These threads count as meta right, so there is a bit of a relaxation on the 20 year rule? Because I suspect my field will be pointing to the past 20 years (and still ongoing) as a crisis in masculinity in large segments of the Arab world.

Lot of different ways to look at how and why that is happening. One of the the interesting things in analysis that I've read on the Arab spring was that it didn't so much correlate to lack of economic opportunity in the sense of absolute poverty but rather to those countries where men (in particular) felt most deprived of opportunity. So in Tunisia or Egypt your sort of bog-standard protester was a 20-something college graduate working in menial labor or service (e.g. engineering grads tending shisha pipes, whom I've met a lot of because I used to quite enjoy shisha.) (I suspect I have qualms with the methodology in this particular paper, but a good summary of the different causal options in this debate can be found here.)

So-far so-normal. You could basically say the same thing about Bernie voters who, stereotypically, are college grads with lots of debt working as baristas. The difference is that in the Arab world you have a lot of compounding social problems related to masculinity, so:

1. There is a basic expectation that you will live with your family until you are married. The bachelor's studio apartment doesn't really exist.

2. Getting married generally requires paying a bride price dowry, which can run into the thousands of dollars.

3. The past 40 years has seen a general increase in religiosity across the region.

The result is that men are economically cut off from licit sex, and socially/religiously cut off from illicit sex. They are sufficiently well-educated and inter-connected with the world to know that they should be doing well economically, have a cultural expectation to be bread winners, and yet live in states where their independent economic prosperity is basically impossible.

The results basically speak for themselves, from Egypt's 99.3% sexual harassment rate to the horrific regional conflicts.

In pulp studies in general the "Crisis in Masculinity" is the treatment of sexual and gender archetypes as the pulp period progresses - it being remembered that the pulps really peaked in the interwar period. The 1920s and 30s pulps saw a great deal of stereotyping of male and female characters, but nothing like how men's adventure magazines became in the post-war 50s and 60s, as the aggrandizement of macho and he-man archetypes really hit its zenith in magazines like Man's Life, Stag, Real Men, and True Men.

A little closer to home, you have the personal question of masculinity as answered by the likes of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard in their own lives and fiction - Howard gets most of the focus, partially because of the success of the Conan the Barbarian (1981) film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the comic books, and the novels with painted covers by Frank Franzetta which all tend to emphasize the body builder/physical culture physique - and led a number of folks in the 70s and 80s and even the 90s to wonder if there wasn't a homoerotic undertone to the whole thing - as emphasized in the chapter “Is Conan Dating Clark Kent?” of Harry Harrison’s Great Balls of Fire! An Illustrated History of Sex in Science Fiction (1977).

Lovecraft, almost hilariously, kind of gets it the other way since most of his protagonist characters are the dynamic opposite of Howard's - intellectual men, sometimes prone to fainting when confronted with eldritch horrors - but this is largely the trap of our contemporary period looking back and seeing these sort of folks as "effeminate," which had somewhat different connotations in the 1930s (most especially associated with "sexual inversion"). Lovecraft certainly didn't think of himself as a "sissy" in his personal life:

I had plenty of foes, but I don't think even the worst ever called me a sissy. I was, in fact, decidedly pugnacious—having a violent & ungovernable temper which the passage of years & a growing sense of the cosmic inevitability of all things has almost totally eradicated. Any affront—especially any reflection on my truthfulness or honour as an 18th century gentleman—roused in me a tremendous fury, & I would always start a fight if an immediate retraction were not furnished. Being of scant physical strength, I did not fare well in these encounters; though I would never ask for their termination. I thought it disgraceful, even in defeat, not to maintain a wholly 'you-go-to-hell' attitude until the victor ceased pummelling of his own accord. What I would have done in a fight with lower-lass boys who 'fight dirty' I don't know, but I was never put to so drastic a test. Occasionally I won fights—aided by my habit of assuming a dramatically ferocious aspect frightening to the nervous....the 'by God, I'll kill you!' stuff. Ah, me—the spirit of youth! Now I'm an old man & scarcely ever double up my fists except on paper. A couple of years ago Long & I dramatised our incessant habit of controversy by getting photographed in the act of exchanging socks on the jaw, but it didn't look natural.

• H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 9 Nov 1933, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 190

Lovecraft and Howard never quite saw eye-to-eye on many things, and took up opposing stances on several issues, but I think that in a real sense they both shared in the culture of (or if you prefer, crisis of) masculinity of early 20th century America and the changing understanding of masculinity has sometimes resulted in misunderstandings of that. I sometimes wonder whether the general inability of Lovecraft or Howard to participate in the Great War - Lovecraft's story is complicated, but basically he was deemed physically ineligible; Howard was too young to be drafted - affected their sense of masculinity.

