The study of masculinity in folklore and fairy tales, and in Western schol- arship in general, has lagged behind the study of femininity. Only recently emerging as a distinct academic focus, masculinity has long dominated scholarly viewpoints as the default or unmarked norm (as one would expect in patriarchal cultures). In fairy-tale scholarship, too, masculinity has often been treated as an afterthought, beyond the more general con- cern with topics like heroes. Here, I focus on masculinity not only as a contrasting element to femininity, but also as a complementary aspect of gender construction, in which masculinity and femininity together are viewed as coconstructed parts of a whole sex/gender system. Obviously this, too, is a cultural construction: Western ideas of masculinity and femi- ninity are no more complementary (or dichotomous) than anything else in the world. In this article, I review what has been said about masculinity in Western folklore and fairy-tale studies, followed by an analysis of the descriptions of men’s bodies in a digitized dataset of canonical fairy tales, and finally by a gender performance-based attempt to locate the gender in men’s bodies. My combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, and of feminist theory with masculinity studies, allows for a novel approach to the topic. I posit that masculinity is constructed in fairy tales as contin- gent and vulnerable, with men susceptible to transformations and judged more by hierarchical values like stature and birth order than are women, who tend to be judged by beauty. The Construction of Masculinity When feminist folklorists and fairy-tale scholars began investigating gender, they tended to focus on femininity. This was due in part to their sense that folklorists traditionally oriented their studies toward genres and themes that were relevant to men and did so with the assumption that male was an unmarked category. In their introduction to Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, Rosan Jordan and Susan Kalčik criticize folklorists for concentrating on male- oriented public genres and thus ignoring domestic-sphere genres (ix). Thus, feminist folklorists sought to draw scholarly attention to neglected women’s genres as part of a corrective agenda. At the same time, feminist theory was introduced into folklore studies as not only a useful but also a transformative approach to studying expressive culture, ideology, and identity. The shift toward studying masculinity and men’s folklore as its own subject, not merely as the default, occurred more recently in folkloristics. Joseph P. Goodwin’s More Man Than You’ll Ever Be: Gay Folklore and Acculturation in Middle America is an early example of folklore scholarship on masculinity. While feminism was beginning to reach folklore studies, masculinity studies was growing in adjacent parts of academia. As R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt write of the field: “In the late 1980s and early 1990s, research on men and masculinity was being consolidated as an academic field” with the attendant publication of journals and textbooks to address this research agenda (833), all of which took cues and borrowed theories and vocabulary from feminism. Masculinity studies scholar Judith Kegan Gardiner has offered four points of consensus among feminist-inflected masculinity studies, which are helpful for evaluating what masculinity studies can offer folkloristic analyses of masculinity. These are that masculinity is a gender, not just an unmarked state; that masculinity is not a monolithic or static thing; that both/all genders should cooperate in political projects; and that essential- ist views of genders should be challenged (Introduction 11–12). This cultural constructionist view is largely compatible with that of folklore studies. Simon Bronner, editor of and contributor to Manly Traditions, asserts that “this book is the first to focus on the problem of the construction of manliness in American folklife” (xvi). Bronner disputes the claim of feminist folklorists that men’s culture has been thoroughly documented and is correspondingly well understood, stating that the essays in Manly Traditions either document previously unnoticed men’s cultures or shed new light on men’s cultures using the construct of manliness as a critical focus. As might be expected, there is a lot less feminist in the version of masculinity studies done by folklorists like Bronner. For the most part, the contributors to Manly Traditions seemed to con- cur with Gardiner’s cultural constructivist view of gender, but they are able to do so in a way that connects them to masculinity studies without necessitating an allegiance to feminism.1 What I perceive as the declawing of feminism in most essays in Manly Traditions tends to take a simplified view of feminism, which detracts from the important critical work feminism carries out within gender studies. The ways in which feminism gets posited in the book lead me to three specific problems with that volume as an example of masculinity studies: (1) whether masculinity studies is functioning as a backlash against feminism or as a critical enterprise unto itself, (2) whether masculinity studies can be successful without relying on divorcing men from masculinity, and (3) whether an activist dimension is central to masculinity studies. Bronner denies that the studies project is a backlash against