This article focuses on underlying psychosocial rationales for perpetuating male-exclusive associations. Further explored is what establishment of such female-excluding male spaces reveal about relative parallels and/or differences in construction of gender identity and definitions of masculinity held by participating members of two male group—one in the Tuscany region of Central Italy, the other in southwestern Connecticut and made up largely of second and third generation Italian-Americans. Do these men, when in their own and exclusive company, act out too easily assumed stereotypes of Italian and Italian-American masculinities—hot tempered, competitive, prone to violence, mother adoring, Latin lovers? Or are their constructions of masculinity based on other and socioculturally and ethnohistorically tempered criteria of masculinity (Società, skill attainment, physical strength and separation from an impoverished past and the feminine)?
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