Getting Laid and Growing Close: Constructions of Masculinity in Relationship Advice for Heterosexual Men
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the growing popularity of men’s self-help products, recent debates surrounding hegemonic masculinity, and attention to the “crisis of masculinity,” research has ignored men’s advice about intimate relationships. Consequently, I examine 30 contemporary relationship advice books and conceptualize their constructions of heterosexual masculinity. Findings demonstrate authors’ overall rejection of hegemonic masculinity, alongside an overarching strategy of “masculinizing” intimacy that promotes two subsidiary gender strategies – relational heroism and tempered ambition – which reframe non-hegemonic behavior as manly. The overarching strategy appears in mild forms in books emphasizing “getting laid” and stronger variants in books that promote “growing close” through intimacy. The strategy promotes a promising departure from the constraints of hegemonic masculinity by broadening men’s acceptable range of talking about and doing masculinity, but continues to emphasize gender difference and enables a reconfiguration of heterosexual masculine intimacy within hegemonic masculinity, thereby limiting its promotion of gender equality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".