“You don’t eat soup in public. You don’t drink from a straw. You don’t cross your legs.” These are, per Fox host Jesse Watters, the rules a man must follow to prove he’s a man. He once shamed Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz for waving with two hands: “We wave with one hand.” That small pronoun — we — does more work than Watters imagines. It assumes a collective with agreed-upon rules and a spokesman authorized to enforce them. The reality is much more complicated.
What counts as masculinity shifts from era to era, culture to culture. A hundred and fifty years ago, a disrespected man challenged the offender to a duel at ten paces. Today he blows his horn and tailgates for three miles. The form changes — pistols at dawn to middle fingers on the freeway — but the reflex underneath, the one that trips a man into proving he will not be shamed, remains the same.
Who Determines What Masculinity is and Isn’t?
Who gets to say what counts as masculine? No two factions read the same rulebook. Watters and his ilk have theirs: the straw, the wave, the uncrossed legs. Liberal urbanite men have theirs: don’t raise your voice, do the dishes, check your privilege. Each is certain his scorecard is the real deal, and spends surprising energy policing whether other men measure up.
Masculinity is not a given but a precarious achievement. Women don’t have to keep re-earning their womanhood; men do. A man has his masculinity perpetually on the line — and the criteria depend on which tribe is keeping score.
Let’s turn our psychoanalytic lens on a current piece of fiction. I’ll ask you to decide whether its protagonist is masculine — and why or why not. There are no right answers.
Take the Test: Is István Masculine?
David Szalay’s 2025 Booker Prize–winning Flesh follows István, a Hungarian whose life unfolds with little agency — casting doubt, from the start, on his masculinity.
We first meet him at fifteen, raised as an only child by his mother. We hear nothing about the father — an absence that casts a long shadow. István lacks the passion that typically drives a man’s life. He has no plans. It is catch as catch can.
Sexual Initiation of a Teenage Boy
His first prospective sexual encounter involves a girl willing to initiate him — if only he could make a move. Eventually he is groomed by a forty-year-old married neighbor enlisted to carry his mother’s groceries. The woman — never named, called only “the lady” — seduces him though he finds her disgusting. As she goes down on him, he notices the gray roots of her otherwise blonde hair.
When an older man seduces an underage girl, the outcry is deafening. When an older woman seduces a teenage boy, the response is a wink — that lucky lad. The asymmetry reveals something I’ll leave for another day.
The affair proceeds. István tells the lady he loves her; she clarifies the feelings aren’t mutual — she loves her husband. Whether his heart is broken or he is merely missing the sex, who can say?
When Man is the One Who’s Pursued
As István matures, women serially pursue him despite his reticence and passivity — hardly traits of masculinity. He receives their advances but never initiates. Perhaps women read him as the strong, silent type — once a masculine ideal, now coded as avoidant and emotionally unavailable.
István’s chief expression of emotion is rage. When he returns to the lady’s apartment hoping to re-engage, her husband blocks him; they scuffle — easily read as Oedipal — and the man tumbles down a flight of stairs to his death. Later, pent-up anger sends István’s fist through a door, breaking his hand; later still, he brawls with his wife’s son. Male aggression — at least he checks that box.
Change by Happenstance
István’s fortunes change when he saves a man in an alley by simply shouting “Hey!” — scattering the assailants. Perhaps heroism, perhaps not. The grateful man teaches him to dress and act as a private bodyguard, then hires him. István learns to play a part, to create the illusion that he is something other than who he is.
Before long, he is hired by a wealthy couple — Karl, an ailing older man, and Helen, his much younger wife, who promptly comes on to him. István is no hero — the kind of man other men neither admire nor wish to emulate, pitiable save for his ability to attract women.
The husband dies; István and Helen marry. He travels by helicopter and private jet, with a child on the way. As a boy he was raised with no father — not even a father figure in passing. Now he is on the verge of becoming one. What does he have to draw upon?
A Father’s Hope for His Son
Fast forward seven years. István and his son Jacob ride tandem on a motorcycle. István invites him to switch places; Jacob agrees half-heartedly, barely gets the bike above walking pace, and declares he’s had enough.
István complains to Helen. She responds: if he’s not into it, he’s not into it. We sense Jacob is not the son István had hoped for — an opinion that hinges on a model of masculinity István appears to consider irrefutable. A remarkable stand for a man who made a practice of never taking one.
