Frank Wedekind’s work resulted from significant changes within society. Masculinity was greatly challenged by women entering the workforce, sexologists conducting studies into the taboo, and homosexuality pervading the feminine into the masculine. Between these new realities and the “cult of masculinity” emphasized by social Darwinism and Nietzschean power worship evident within the building and consolidating of nation states, men increasingly feared the feminine and feminization. “This de stabilization, in turn, prompts anxieties and backlashes from those who have vested interests in maintaining the traditional norms” (Libbon). Masculinity consolidated into a form of elitism, while feminist ideals came to be associated with any marginalized group. In Spring Awakening especially, “Recognizing that the crisis of masculinity was not just the result of women's sexual and economic liberation, the homosexual's blurring of gender, or the sexologists' pathologizing of sex, but also due to a patriarchy that was now valorizing a hypermasculinity as a counter-balance to the threat of the feminine and feminization, Wedekind portrays the ordinary male simultaneously caught between a crisis of masculinity and a cult of masculinity. Suffering from an overwhelming sense of inadequacy and disempowerment, Wedekind's masculine characters lash out against all that is feminine in an effort to prove their legitimacy and supremacy as men” (Libbon).