(andar aos) Papéis

« (…) while in the end the female in societies in which every woman marries is practically certain o resolving all the doubts about her own sex membership that were implanted in her in the natural course of her long infancy and childhood, the male needs to reassert, to reattempt, to redefine his maleness.

In every known human society, the male’s need for achievement can be recognized. Men may cook, or weave or dress dolls or hunt humming-birds, but if such activities are appropriate occupations of men, then the whole society, men and women alike, votes them important. When the same occupations are performed by women, they are regarded as less important. In a great number of human societies men’s sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activity that women are not allowed to practise. Their maleness, in fact, has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some field of performing some feat. Here may be found the relationship between maleness and pride; that is, a need for prestige that will outstrip the prestige which is accorded to any woman. There seems no evidence that it is necessary for men to surpass women in any specific way, but rather that men do need to find reassurance in achievement, and because of this connection, cultures frequently phrase achievement as something that women do not or cannot do, rather than directly as something which men do well.

The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough – whether it will be to build gardens or raise cattle, kill game or kill enemies, build bridges or handle bankshares – so that the male may in the course of his life reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement, of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of child-bearing have given him a glimpse. In the case of women, it is only necessary that they be permitted by the given social arrangements to fulfill their biological role, to attain this sense of irreversible achievement.

(…)

Each culture – in its own way – has developed forms that will make men satisfied in their constructive activities without distorting their sure sense of their masculinity. Fewer cultures have yet found ways in which to give women a divine discontent that will demand other satisfactions that those of child-bearing.»

Male and female, Margaret Mead