Toward a fuller conception of Machismo: Development of a traditional Machismo and Caballerismo Scale (original) (raw)
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Machismo and Mexican American men: An empirical understanding using a gay sample
Journal of Counseling Psychology, 2011
Machismo is an important concept describing men's behavior in Mexican culture, yet it is not welldefined. Most conceptions of machismo focus on a restricted, negative view of hypermasculinity. The authors posit that a fuller conception consists of 2 parts: traditional machismo and caballerismo, which is a focus on emotional connectedness. The authors developed a scale to measure these dimensions and found support for these 2 independent factors in 2 separate studies of Mexican American men. Traditional Machismo was related to aggression and antisocial behavior, greater levels of alexithymia, and more wishful thinking as a coping mechanism. Caballerismo was positively associated with affiliation, ethnic identity, and problem-solving coping. Traditional Machismo was also associated with less education, whereas there were no differences across education level on Caballerismo scores. These results support the more complete, two-dimensional representation of machismo.
Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 2008
Male role attitudes of 130 Mexican American college men were examined. Results indicated that Mexican American men held significantly more traditional attitudes toward male roles on all nine indicators of masculinity compared to a normative sample of U.S. men. Socioeconomic status (SES) and Mexican cultural orientation were significantly related to male role attitudes, with higher SES associated with greater endorsement of views that men should be physically tough and should not display traits characteristic of women. Greater endorsement of Mexican culture was associated with views that: (a) men deserve respect from their wife and children, (b) self-assurance in men is admirable, and (c) that it is essential for men to gain others' respect. Implications for practice and research are discussed.
Change and the Construction of Gendered Selfhood among Mexican Men Experiencing Erectile Difficulty
Ethos, 2013
Cultural anthropologists disagree about how to define "the self," debating whether it is an integrated or fragmented entity, and how people experience singular "selves" despite lived change. I argue that, rather than disrupting self-making, experiences of social or embodied disjunction may become key elements of shifting but cohesive-feeling selves, especially in cultural contexts in which change over time is expected. To do so, I examine the changes in selfhood lived out by Mexican men experiencing decreased erectile function, analyzing their narratives regarding their experiences of erectile difficulty and the social and physical changes, like aging and illness, that can cause it. I examine how men collaborated with women including wives, mistresses, and me to incorporate changes that rendered them unable to enact stereotypically macho or youthful masculinities into self-consciously different selves, which made sense within local cultural calls for change in gender norms. [self, masculinity, aging, sexuality] In recent decades, people in Mexico have debated whether machismo, a patriarchal style of masculinity characterized by virility, womanizing, and emotional withdrawal, is endemic, a racist stereotype, or a "traditional" but outmoded form of manliness (Gutmann 1996;). Although machismo is often cast as a cultural or biological inheritance of coercive unions between conquistador and indigena ancestors, this idea is relatively recent, popularized by Octavio Paz in the 1950s (Gutmann 2000; McKee Irwin 2003;. Nevertheless, it has become a global stereotype and a key but contested discourse for understanding Mexican men's lives. People from many walks of life in Mexico both assert that machismo exists and that it must change; companionate marriage and more egalitarian gender roles are widely idealized as key to national modernization (Amuchástegui and Szasz 2007; Wardlow and Hirsch 2006). In Mexico as elsewhere in Latin America, male privilege persists but gender norms and roles have dramatically shifted, and beliefs that men are innately predisposed to machismo compete with ideals of men as loving, responsible, and egalitarian (cf. Lancaster 1992).
Masculinity, Machismo and Their Relation with Some Familiar Variables
In this study, on one hand, the purpose was to identify if, in the incidence of the machismo, whether or not there are occurring modifications or changes toward a more equitable conception with relationship to the women on the part of the men, and on the other, to identify if some family variables such as the number of children, the stage of the vital cycle, the father's age and the educational level would have correlation with the level of the father's machismo in urban families of middle class. An inventory was built for such aim, considering the machismo like an attitude, that is to say, like a social construction that implies certain beliefs and opinions mainly around the masculine function or to the "to be man." Concerning the phenomenon of the machismo, the results apparently indicate that it is possible that a tendency exists towards the decrease of this attitude in the studied sample. Also, this phenomenon is directly correlated with the age, the years of s...
South Texas Veterans Health Care System, San Antonio, Texas Limited research has taken an intersectional approach in which masculinity, ethnicity, and social class are collectively considered in understanding Latino men's well-being. This study aims to address this gap by examining the role of perceived social class, familismo, acculturation, enculturation, Mexican American attitudinal marginalization, and masculinity ideology on well-being for 134 Mexican American college men ranging in age from 17 to 42 years (M 20.64, SD 3.92). Hierarchical multiple regression results indicated that men felt more satisfied with their lives when they perceived themselves to be of higher social class, adhered to familismo and to Mexican culture, expressed lower levels of marginalized attitudes toward Mexican American cultural norms, and had less traditional male role attitudes. The model collectively accounted for 26% of the variance in well-being, with perceived social class being the strongest predictor. The implications for practice and research are discussed in relation to understanding Latino men's well-being within the context of intersectionality and masculinity.
Machismo and anabolic steroid misuse among young Latino sexual minority men
Body Image, 2019
Latino sexual minority men (SMM) have elevated anabolic-androgenic steroid (AAS) misuse in comparison to their heterosexual and non-Latino peers. Within a gender role framework, desire to present as masculine through heightened muscularity may be related to increased AAS misuse. To assess the association between AAS misuse and a culturally-distinct masculinity, this study examined the relationship of two aspects of machismo, traditional machismo and caballerismo, with AAS misuse in the past month. Participants were 141 young adult Latino SMM recruited from the San Diego area. Participants completed a self-report questionnaire online in English or Spanish, which included measures of machismo and AAS misuse. Out of 141 participants, 27 reported AAS misuse (19.1%). Traditional machismo was positively associated with AAS misuse and caballerismo was negatively associated with AAS misuse. Traditional machismo, which emphasizes dominance, may be positively associated with AAS misuse due to its facilitation of muscle development, which could enable physical intimidation; greater musculature may also counteract assumptions about femininity and sexual orientation. Caballerismo may be negatively associated with AAS by providing a flexible masculinity model that emphasizes social cohesion over dominance. Future AAS misuse interventions could include values-based work and cognitive restructuring of masculinity schemas.