feminism; instead, he affirms it is “progress toward fuller consideration of the way that gender is enacted, indeed embodied, in lived experience” (xviii). There is danger, however, that enthusi- asm for masculinity too easily slides into nostalgia for the way things were before feminism, as Gardiner asserts in her introduction to Masculinity Studies & Feminist Theory (10). My goal, then, is to combine the insights from masculinity studies with the rigor of feminist analysis in order to decipher the meanings of masculinity in a folkloristic context, specifically the meanings of masculinity in fairy tales. Existing studies of masculinity in fairy tales fall into three categories: interpre- tations of these materials from outside an academic disciplinary perspective, observations made by feminist folklorists almost as an afterthought once they have discussed the construction of femininity in fairy tales, and dedicated works on masculinity in folktales and fairy tales. The most popular, and tellingly nonacademic, study of masculinity in fairy tales is Robert Bly’s Iron John. Using a mythopoetic perspective, Bly inter- prets one version of ATU 502 from a particular translation of the Grimms to reveal a story supposedly about manhood and its tribulations. As an example of his universalizing approach, Bly writes about how “we hear from the Iron John story the importance of moving from the mother’s realm to the father’s realm” (ix). Appropriating anthropological ideas about wounding as a part of initiation rites, Bly explores how the figure of Iron John helps young men navi- gate masculinity: “The young man investigates or experiences his wound— father wound, mother wound, or shaming-wound—in the presence of this independent, timeless, mythological initiatory being” (36). Lacking any sense of cultural context, Bly’s work is nevertheless quite popular. As an example of the feminist response to Bly, Gardiner critiques his work as being “ahistorical, inaccurate, ethnocentric, racist, and sexist” (“Theorizing Age” 102). And yet Gardiner’s reading is more sympathetic than Jack Zipes’s reading of Bly in “Spreading Myths about Iron John,” in which Zipes provides a model for how folklorists can contribute unique insights to analyzing the men’s movement. Zipes’s close textual reading of the Grimms’ tale undercuts much of Bly’s attempt to claim this story for his purposes. And Zipes, unlike most of the folklorists who contributed to Manly Traditions, is explicitly concerned with women’s welfare. Zipes reprimands Bly for his falsely homogenizing victimiz- ing efforts, asking, But where in his treatise are all the wounds that men cause? There is no discussion of the manifold disturbances in family and personal life caused by the development of capitalism; no class, gender, or racial distinctions made in Bly’s diagnosis of the malaise affecting men; no consideration of the economic factors of unemployment and bureau- cratization that cause violence in and outside the family . . . leaving women more victimized since the 1970s than ever before. (117) Both Zipes’s and Gardiner’s critiques of Bly situate the construction of mascu- linity within a much broader context of gender relations rather than focusing on the isolated experience of the male character. Masculinity studies ought to examine the construction of male experiences and masculinity in relation to other subjects in order to avoid the misrepresentation of, in Bly’s case, the “wounds” of the young man. Feminist analyses of gender roles in fairy tales have tended to consider masculinity primarily in contrast to femininity, often as it relates to beauty, agency, and behavior. These analyses have also tended to emerge later, and in smaller numbers, than the examinations of femininity. As Ruth Bottigheimer believes, “Male tales . . . have received short scholarly shrift” (“Luckless” 259). Kay Stone notes the traits of male heroes, who “can be slovenly, unattractive, and lazy, and their success will not be affected” (“Things” 44). A consensus among critics is that the attractiveness of heroes is not as important as the attractiveness of heroines. Maria Tatar writes in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, “If the female protagonists of fairy tales are often as good as they are beautiful, their male counterparts generally appear to be as young and naïve as they are stupid” (87). Thus, physical attractiveness would not seem to be a defining trait in the success of male heroes. There is also a sense that male characters in fairy tales are more active than female characters. Stone writes, “Heroes succeed because they act, not because they are. They are judged not by their appearance or inherent sweet nature but by their ability to overcome obstacles, even if these obstacles are defects in their own characters” (“Things” 45). Marcia Lieberman concurs with the importance of being active for male characters, writing, “Girls win the prize if they are the fairest of them all; boys win if they are bold, active, and lucky” (385). Related to activity is aggression. Bottigheimer suggests in her study of the masculine tale “The Lazy Boy” that anger and aggressive actions belong solely to the masculine realm: “anger is the prerogative of authority figures, whose authority is often constituted by their maleness” (“Luckless” 287). Male characters are rewarded for acts of kindness, though the need to be polite and nice does not seem