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Manhood's opposite was once childhood
The opposite of manhood
For a while that shift may have been productive. Women were kept out of sports, scouting, and war and could not be public heroes, so men took heroism on as their own way to prove they were men. Now that women do the same things and prove just as heroic and strong, defining manhood as the opposite of womanhood has pushed some men toward toxicity, a way of saying that at least they are not that kind of girly girl.
Letters between friends
Before the 19th century, heterosexual men wrote to each other in letters that read like ones a 15-year-old sends to a girlfriend. They wrote that they had not heard from a friend in so long, asked whether he was mad at them, and said that reading his last letter made them cry. Male students who read these letters today get uncomfortable.
Early photographs
Early cameras caught the same closeness. Men photographed themselves and their friends sitting on each other's laps, embracing, and walking arm in arm and hand in hand. That disappeared in the late 19th century.
Why did male affection become suspect?
In 1869 the Austro-Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined the word homosexual, and by the end of the century European and American doctors were classifying same-sex attraction as a medical condition. Once that category existed, close physical affection between men began to be read through it. Historians such as E. Anthony Rotundo, in his 1993 book American Manhood, describe how the idea of manliness hardened in this period. Intimate male friendships that had been unremarkable in the early 1800s became harder to display.
How did scouting and sports reshape manhood?
Organized team sports spread through schools and colleges in the late 1800s, backed by a movement called muscular Christianity that tied physical toughness to moral character. Robert Baden-Powell held the first Scout camp on Brownsea Island in 1907. The Boy Scouts of America was incorporated in 1910, three years later. These groups gave boys a structured path to prove themselves as men outside the home.
Why did early photographs show such closeness?
Exposure times in the 1840s ran from several seconds to minutes, so sitters planned their poses deliberately. What they chose reflects what they considered respectable to show. Surviving nineteenth-century portraits include many of men posed with arms around friends, a custom that faded as the century ended.
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