{"id":16790,"date":"2021-11-22T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-22T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/?p=16790"},"modified":"2025-04-08T09:58:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T09:58:07","slug":"myths-around-men-hadley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/myths-around-men-hadley","title":{"rendered":"Myths around Men"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Dr Robin A Hadley, author of How is a Man Supposed to be a Man<\/a><\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The global trend of declining fertility rates and an increasingly ageing population has serious implications for individuals and institutions alike because care in later life is often fundamentally reliant on adult children to indirectly and\/or directly support their parents. In the Westernised world there are probably more childless men than childless women. Childless men are mostly excluded from ageing, social science and reproduction scholarship and almost completely absent from most national statistics. Most countries do not collect the father\u2019s fertility history at birth registration \u2013 as they do the mother\u2019s \u2013 consequently the exact level of male childlessness is difficult to determine. Indeed, Marcia Inhorn et al\u00a0 (2009) and Inhorn (2012) have successfully argued that men have been marginalized as the \u2018second sex\u2019 in anthropology and the social sciences through two main ways. First, that the vast bulk of sociocultural material on reproduction centres on women\u2019s experience. Second, the widely embedded assumption that they are not interested and disengaged, from reproductive intentions and outcomes. There are many myths around men, manhood and masculinity when it comes to both age and reproduction. Two of the most embedded in many societies, institutions and social structures is that men are fully fertile from puberty until death and that men are not concerned about reproduction. In my book How is a man supposed to be a man? Male childlessness a Life Course Disrupted<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>I examine these and other myths around men in the Epilogue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Men\nCan Have Children at Any Time in Their Lives.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Sperm declines in\nefficacy after the age of 35.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. All societies have\nsociocultural rules (the \u2018social clock\u2019) regarding the acceptable age to become\nparents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. The vast majority of men do not become parents after 50.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018Men\naren\u2019t bothered about being a dad.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Research has shown\nthat a diagnosis of infertility for men and women cause the same distress as a\ndiagnosis of cancer or a similar disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Childless men who\nwanted to be fathers reported being more angry, jealous and depressed than\nequivalent women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Parenthood is mainly\nassociated with women. Men who express the desire to perform nurturing roles\nare often stigmatized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Any species that\nrequired a male and female to reproduce would not survive long if the majority\nof either sex \u2018was not interested\u2019 in reproduction. Similarly, would Homo\nsapiens have gone through its various technological and social advances if survival\nof the species was not a priority?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The arguments supporting\nfor those statements above are detailed in Chapter 1, \u2018Contexts of\nChildlessness\u2019 and 2, \u2018Ageing and Male Involuntary Childlessness\u2019.\nMoreover, how the childless-by-circumstance men experienced these fictions in\neveryday life are described in Chapters 4 to 7 respectively, Chapter 4.\nPathways to Involuntary Childlessness, Chapter 5. Negotiating Fatherhood. Chapter\n6. Relationships and Social Networks, Chapter 7. Ageing Without Children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nscholarship and the wider world there is a need to acknowledge the complex interconnection\nbetween the biological, cultural, economic, physiological, psychological and\nsociological that influences the reproductive outcomes for men and boys across\nthe life course. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

References:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hadley, Robin A.\n2021. How is a man supposed to be a man?\nMale childlessness a Life Course Disrupted<\/em> (Berghahn Books: New York).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inhorn, M.C. 2012.\nThe New Arab Man. Emergent Masculinities,\nTechnologies, and Islam in the Middle East<\/em> (Princeton University Press:\nPrinceton, NJ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inhorn, Marcia C, Tine Tj\u00f8rnh\u00f8j-Thomsen, Helene Goldberg, and\nMaruska la Cour Mosegard (ed.)^(eds.). 2009. Reconceiving the Second Sex: Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction.<\/em>\n(Berghahn Books: New York).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Robin A Hadley<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is an independent research consultant who has conducted research with the Open University and Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) where he is an associate lecturer.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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by Dr Robin A Hadley, author of How is a Man Supposed to be a Man<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1969,107,1665,427,129,1726,1967,1595,1799,470,1968,500,204],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16790"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16790"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16801,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16790\/revisions\/16801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}