In order to understand these terms and trace their origin understanding masculinity as a term is very essential.
Susan Faludi in her book Stiffed - The Betrayal of Modern Man, talks of a certain gender identity in terms of being masculine. She argues that there seems to be a certain code of conduct laid down meticulously for men in general. The very paradigm of masculinity talks about being the master of your own universe. Men live under a great burden of masculinity. The fact that men are expected to be all withstanding, puts an unparalleled pressure on them to live out roles which they can fall short of in situations of crisis and may not want to be trapped on a day-to-day basis, but since masculinity is shaped and reinforced by society, they most often refrain from thinking their way out of this dilemma and from taking active political steps to resolve their crisis. It can be argued that this act of overlooking their own constraints for so long seems to have resulted in the form of a range of distributary masculine gender and sexual identities such as metrosexuality, retrosexuality, hypermasculinity, homosexuality and bisexuality. Ask feminists to diagnose men's problems and you will often get a very clear explanation: "men are in crisis because women are properly challenging male dominancewomen are asking men to share the public reins and men can't bear it" (9). Ask anti-feminists and you will get a diagnosis that is in one aspect similar-men are troubled, many conservatives say, because women have gone far beyond their demand for equal treatment and now are trying to take power and control away from men. Both feminist and anti-feminist views on this conflict are rooted in a perception that to be a man means to be at the controls and at all times to feel yourself in control. What's more likely, Faludi, is that they are clinging to a 'phantom status'. However, to understand why men are so reluctant to break with the codes of manhood sanctioned in their childhood perhaps we need to understand how strong the social constraints on them are.
