Masculinity in America v the UK: which country has the manliest men?

British men feel less masculine than American men, according to new research released last week from YouGov.

When asked to rate themselves on a scale of 0 to 6, where 0 meant “completely masculine” and 6 meant “completely feminine”, 42% of men in the US gave themselves a 0, compared with just 28% of men in the UK.

It’s not immediately clear what, if anything, the difference in responses means. Do American men really feel differently about their gender than British men? Or is there confusion over what it means to identify as “masculine”? We dug into the data and talked to a few experts to find out.

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Jeffrey Leak, associate professor of English at UNC Charlotte in North Carolina, is the author of a short paper in American Quarterly titled American and European Masculinity. Leak says his research has led him to conclude that around the world, men are no longer sure what constitutes masculinity – and that’s especially the case in America where, he says, “men are asking themselves: ‘If I’m not the breadwinner, then who am I?’”

While we talk on the phone, Leak mentions his son. He wonders aloud how growing up in the US his son might end up defining his masculinity in a different way from his father. Based on YouGov’s research, he’s probably right.

When YouGov, which is headquartered in the UK, conducted the survey in early May, they had enough British respondents to break the responses down by age and gender. They discovered a big generational divide – just 2% of men age 18-24 described themselves as “completely masculine” compared with 56% of the men age 65 and over (unfortunately, with only 1,000 respondents in the US, they could only describe the responses by age or gender).

Every man I spoke to while researching this article mentions a generational divide – either by contrasting themselves to a male relative or by contrasting now to a time before. When I asked male co-workers for input on the topic, (American) Mike Barry responded: “Historically in America, I don’t really think there was even an option for men to view themselves as not masculine. You were either masculine, or not masculine enough, which was a problem.”

Another (British) colleague, Oliver Laughland, thinks masculinity is not a fixed concept since it’s “split by class, culture, location and ethnicity, so it’s very difficult to describe just how ‘masculine’ you are”.

But Mike and Oliver are middle-class men, and that may well affect their attitudes to gender. Because while notions of “masculinity” are becoming more fluid for some, I’m reminded by Andrew Reiner that that’s not necessarily the case for white working-class men in the US. Reiner teaches a course titled “Real Men Smile: The Changing Face of Masculinity” at Towson University in Maryland. He describes the gap in masculine identity between upper- and working-class Americans as “a real chasm”.

Reiner goes further than that: if you can understand what masculinity means to white working-class Americans, you can start to understand why Donald Trump is now the Republican presidential nominee – “It’s not surprising given the way he’s talking and the things he’s saying that he’s resonating.”

American men with less formal education have higher unemployment and, when they can get work, receive lower wages. In the cookie-cutter stereotype of an American family, a woman might have a job (increasingly she will), but a man who stays at home? Useless. “They’re scared basically,” Reiner explains. “And, as a lot of men do when they’re scared, they’re overcompensating with hyper-masculine behaviour.” Trump’s behaviour – emotionally unexpressive, unapologetic and self-assured – all conforms to the archetypal “real man”.

Reiner (a white man) emphasises that this is particularly the case for white men. Leak (a black man) also thinks race is important when it comes to understanding masculinity. He says that white American men who have lived through eight years with an African American president (and now face the prospect of at least four years with a female president) are a “cultural and social firecracker”.

Past research has shown that assumptions about masculinity and race are closely tied up. A study found that Asians are generally perceived as feminine – which acts as an advantage to Asian women but a disadvantage to Asian men. That same study found that black people are perceived as masculine which is a disadvantage to black women seeking a partner.

Fascinating though all this is, race and social class exist in the UK too. So these explanations aren’t enough for understanding the way American and British men talk about masculinity differently. Nor can they fully explain the gaps in attitudes about femininity either – YouGov found that 46% of American women described themselves as “completely feminine” while 35% of British women said the same. Notions of gender are just more likely to be at the extreme end of the spectrum in America.

Part of the explanation could lie in how gender stereotypes differ between the two countries. Last year, Reddit user arabella15 posted a question: “Are there any huge differences between dating an American guy and dating a British guy?” The responses included “most American guys are circumcised. Most British ones are not” – that is factually correct.

One other response to arabella15’s question is interesting. A user called Xaila says they are an American three years into a relationship with a British man and explains: “Good natured self-deprecation and darker humo(u)r is pretty much a national sport.” British men might simply take themselves less seriously and so be more willing to check something other than “6/completely masculine” on a survey.

But is there any way to actually measure transatlantic masculinity beyond what men say? Apparently so. When I moved to the US from Britain in 2014, the company that hired me paid for me to have an “intercultural consultant” to help ensure I wouldn’t cause too much offence to my new colleagues (or be offended too much – I never quite understood the purpose). During my day with my culture coach, Jamie, I was told that American and British cultures really were “fundamentally different”, as were the men within them.

My login for the RW3 culture wizard portal, which claimed to calculate my own culture scores and contrast them to the averages in the US and the UK which Jamie taught from, has now alas expired, but I have found a similar online tool – Geerte Hofstede – which opaquely states that the US scores 62 on masculinity while the UK scores 66. I can find no explanation of the methodology behind those numbers and it seems hard to believe that an objective definition of masculinity might exist against which to truly compare Brits and Americans.

So, back to the YouGov survey. What does it mean that there’s such a strong difference in how American and British men view masculinity? Masculinity can’t be measured from 0 to 6, not least because people who check the “male” box on a survey don’t all agree what it means to also check the box that says “completely masculine”. Whether real differences exist between Americans and Brits, it’s clear that simple survey questions don’t fully capture the ways that race, class and age affect those meanings.

While Jeffrey Leak is talking to me about masculinity, a story suddenly comes to mind. He tells me that last week, he had to take his seven-year-old son to the doctor and then the ophthalmologist before finally dropping him off at school. “I noticed that everyone we interacted with, all the professionals, well, they were all women and so I asked my son: ‘What do you think that means?’ And my son said to me: ‘I guess it means that girls can do a lot of different things.’” Like all men, Jeffrey’s son will have to figure out what, if anything, that means for his manhood.