As if the homeless didn’t have enough going against them, now, it turns out, the bastards engage in “compensatory masculinity,” either blaming the women in their lives for all their problems or sexualizing or revering them as motherly objects.
I refer to a chapter in a new book that was written by Erin Dej, a criminologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont.
Dej’s chapter is called When a Man’s Home Isn’t a Castle: Hegemonic Masculinity Among Men Experiencing Homelessness and Mental Illness.
Her conclusion is that while homeless men are denied the usual range of hypermasculine rewards (a house, a job, power, etc.) such are the benefits of “the patriarchal dividend” that they nonetheless “perform masculinity” and behave in the few hypermasculine ways that remain open to them.
