The role of men in traditional societies is generally for the males to be the ruling gender while the women are given a subservient position. In certain traditional societies, however, this has been modified as modernization has taken place and as economic development has improved working conditions and the employment picture in general while also bringing this regions more and more onto the world stage where they must interact with other countries, notably Western states with a more egalitarian societal structure even if the reality does not always match the intent. The role of men in China, Nigeria, and Egypt today shows both how traditional elements have been maintained even as some changes have been instituted.
Interestingly, much of the research on the male role today comes not from studies designed to illuminate that issue specifically but instead intended to highlight the role of women. For this reason, the role of men is often set forth to show how it differs from and contrasts with the role of women, as is indicated in a recent study from Africa:
Images and stereotypes of women, particularly African women, abound. Indeed, African women have long been perceived as docile, "bound to home and hearth," submissive to male authority, and even politically inert or passive (Ekechi 235).
In Nigeria, there is evidence that some believe the traditional male role is being challenged, which has produced various devices to protect that role and to disseminate it more widely. One approach is found in Nigerian popular literatures written by men since the early 1960s, and one analyst uses the term "masculinism" for that strand of masculinity where the artist anxiously re invents and re presents women to a male audience, "adapting old gender models to maintain male control of changing social and cultural formations" (Newell 50). Masculinity is the ideology supporting male social and political power still, and under these cir...