Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated gender ideologies and with country-level indices of gender equality and human development. Using data from university samples in 62 countries across 13 world regions ( N = 33,417), we demonstrate: (1) the psychometric isomorphism of the PMB (i.e., its comparability in meaning and statistical properties across the individual and country levels); (2) the PMB’s distinctness from, and associations with, ambivalent sexism and ambivalence toward men; and (3) associations of the PMB with nation-level gender equality and human development. Findings are discussed in terms of their statistical and theoretical implications for understanding widely-held beliefs about the precariousness of the male gender role.

Discussions about men’s victimization by their female intimate partners have gained increased visibility in the last two decades. These discussions put victim positions on offer for men that stand in stark contrast to more widespread associations between masculinity and perpetration of violence. This article examines how these contradictory positionings play out and are discursively negotiated in Finnish online discussions of female-inflicted intimate partner violence (IPV). Two recurring types of positioning of men were identified in the analysis: neglected victims and naturally superior perpetrators. The analysis illustrates how gendered differences between men and women in relation to violence are both reiterated and denied in the processes of enacting, balancing, and rhetorically employing these positionings. Thereby, light is shed on the multiplicity of complex and fluid ways in which masculinities are constructed and customized in the context of meaning-making surrounding the issue of IPV.

This article explores the ways in which lethal intimate partner violence perpetrated by both men and women is made sense of in news reports in Finnish tabloids. An analytical approach drawing upon critical discursive psychology, complemented with tools from membership categorization analysis, was adopted for distinguishing recurring patterns in accounting for violence and use of gendered categorizations in the news. Two recurring interpretative repertoires of violence were identified. The first constructs violence as originating from interactional or relationship problems, while the second relies upon characterizations of the perpetrators as pathological or deviant to explain violence. The analysis accords particular attention to the ways in which the ideal of gender-neutrality that is prevalent in Finnish society is drawn upon in these repertoires, 2 and how this ideal entwines with the circulation of gender-specific assumptions. The analysis also illustrates how categorizations often work in the reports to preserve the normality of men as perpetrators of lethal intimate partner violence while attaching deviance and moral questionability to women both as victim and as perpetrators, thus maintaining the taken-for-grantedness of gendered differences in relation to violence.

This article examines how Finnish tabloids portray women who have used violence. The aim is to look at the ways in which violence committed by women is made sense of in relation to culturally shared conceptions and expectations regarding the relations between gender categories and violence. The analysis of the data draws on sociosemiotics and distinguishes modalities as discursive devices that attach meanings and different levels of agency to violent action. By focusing on descriptions of women's violent agency, the analysis attempts to dissect the ways in which the identities of 'feminine women' and 'violent women' are dialectically constructed. A recurring theme in the positioning of women in the analysed news articles is the attachment of deceptiveness to them and their actions. Especially in the reporting of the most sensationalized cases, women as perpetrators of violence are often portrayed in the data as strong agents with an antisocial will to hurt others, and with the capacity to potentially escape being held responsible for their violence. These findings are discussed in relation to the Finnish cultural context and the prevalent discourses on gender, violence and equality in it.

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflecting the greater autonomy support and flexible self-construction processes present in these countries. Using data from 62 countries ( N = 28,640), we examine binary gender gaps in agentic and communal self-views as a function of country-level objective gender equality (the Global Gender Gap Index) and subjective distributions of social power (the Power Distance Index). Findings show that in more egalitarian countries, gender gaps in agency are smaller and gender gaps in communality are larger. These patterns are driven primarily by cross-country differences in men’s self-views and by the Power Distance Index (PDI) more robustly than the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI). We consider possible causes and implications of these findings.