His disappointment deepens when he learns Jacob has been skipping school because a classmate is bullying him. Helen suggests changing schools; István watches his hand ball into a fist — the same emotional disconnection that once sent his fist through the door.
He tells Helen to go fuck herself — one of the first times we’ve seen such raw emotion. He doubles down: if Jacob retreats out of fear, it will damage his self-esteem. What’s he supposed to do, Helen asks — tough it out? Which is precisely what István has in mind.
The male code is clear. Men must master their fear. István expects his son to man up. He hadn’t learned those rules from a father; he absorbed them from the culture. He seems to have forgotten the frightened boy he once was — frozen when offered sexual favors, so unnerved by the neighbor’s advances he had no choice but to follow her lead. That forgetting severs his empathy and aligns him with the brethren who expect boys to man up lest they be branded sissies, wimps, or momma’s boys.
Are Fathers More Inclined to Encourage Sons to Take Risks?
Mothers and fathers often find themselves at odds, as István and Helen do, when the father pushes the son to master his fear and display courage — behaviors mothers frequently regard as reckless. Fathers accuse their wives of overprotectiveness, of undermining the boy’s autonomy. This dialectic is essentially universal and unresolvable.
Father is both an actual person and a function in a boy’s psychological development. As a function, he serves as limit-setting authority and representative of the world beyond home and mother. He invites the boy to take risks, test limits, individuate — pulling him outward, away from the gravitational field of dependency on the mother. Risk is the currency through which masculinity is established. To hesitate, to cling, to prefer safety registers as an affront to the boy’s male pride.
Is There Pride in Risking?
When I was a first-year psychiatric resident, I told my supervisor — a psychoanalyst — that I viewed a boy’s arm in a cast as a sign of masculinity. He found this curious; in his book, a broken arm irrefutably symbolized castration. Au contraire, I argued — a cast represents a boy’s willingness to take a risk.
My thinking was informed by Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. A young Civil War soldier named Henry struggles with battlefield fear and the impulse to run, leaving him feeling shamefully unmanly. He envies the wounded because their injuries certify courage. When accidentally injured, he wears that red badge as if it symbolized bravery. Such posturing — faux and unearned — is built on a house of cards. The same can be said of István. To rely on others to vouch for one’s masculinity is paradoxical, since needing external validation runs counter to the male ethos of self-sufficiency.
Pencils Down
So — how did you score István? This isn’t true/false, and there is no answer key. I won’t be handing you the verdict. But I will leave you with a frame to chew on.
How Do You Measure Masculinity?
What gives a man the right to think of himself as masculine is complicated. Men operate within a narrowly defined hierarchy — what R. W. Connell calls hegemonic masculinity. Society-specific in its particulars, it ranks men against one another, privileging some and subordinating others — the betas and cucks who don’t measure up.
The hegemonic template defines what counts as properly masculine: strength, self-reliance, emotional control, competitiveness, heterosexuality, command. By comparison, there are myriad ways to be a woman, without any one way fully epitomizing femininity. When Watters used the royal we, he was borrowing authority from this ideal.
This is the trap. The hegemonic ideal is a standard most men cannot meet, yet failing to meet it carries real consequences — ridicule, demotion, loss of standing among other men. So men perform. Some pull it off well enough that the rest of us never see the seams. Others, like István, drift through life letting other people — usually women — confer a masculinity they cannot generate from within. Either way, the rulebook is held by someone else.
Who and What Determine Masculinity?
Which returns us to the title’s question. The honest answer: too many parties, with conflicting agendas, none fully accountable to the man whose life is being judged. Watters speaks for one tribe. The progressive editor for another. The father pulls toward risk; the mother toward safety. The culture broadcasts mixed signals on every channel. The man, caught in the middle, must triangulate — and do so without appearing to need help, since asking for guidance is itself coded as unmasculine.
That is a heavy load, and it goes a long way toward explaining why so many men today appear simultaneously defensive and exhausted. What used to be a clearly marked path — narrow, even oppressive, but at least visible — has become a hall of mirrors in which a man can move in any direction and still be told he has gone wrong. No wonder the loudest voices in the manosphere find an audience: they offer what the broader culture no longer provides — a simple answer to what a man is supposed to be.