Masculine overcompensation is the idea that men who are insecure about their masculinity will behave in an extremely masculine way as compensation. I wanted to test this idea and also explore whether overcompensation could help explain some attitudes like support for war and animosity to homosexuals.

Says Robb Willer, a sociology doctoral candidate at Cornell University. Guess what he was right. Threaten your ordinary man's masculinity and the most common outcome is that his support for the war in Iraq grows, his distrust and dislike of homosexuals increases and he starts looking to buy himself a SUV.

The irony of this, in Australia at least, is that the SUVs ("Four Wheel Drives" we call them) are too expensive to run to use to commute to work so the wife gets given the SUV to drive the kids to school. I gather from a recent episode of The Simpsons, our window into the lives of middle America, a similar phenonemon exists in the USA.

Not only did men who felt that their masculinity was threatened behave in an overly gung-ho manner but they also reported feeling ashamed, guilty, upset and hostile. Doesn't sound like the ingredients for a rewarding existance.

"So does this overcompensation extend to violence against women in these threatened men's lives?" I hear you ask and the answer is probably and Robb Willer intends to extend his study to investigate this aspect of male behaviour.

Much of this insecurity that exists in contemporary men about their masculinity can be directly attributed to the lack of objective milestones in masculine development in modern society combined with few and perverted masculine role models. To a female it may be completely incomprehensible however for a young man the question of when you become a man and how do you prove to yourself and others that you are one is the cause of much of the anti-social behaviour that this demographic exhibit. In primitive societies this was not a problem because there was specific trials and initiation practices that boys undertook, with the guidance of adult males, that aided them in this transition. Clearly it is inappropriate to try and artificially reintroduce these ancient practices but it is important to young men, and to the broader society, that some form of transition ceremony is undertaken.

Returning to the findings of Robb Willer's research, it is clear that measures taken in the name of femininism to advance the status of women within the society will be most effective if they do not threaten men's masculinity. From this research we can see that such threats, even if they are unintentional, damage the progress of women's rights because they make men more macho and less inclined to embrace change.

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