The overweight mechanic who takes care of his family but has faithfully been with his high school sweetheart isn’t masculine.

The firefighter who risks his life but is terrible with women and only makes $70k/yr isn’t masculine.

But there are many masculine men who don’t hit all these characteristics.

Now don’t get me wrong: those things are important. The arguments always come back to making money, getting laid, and being in shape. “Real men make 6-figures and have a big family”.“An alpha male lifts weights and is good with women”.“A real man takes martial arts or does MMA”.People give lists that include things like I’ve thought about all the different arguments that people make about what a “real man” does. They do not inherently make you masculine. Men who aren’t willing to do what it takes to become masculine will bend the definition to include things that are antithetical to becoming a man but because they do it AND they still want to be considered masculine, they argue for it.įor example, a lot of guys like to argue that because men play video games, that video games (especially sports games or first-person shooters) are examples of manliness.Įven men in today’s world think that being able to hold your liquor, smoke cigars, and get laid off from dating apps makes you man. That makes it easy for anyone to change the definition to suit their narrative or message. It’s easy to say that masculinity is one of those things that you know when you see it, but that leaves us with a big problem:

This means we have to define “masculinity”. Urn:oclc:772087404 Scandate 20100913235012 Scanner we try to become something, we have to know what we’re trying to become. OL1330246W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 93.49 Pages 392 Ppi 400 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0330256114 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 17:47:27 Boxid IA126511 Boxid_2 CH106901 Camera Canon 5D City New York Curatestate approved Donor

The man without qualities