Challenging Macho Values (PDF)

men to buy into the security provided by strong leadership and patriarchal values.

It is at times like this that male power also gets reproduced through ideology, culture and fantasy. There is a fear of internal chaos if personal power is challenged or within the institution if leadership is weak. This leads to the eager espousing of patriarchal values around certainty and control as something natural which must be affirmed in schools. It seems so natural that it stops any realization that alternatives exist, and promotes fantasies to help sustain the masculine feelings of power and control within.

Male staff at a Derby secondary school would joke with each other from time to time about employing a ‘Basher’. Such a fantasy of control would arise when the pressure of ever increasing marking and peripheral paperwork coincided with a larger than usual number of classroom confrontations with difficult students. We would all contribute money from our salaries; a PE store would be converted into the ‘Basher’s’ room. There the ‘Basher’ would wait within carpeted and mattressed walls to deal with the deviant, antisocial pupil to be sent to him. One visit would be enough to solve the problem for staff and school.

Of course, this was a male fantasy shared by male staff but it serves to show how the dominant culture works through fantasy and it has such a tight grip on us because it works through our unconscious desires. All the men taking part bought into the fantasy at some level. In the face of a downwardly spiralling disciplinary system, our collective imagery, taken from the popular culture of what it is like to be a ‘real’ man reasserting control, takes over from the inside. Our heads were colonized with images from popular culture of what ‘real’ men would do in this situation and thus violence or threats of violence through the image of the big, faceless male ‘Basher’ gave us back the power and security of a ‘males-on-top’ identity which was seen to be slipping away.