Big Love: Rewriting the Modern Man
In March 2006, HBO premiered Big Love, a controversial series inviting the
audience to follow the trials of a fictitious polygamous family living in suburban
Utah. With three wives and seven children, Bill Henrickson faces a constant
battle to maintain his place in the family and in society. Although Bill is an
atypical man with an atypical family, he can be seen as representing every man’s
struggle to find equilibrium between his own masculinity and the stereotype of
the masculine ideal. By taking Bill, the main character of this series, as an
exaggerated case-study of the modem man, one can see how the threats to his
masculinity destabilize the stereotypical ideal and, in comparing that instability
to the ideal, it becomes possible to redefine what constitutes masculinity.
Stereotypes are generally viewed as inherently negative constructs, a means
of establishing a prejudice against a person or group, but they are often based on
observable behaviors. In the article “Stereotypes as Dynamic Constructs:
Women and Men of the Past, Present, and Future,” Amanda Diekman and Alice
Eagly explain: “In general, a group’s stereotypic characteristics are congruent
with the activities required by its typical social roles.. .. Gender stereotypes are
thus emergent from role-bound activities, and the characteristics favored by
these roles become stereotypic of each sex and facilitate its typical activities”
(1171-2). If one agrees that gender stereotypes are based on behaviors typically
performed by a specific sex, it then becomes possible to measure an individual’s
actions against those ideally expected to occur among members of that sex
group. To oversimplify the idea, the actions of a sexual male should ideally
conform to the gender stereotypes associated with men by completing the
actions found to be typical of the male. However, this is not a stable means of
evaluating masculinity, because some men do not participate in these actions, or
are at certain times or places seen to “fail” at them, and because some women
perform these same actions, typically thought to be masculine. Does this mean
that stereotypes a ɔ