"Working-class students struggle with 'composite masculinity,' study finds."

"Combine the 'chiselled out of rock' body of actor Ryan Reynolds, the intellectual prowess of writer Christopher Hitchens and the 'funny, quirky' demeanour of film star Joseph Gordon-Levitt and you have the perfect role model for male middle-class undergraduates."

But while bourgeois students can “seamlessly integrate” many types of masculinity, a study at two universities concludes that their working- class peers find squaring the many demands placed on the modern man more challenging....

Both groups say that brainpower is a part of masculinity, but as Nicola Ingram, lecturer in sociology at the University of Bath and one of the project leaders, explained, working-class students... "are partially struggling to pull [together] different forms of masculinity,” she said. “The middle-class men on the other hand seamlessly integrate [them]…to create a ‘composite masculinity’. This…allows them to be many different types of men at once, although they emphasise ‘intellectual masculinity.’”

One middle-class interviewee spoke of admiring how the late Mr Hitchens threw “his weight around intellectually” on debate shows, adding that the way he talked with female panellists showed “intellectual masculinity.” This kind of attitude “belies an assumption of entitlement to dominance,” according to Dr Ingram, and was “arguably a refashioning of traditional male hegemony.”

Do you know how to be dominant the Christopher Hitchens way?  You have to crush the opposition through the force of your ideas not out of the feeling that you must win because you are the man.

Has feminism made it much harder for lower class men to do well in life?