Rather than attempting to define masculinity as an object ( a natural character type, a behavioral average, a norm), we need to focus on the processe… - Raewyn Connell

Thus feminism is more than contesting the discursive positioning of women; feminism involves peaceable households and cooperative child care, and so on. The labour movement tries to create more democratic workplaces; anti-colonial movements build structures of self-government. All of these movements create new cultural forms and circulate new knowledge.

Masculinity is necessarily in question in the lives of men whose sexual interest is in other men. Men in gay and bisexual networks will be dealing with issues about gender quite as serious as environmentalists', though differently structured.

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.