to be as ruthlessly enforced as it is with female characters. Additionally, these acts of kindness are possible because boys are active enough to seek out the opportunities to be kind in the first place. Lieberman notes, “The boy who sets out to seek his fortune . . . is a stock figure and, provided that he has a kind heart, is assured of success” (392). The male protagonists in the Grimms’ fairy tales, specifically, do show compassion for their “natural allies and benefactors” (Tatar, Hard Facts 88). But the compas- sion is exerted only in certain situations: “If the hero often distinguishes him- self by showing mercy for animals, he remains singularly uncharitable when it comes to dealing with human rivals” (90). As with other scholars who discuss gender in fairy tales, Tatar’s discussion of masculinity benefits from a compari- son to femininity: In short, male heroes demonstrate from the start a meekness and humility that qualify them for an ascent to wealth, the exercise of power, and happiness crowned by wedded bliss; their female coun- terparts undergo a process of humiliation and defeat that ends with a rapid rise in social status through marriage but that also signals a loss of pride and the abdication of power. (94–95) Male heroes, thus, seem to suffer less than their female counterparts, and their trajectory moves from lesser to greater agency, not necessarily the case in clas- sic tales about heroines. These classic tales, of course, are not a universal set; tales written by women in seventeenth-century France and nineteenth-century Germany, for instance, vary in tone from those by the Grimm brothers, which Tatar is primarily focusing on here.2 Other male characters are not described in such charitable terms; Tatar notes “the ease with which men slip into the role of beasts . . . the seeming interchangeability of man and beast” (Hard Facts 170). As feminist scholar Susan Bordo has noted, tales of beastly bridegrooms contribute to the double bind of masculinity enforced for men: ideal men “have the sexual charisma of an untamed beast and are unbeatable in battle, but are intelligent, erudite, and gentle with women” (Male Body 242). Three works that specifically address masculinity in fairy tales from the perspective of culturally situated ethnography, disability, and symbolism are worth noting. One of the few works specifically on masculinity in folk and fairy tales is The Bear and His Sons: Masculinity in Spanish and Mexican Folktales by James Taggart. He uses folk-narrative repertoires with life histories, ethno- graphic observations, and psychoanalytic theories to analyze how masculinity is represented in Spanish-language folktales. Taggart regards the stock protagonist Little John, as “obviously a symbol of manliness, and his story is a metaphor for the transformation of an unruly boy into a controlled man who is ready for mar- riage” (35). In Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Ann Schmiesing examines men’s bodies in fairy tales specifically in the context of disability and disease in the Grimms’ tales, combining theoretical tools from disability studies with folklore studies. She notes that many disabled male char- acters appear in the Grimms’ collection, “in part because disability is a frequent attribute of male characters depicted as underdogs” (82). Examples include the Frog King, multiple instances of wounded soldiers, and monstrous births such as “Hans My Hedgehog” and characters who are reduced in physical stature (like Thumbling) or mental capacity (like Dummy characters). Notably, Schmiesing spends the most time scrutinizing men’s bodies in the tales—bodies that are depicted in ableist terms both to inspire audience sympathy and to enforce a normalizing effect. Francisco Vaz da Silva, though he does not specifi- cally discuss masculinity as a topic in Metamorphosis: The Dynamics of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales, has written much about the ways in which men’s and women’s bodies both undergo transformations in fairy tales. Vaz da Silva, like his feminist counterparts, has spent considerably more time discussing the con- structions of feminine bodies. However, particular traits of male bodies emerge from Vaz da Silva’s study. Men are more likely in European folk belief and folk narrative to turn into werewolves and to require disenchantment by dismem- berment, sacrifice, and bleeding (44). In Vaz da Silva’s view, the werewolf is equivalent to the masculine body since a tail symbolizes a penis. Although Vaz da Silva spends far less time discussing male attractiveness than female attrac- tiveness, he notes that golden hair, attractive attire, and recognizable markings, often on the legs or feet, are all part of the bundle of traits to be expected in European fairy-tale heroes. Based on these scholarly explorations of male fairy-tale figures, one would expect to find male characters who are active, somewhat attractive (but with less of an emphasis on male attractiveness than on female attractiveness), and some combination of kind, simple, and humble. Yet male characters are also expected to be more aggressive than female characters and perhaps more prone to violence. Some sorts of transformations, perhaps enabled by dismem- berment or blood, would also be common. These traits, while contradictory, form the basis for the explorations of my dataset in the section following an explanation of my methods.