Nurturing Femininities

How do men define care? What do they understand by it? How do the meanings they assign to care relate to their identities as men? What sorts of negotiations about the meaning of care are occurring among men (and women)? Many of the men in the study endorsed feminist assertions about the involvedness of caring, and how caring engages an ethical mode of being defined as other-centred and selfless. Rather than accounting for the work of care in a flippant fashion, indifferent to the effort, skill, and complexity involved, care was defined as physically and emotionally demanding. They proposed that caring requires expert and specialist attributes, and they inferred that caring values are morally superior to the self-interested rationality widely prevailing in society. What we find here is the way the men consider identity to be expressly tied to caring and nurturing deeply tied to femininity. The idea of nurturing femininity amounts to a pervasive discourse which is used to construct an ideal type of caring. Whilst this can imply essentialist notions of femininity as the biological antithesis of masculinity, it need not; what the men depict here is the antagonistic social construction of masculinity. By imaging themselves to be inadequate, incompetent, or uninterested nurturers, men easily distance themselves from feeling obliged to care. Aided by an individualist ideology of free choice the unequal division of love and care labour can be rationalised on the basis that carers have chosen care work because it fits their psychological makeup, social interests, and self-identity.