Since most crimes are committed by men, crime has been viewed in some criminological circles as a way of "doing masculinity." Group, class, structure, system, and dominance were central in the language of early masculinity studies. In later developments of this early work, ideas were borrowed from Giddens (1976) and from ethnomethodology and phenomenology (Messerschmidt, 1993) and grafted onto the earlier account of structure to provide a vision of action and a context for a discussion of how masculinity operated in practice and in detail. These developments have been characterized as "second stage" thinking by Tony Jefferson (1996a). His own work has been notable for attempting to move the discussion of masculinity to a different plane. The key characteristics of this work are the deployment of a conception of "discourse" rather than a general notion of social structure and the foregrounding of the importance of the psyche. This article assesses the work of James Messerschmidt; it argues that his use of the central term "masculinities" is tautological and that the arguments linking masculinity to crime are implausible and logically flawed. Next, the article considers writings by Tony Jefferson that have switched the focus to the psychic character of "masculinity." The article argues that none of the Kleinian concepts used by Jefferson are able to differentiate between masculinity or femininity. The article then considers alternative psychoanalytic accounts that do achieve this. The article concludes by suggesting, paradoxically, that Jefferson's approach is helpful, because masculinity and femininity are what psyches must confront rather than what psyches are. 26 notes and 71 references