arguments that masculinity should change often come to grief, not on counter-against reform, but on the belief that men cannot change, so it is futil… - Raewyn Connell

Gender terms are contested because the right to account for gender is claimed by conflicting discourses and systems of knowledge. We can see this in everyday situations as well as in high theory.

The novels of James Fenimore Cooper and the Wild West show of Buffalo Bill Cody were earl steps in a course that led eventually to the Western as a film genre and its self-conscious cult of inarticulate masculine heroism. The historian John MacKenzie has called attention to the similar cult of the hunter in the late nineteenth-century British empire. Wilderness, hunting and bushcraft were welded into a distinct ideology of manhood by figures such as Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scouting movement for boys, and Theodore Roosevelt in the United States.

Recognizing multiple masculinities, especially in an individualist culture such as the United States, risks taking thm for alternative lifestyles, a matter of consumer choice. A relational approach makes it easier to recognize the hard compulsions under which gender configurations are formed, the bitterness as well as the pleasure in gendered experience.