Many psychologists today believe that masculinity is an acquired and not endowed quality. Women are born of women and therefore they naturally 'are' while men are born of the opposite sex and must therefore 'become'.
MANY PSYCHOLOGISTS now believe that the male identity is more delicate and its establishment and maintenance more fraught with complications than that of the female identity.
A new branch of psychology called masculine psychology has emerged. Masculine psychology is the gender related psychology of male human identity.
Masculine psychology is concerned with issues of gender differences with a scientific and empirical approach as well as it is therapeutic in its orientation.
According a school of psychology, men are born of the female body that is a different gender from them, while women are born from a body that is the same gender as their own. It is, therefore held that a woman simply is, but a man must become.
A noted psychologist Neumann regards that “patriarchal normality as a form of fear of the feminine”. Therefore, what is regarded as masculine, that is, being action orientated, self-reliant, guarded, and seemingly independent is something that must be earned in adult life by men. And, this process of acquiring masculinity is now known as masculism.
The term masculinism was coined as the counterpart of feminism in the early 20th century. The shortened form the term, masculism, is said to have appeared in the 1980s in the conventional body of knowledge.