Are Men Animals?: How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short, by Matthew Gutmann
Bibliographic record
Abstract
T he nature-nurture debate is perhaps one of the most enduring debates within anthropology and one of anthropology's greatest contributions to public understanding of human behaviour.Most famously, Boas and his students championed cultural relativism while successfully critiquing scientific racists and eugenicists who worked to naturalize racialized categories.These same anthropologists, most notably Margaret Mead, also critiqued the biological determinism of gender, sex and sexuality.In Are Men Animals?How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short, anthropologist Matthew Gutmann challenges us to ask why "racialized ideas about biological capacities" have been largely rejected (except of course within white supremacy) "but beliefs about men's biological capacities and animal urges" have not (2019: 229).Drawing on research in the natural and social sciences, including his own multi-sited ethnographic research on masculinity in China, Mexico and the United States, Gutmann argues that the entrenchment of gendered behaviour, specifically toxic masculinity, as biological, is the result of social processes including cultural perceptions of gender and sexuality, confirmation bias and folk science.In the spirit of anthropology's contribution to public understanding of gender and sex, this book is written for a public audience rather than an academic one, and this has some advantages and costs.The book is very accessible and excerpts would make a great addition to undergraduate courses on the anthropology of gender.However, more specialized researchers may be left longing for more concrete examples of recent research that challenges the myth of testosterone and other biological agents of gender.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".