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Although popular culture contrasts men and women as opposites, cross-gender friendships between the sexes are thriving. I agree with other scholars that men's friendships with women are increasing in number, value, and social acceptability in the United States. I argue that we should expand our contexts for understanding cross-gender friendships from dyads or paid bonds to include men and women comrades, coworkers, in-laws, exes, and members of other mixed groups.

This essay describes paradoxes and contradictions in treatments of masculine psychology in men, masculine women, and female-to-male transgendered persons. Using object-relations psychoanalysis, Nancy Chodorow explained the complementary and opposing psychologies in men and in women, emphasizing competitive and inhibited aspects of masculine psychology. Similar psychological theories are still being advanced today as applicable to most men and women. However, some contemporary gender scholars reject psychoanalysis as not only outmoded, biased, and sexist, but also as intrinsically inapplicable to gender variant people. They may resist all psychological theories on the grounds that such theories inevitably pathologize their subjects, with the paradoxical results that transgendered subjects, in particular, are accorded no psychological interiority at all and that all descriptions of the non-normative are considered pathologizing. Even more paradoxically, theorists of female masculinity like Judith Halberstam and scholars of transgender studies, including Henry Rubin, Sally Hines, and Bobby Noble, imply that people born female may make better men than people born male. Along with therapists of transgender clients, transgender studies scholars claim that gender is innate and biological in origin, yet they seek to facilitate gender transition through social changes, including new technologies and new queer ideologies. Although generally decrying essentialist prescriptions for human behavior, moreover, these scholars may conclude that they are ethically bound to essentialist explanations of gender.

Two popular entertainments, the South Park cartoon show and The Blue Man Group theatrical performance, are analyzed as symptomatic of a new configuration of masculinity in the contemporary United States. This masculinity is shaped by young men's ambivalent resistance and accommodation to the consumer culture. It manifests itself in an expulsive anality unlike the bourgeois character traits described by Freud or the polymorphously sensual scatology that Bakhtin ascribes to folk culture. Not the breadwinner masculinity of the post-World War II era, this market masculinity is simultaneously childish, creative, homoerotic, homophobic, racist, cynical, and paranoid. It reflects young men's difficulties in maintaining individual autonomy both against the impersonal authority of the law of the father and against the more seductive power of corporate advertising, which might be called the market of the mother. This analysis furthers feminist efforts toward socially contextualized, nondualistic understandings of masculinity.