Pampered sons, (wo)manly men, or do-nothing machos? Costa Rican men coming of age under neoliberalism.

This article explores how young men in Costa Rica negotiate ideas of manhood under neoliberalism. We draw on interview data involving 23 men, ages 15­35, residing in one Costa Rican city. Comparing men across three different class locations, we find diverse "markers of manhood." Our data suggest an emerging globally dominant masculine ideal among an elite class of men, a declining locally dominant masculine ideal among working-class men, and a cynical, possibly counter-cultural masculine ideal among poor men. We conclude that masculinities are not only fluid, but tied to changing economic circumstances and class structures.

Commentary: male osteoporosis-policy gaps in prevention and treatment.

Osteoporosis is a disabling disease affecting 10 million Americans, leading to increased risk of fractures and poor functional ability. Although typically thought of as a women's disease, millions of men are diagnosed with osteoporosis or low bone mass, and the risk for osteoporotic fractures is increasing. To address undetected and untreated osteoporosis among men, public health education should be targeted to males. Insurance programs, including Medicare, should add the heel qualitative ultrasound (QUS) for age-eligible men with follow-up every 2 years. Policy changes should address funding of targeted education and prevention programs for aging males, including coverage of screening tests.

Backlash or equality?: The influence of men's and women's rights discourses on domestic violence legislation in Ontario.

Through an examination of the public debates from Ontario's Bill 117, An Act to Better Protect Victims of Domestic Violence, this article explores the discourses that men's rights activists used to counter feminist constructions of domestic violence. Using a combined method, the author collapses the data into four important themes: protection, rights, and gender; funding and fairness; numerical and statistical truths; and resistance. By examining how they collectively construct the problem of domestic violence, the author exposes the ways in which men's rights advocates disqualify women's experiences and the responses to such claims.

[Medicine and the sexual distribution of work: an analysis of the scientific discourse on the role of the "human factor" in improving performance at work (Spain, 1922-1936)]. / El "factor humano" y la distribución sexual del trabajo en el discurso de la organización científica del trabajo (España, 1922-1936).

During the first third of the twentieth century, and especially after the 1920s, a discourse on occupational hygiene and safety began to develop in Spain. This discourse, without rejecting the value of the work carried out in the factory environment, particularly stressed the need to take into account what was called the "human factor." Promoted mainly by the budding occupational doctors and psychologists, this discourse became part of both the lines of biological thinking of constitutional pathology as well as the economic ideas of the so-called OCT, and it expounded the need to take the somatic and psychic characteristics of people into account in order to carry out "rational" distribution of the same in the workplace. The article aims to highlight the way in which this discourse contained elements that would help to attribute specific roles within the workplace based on the biological and psychological characteristics of men and women, so facilitating the legitimisation of a sexual distribution of work which helped to reinforce the social organization of gender at that time.

Ideal men: masculinity and decline in seventeenth-century Spain.

This article examines how the experience and critique of their country's decline led Spaniards to craft a distinct discourse of masculinity in the seventeenth century. As they self-consciously examined Spain's crisis and offered political and economic solutions, these same writers also offered a scathing critique of standards of masculinity. Using the figure of the ideal nobleman as a case study, the article examines how moralists, arbitristas, and hagiographers constructed a dynamic code of manhood linked to questions of productivity, male chastity, and military performance. Further, it argues that this discourse was ultimately nostalgic and failed to adapt itself to the circumstances of the seventeenth century.