Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 83

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