Journalist Caitlin Moran recently tweeted the following:
“I feel like every day now, I read/hear something saying “We don’t talk about what’s POSITIVE about masculinity; what’s GOOD about men and boys.” So: what IS the best stuff about boys, and men? Honest, celebratory question.”
What followed was a collection of replies acknowledging and celebrating various traits seen typically as ‘male’, including certain activities, such as knowing about sports or cars, or a desire to do DIY type work, and characteristics such as physical strength, no-nonsense attitudes and a ‘less complicated’ style of friendship between men.
Whilst I condone Moran’s efforts to turn recent discussions surrounding masculinity on their head and frame it in a positive light, to me the the responses offered and discussion that followed felt somewhat stifling. I am biologically male and identify as male, but do not feel like I personally adhere to most of these stereotypes. I am not physically strong, I know very little about cars and sports, and find there be just as much nuance and drama in male-male friendships as there is in friendships between other genders.
I am not sure that homing in on various ‘positive’ male stereotypes is necessarily a good antidote to discussion surrounding toxic masculinity and the rhetoric of professional douchebags like Andrew Tate. I do not believe that anyone who identifies as male should feel any pressure to adhere to certain traits seen as masculine, any more than I believe that anyone who identifies as female should be expected to live up to any stereotypically feminine traits. Am I any less ‘male’ for not taking an interest in the premier league, or being useless at fixing a punctured tyre?
I believe the Boltzmann distribution curve sheds light on understanding this scenario. This distribution portrays the individual energies of a set of particles that make up a body with an overall energy. For instance, the billions upon billions of individual water molecules that make up a glass of water at a certain temperature.
What this distribution shows is that the range of individual energies across the population of particles remains broad even when the overall temperature of the body is increased. For instance, in a glass of water at 10oC, there will be some water molecules with very high kinetic energy, some with very low kinetic energy, and many representatives of all points in between; and in a glass of water at 20oC there will again be some molecules with very high kinetic energy, some with very low, and many in between.
You will only notice the difference if you sample many molecules – shrinking yourself down to the scale a few Angstroms and going from molecule to molecule with a clipboard and asking each of their kinetic energies, it would take you a long time to gather enough data to ascertain the overall average energy of the population (and hence the temperature), but luckily you can achieve a similar assessment by sticking your finger in the glass and judging if it’s warm or not.
What the Boltzmann distribution shows is that the average traits of a population can feel somewhat removed from the situation as seen from the level of the individuals within that population. Just as a warmer glass of water still contains a large distribution of energies within its constituent water molecules, so too can the overall population of males in, say, the UK be – on average – more knowledgeable on sports or less inclined to drama in their close friendships. But that does not mean there won’t be large swathes of that population who hate sports, are no good at DIY, can’t benchpress and would choose a pina colada over an IPA. These individuals are no less ‘male’ for doing so.
Failure to acknowledge the characteristics of the Boltzmann distribution curve leads to the false assumption that for a population to be, on average, a certain way, all its constituent individuals must be at least a little bit that way inclined, and that is simply not true, whether you’re talking about molecules in a glass of water, or gender stereotypes in a country’s population.
