When I wrote an essay on toxic masculinity for a psychoanalytic magazine, the editor came back with a reasonable query: “You’ve nailed toxic masculinity. But could you define masculinity?” I had the pathological version down cold — swagger, domination, pretending to need no one. The ordinary version, the one most men embody every day, turned out to be much harder to pin down.
Toxically masculine men are full of themselves, out for themselves, and indifferent to anyone else in the room — the guy who raises his voice over yours and calls it confidence.
Most men aren’t straitjacketed by that behavioral template. They go about being men in a multitude of ways. Masculine behavior varies, but it doesn’t run the gamut — it sits inside a territory that’s wide but bounded. You can recognize it in outline even when you can’t describe it in full.
Every culture has its templates of ideal manhood — the lone cowboy, the Wall Street financier, the MMA fighter, the founder with the billion-dollar exit. Men are measured against them, by themselves and by others. Sociologists call this hegemonic masculinity — a fancy term for something every man knows in his bones: there is a version of maleness that counts as the real thing, and it lies beyond most every man’s reach. Toxic masculinity is what happens when men try to enact that hegemonic ideal without restraint or reflection.
Hegemonic masculinity determines which man sits atop the totem pole. The more a man veers from the ideal, the more he is regarded as a lesser man — a loser, a beta, a momma’s boy, a cuck. Female culture, by comparison, grants women greater latitude — a wider variety of ways to be acceptably feminine. The asymmetry itself helps establish the legitimacy of distinguishing masculinity from femininity.
So what does masculinity mean? Not one thing but many: a performative script in how one acts; an identity in how a man thinks about and experiences himself; something a man inhabits; a state of mind less about what is between one’s legs than between his ears.
Types of Men: Good, Bad, and Ugly
Consider Sergio Leone’s 1966 spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Its three characters transcend the faux good-guy/bad-guy binary typical of westerns. The one deemed ugly, a violent criminal, is paradoxically the most emotionally honest of the three. Each man’s assigned title fails to do justice to the breadth of his personality.
Masculinity is comparably multifaceted. Men can be good in non-gender-specific and gender-specific ways. In the latter case, they act in ways that earn them the right to see themselves as good men for rising to the occasion — “to provide and to protect” come readily to mind. All men contain the capacity to be any of the three types — good, bad, and ugly.
Men are good to the extent they live up to certain expectations. They are expected to bring home the bacon and treat loved ones with care, to protect them from others — including from themselves, which calls to mind the boast: “Today I rescued a woman from being raped. I stopped myself.” Restraint ranks high. Men live by a code — keeping one’s word, for instance — with honor synonymous with male pride.
Men can also be bad in distinctly male ways. They abuse the privileges afforded them. They act entitled. They take advantage of position and power. They can be extraordinarily self-centered. So can women, but unlike women, many men justify the practice as a right granted them by dint of being born male. Women just don’t think like that.
Men also act in ugly ways. To varying degrees, men have a cruel streak. There is a male tendency, plainly visible in pornography custom-made for men, to imagine women being harmed, demeaned, embarrassed, stripped of their power, dominated, and possessed. Most men restrict these impulses to fantasy. Others actualize them as flagrant misogyny.
Distinctive Features of Masculinity and Male Psychology
A quick inventory of male traits and tendencies that differentiate men from women along gendered lines.
Men grapple with significant degrees of hostility, aggression, and an urge to dominate — impulses that challenge men more than they do women. If anything defines healthy masculinity, it is the containment of these impulses. Degrees of misogyny are another variable feature of male psychology.
Are Men Really That Dependent?
A second distinctly male feature, uncovered by infant researchers, is a boy’s heavy dependency on his mother to regulate his emotions — stronger in boys than in girls. The need persists unconsciously throughout a man’s life, hiding behind a performance of autonomy and self-sufficiency. When the denial is taken to an extreme, it can curdle into toxic masculinity.
Is Male Pride Pathologic?
Then there is male pride. When I proposed writing a blog for a psychoanalytic journal, the editor objected that the term “male pride” evokes the manosphere’s worst segments — male supremacy. Be that as it may, the term is justified. A man’s sense of masculinity is inherently unstable and susceptible to attack. To collapse male pride into male supremacy is to miss the vulnerability underlying a man’s sense of manliness. Masculinity depends on external validation and on the absence of attacks from those who would paint him as a pussy, beta, momma’s boy, or cuck — which directly contradicts the male performance of self-sufficiency.
Men have what women as a class tend to lack: a rigid, narrowly defined sociocultural checklist of what it means to be manly. There are many ways a woman can be while still maintaining a solid sense of her femininity. The mean girl phenomenon is real, but it differs from the flagrant, in-your-face bullying and hazing men use to challenge each other’s claim to manhood. Boys and men tease one another in good-natured fashion — until sometimes they don’t.
There is nothing in female psychology comparable to a man’s fear of emasculation. Conversely, there is nothing in male psychology comparable to women’s perpetual vigilance about the prospect of rape.
Why Perversion is Mainly a Male Thing
A final distinguishing feature involves the mostly male practice of frank perversions — flasher-style exhibitionism, Peeping Tom voyeurism, and the objectification of women reduced to mere body parts. There is something inherently perverse about male psychology relative to female psychology, plainly visible in the pornographic scenarios men seek out. Men struggle with the impulse to harm, punish, humiliate, or dominate women. Fantasy and pornography provide a haven for the safe expression of these hostile and sadistic impulses, sequestering what might otherwise invade a man’s love relations.
I consider that sequestration a healthy manifestation of masculinity, though others might damn men for harboring such impulses at all — a topic for future posts. The sadistic impulse to debase women, as Freud pointed out long ago, is one more phenomenon distinguishing male from female psychology.
What Constitutes Masculinity?
What emerges from this inventory is not a definition so much as a portrait — and, like the portrait Leone painted of his three gunmen, it refuses the comfort of clean categories. Masculinity is less a thing than a set of expectations, vulnerabilities, and impulses that men are required to negotiate on a daily basis, often without realizing they are doing so. It is performed, inhabited, and policed — by other men, by women, and by the man himself. The variability across individual men is real, but so is the underlying coherence. Most men recognize the script even when they refuse to read from it.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are not three separate kinds of men but three registers within every man. The provider and the protector share psychic real estate with the entitled patriarch and the man who fantasizes about debasing women. To pretend otherwise — to insist that good men are good through and through and that bad men are an aberrant minority — is to misunderstand the territory. It is also to foreclose the conversation we most need to have. Honesty about what lives inside men is the precondition for anything resembling change.
This is why the question of what masculinity means cannot be sidestepped. If we are going to ask why being male no longer works so well — the question this series is built around — we have to be willing to look at the thing itself in its full ambiguity, without flinching and without flattering. The aggression and the dependency, the pride and the fragility, the codes of honor and the impulses toward cruelty all belong to the same psychology.
In the entries to come, I’ll turn to what happens when this psychology meets a world that no longer reliably rewards it — the vanishing scripts, the eroded validations, the new and unwelcome demands. But the inventory had to come first. Before we can ask why so many men feel adrift, undone, or enraged, we have to be clear-eyed about what masculinity has always been, and about the parts of it that men themselves have rarely been encouraged to look at directly.