[/edit] Thank you u/StupidHistoryNerd for the proofreading.

It's not widely studied, but the topic does come up to some degree in hockey (and yes, there are academic articles on the subject). But I think in the coming years the subject will get some coverage in terms of how modern medical science has effected the game, namely something that is also heavily at play in American football: concussions. The resulting adoption of safety measures (both in terms of equipment and rules) has notably changed the game on an incredible level (it is almost safe to say that the days of the ["enforcer"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforcer_(ice_hockey)), who would just be there to fight; the famous Rodney Dangerfield quote of "I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out" is also effectively meaningless in todays hockey leagues), which has faced criticism from many "old-timers" and traditionalists (Don Cherry is by far the biggest name in this regard).

The result has also seen a massive drop-off in numbers of children enrolled in the game (I speak for Canada here; I don't claim to know the relevant stats in other countries), though that is also been attributed to cost (upwards of $20,000 per year for the top-tier programs; it has been estimated to cost more than $100,000 to develop a child into an NHL player by the age of 16, which is when they leave home for a team), but the rise of participation in sports like soccer and basketball (namely sports that lack severe physical contact, and the resultant injuries like concussions), is also something that's been noted.

However this is all far to recent to have any in depth studies, though there are people working on it. It'll take a few decades for trends to properly emerge, and even longer for papers to be written, and consequently historians will have to wait even longer for a proper separation to note the current crisis in hockey; until then we can amuse ourselves looking at topics like the masculinity of 1907 Ottawa Silver Seven and Montreal Wanderers (from the above-mentioned paper, one of my favourites: '"Talk About Strenuous Hockey": Violence, Manhood, and the 1907 Ottawa Silver Seven-Montreal Wanderer Rivalry' by Stacy L. Lorenz and Geraint B. Osborne, Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter, 2006): 125-156.)

For Alaska, particularly Native Alaska, there's a significant crisis in the 19th century as Euro-American nations attempt to exert control over Alaska's people. In most traditional Alaska Native cultures, the ascent from adolescence to manhood is marked by a feat of warfare, hunting or other major accomplishment.

When Russia arrived, it crushed this traditional system in the Aleutians and Kodiak archipelago by forbidding internecine conflict as detrimental to the fur trade. Furthermore, the (generally male) leaders of villages found themselves unable to resist Russian demands, which further emasculated them in their own minds and the minds of their friends and neighbors. What was a man who was unable to defend himself and his friends?

In Kodiak and the Aleutians, the Russians were able to crush organized resistance through superior firepower. They lacked the ability to do the same in Southeast Alaska, where the Natives were just as well-armed as the Russians, courtesy of profits from the fur trade.

By the time of the Alaska Purchase, the rich sea otter trade had collapsed from overhunting. This meant that when the Americans arrived, they outgunned the Natives of Southeast Alaska, and with bombardments of a handful of Native villages and shows of force throughout Southeast, the pattern was repeated.

Have there ever been any crises in femininity? Is there a reason why crises in masculinity are more prominent?

If masculinity were in crisis as often as historians assume, I imagine we would not be living in as misogynistic and patriarchal a world as we do.

That said, the postwar crisis of masculinity flares up in the sense that so many white men seemed to have it all and yet still felt dissatisfied. DJ Waldie speaks to this feeling really well in Holy Land when he sits with his father watching Victory at Sea on television for hours and they never once see the ship on which the old man served. It is almost as if the crisis of masculinity arises from a quest for authenticity or validation, which never quite seems to suffice.

Some of the Playboy literature really captures the sense that masculinity is a style that requires constant upkeep. Ehrenreich, Pitzulo, and Fraterrigo have all commented on the endless stream of consumer purchases and lifestyle habits men needed to make and to perfect if they were to live up to the Playboy ideal. Every time a man bought a new car or read through another issue of Playboy, he was only momentarily a man again. The attained sense of sophistication was fleeting, and he could miss a crucial next step only to plunge back into emasculation if unable to afford to keep up. The crisis of masculinity then (and I suspect both beforehand and afterward) was therefore an effort by corporate America to keep men working hard to earn enough money to use to purchase more and more goods.

This is what scholars like Robin Kelley* mean when they argue that whiteness (and masculinity) are foundation myths for the capitalism. If we all were not trying to buy our way into becoming our ideal selves, much of the profits that drive global growth would not be made. God forbid, if we gave up on identity politics as they seem to operate in a neoliberal world, we might just revert to moral economies and moral ecologies where we work to support each other not to assert our more perfect manhood over other men.

*http://bostonreview.net/forum/after-trump/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back