The previous post focused on the controversy surrounding the terms masculine and masculinity—terms some claim refer to nothing set or specific, which leads them to propose they be wiped from our present-day vocabulary. There is simply no succinct way to define these terms, which are culture bound, era-specific, and open to constant revision, more ill-defined today than ever before. We can venture guesses as to what these terms meaning, which necessitates we consider former criteria that have now been eliminated as our thinking about the concept evolves.
Notwithstanding, everyone retains a sense of which behaviors and traits count as masculine or unmasculine, allowing for an admixture of both. Conventional wisdom doesn’t pinpoint what these terms specifically refer to so much as mark out a range of behaviors most would recognize as describing a masculine-seeming man or his opposite. Let’s start with that.
When I wrote an essay on toxic masculinity for a psychoanalytic magazine, the editor challenged me with a simple question I couldn’t answer. I had captured toxic masculinity in a ten-point checklist. Could I do the same for masculinity itself—specify what it is and isn’t? This I considered an impossible task.
The first thing that came to mind when I tried to generate a definition of masculinity was something written by Robert Stoller, a highly esteemed professor of psychiatry at UCLA who was my favorite instructor during my psychiatric training. Stoller wrote: “The first order of business in being a man is: don’t be a woman . . . for much of masculinity, as is well known, consists of struggling not to be seen by oneself or others as having feminine attributes, physical or psychological.”
Now, it’s strange to define what something is, first and foremost, by what it must never be. Stoller juxtaposed masculinity with femininity, then defined the former in opposition to the latter, which seems to be a curious and questionable way to define masculinity.
Cultural Templates
Every culture has a stereotypic template for measuring masculinity. In ours, certain actors embody degrees of masculinity beyond the average man’s reach—James Dean and all who followed his image. Professional athletes fit the bill, as do famed start-up founders. Men get measured against these templates, by themselves and by others.
Sociologists call the template 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. Toxic masculinity is what happens when men go all out and try to enact that hegemonic ideal without restraint or reflection.
The more a man embodies the ideal, the better positioned he is to swagger and enact alpha-like behavior. The more he veers from it, the more he is at risk for being regarded as a lesser man—a loser, a beta, a momma’s boy, a cuck. This all hinges on zero-sum thinking: you are either a winner or a loser. Sound familiar? Men challenge one another to step up and take it like a man—locker-room hazing, giving each other shit, seeing who can withstand the heat. It is a continuous rite of passage.
Female culture, by comparison, grants women greater latitude—a wider variety of ways to be acceptably feminine. That asymmetry itself legitimizes 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 experiences himself; something a man inhabits; a state of mind, less about what is between one’s legs than between his ears. A penis isn’t even required: genetically male (XY) infants born without one turn out acting and feeling male if raised indisputably as boys.
In fact, most men today aren’t straitjacketed by the hegemonic 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.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Sergio Leone’s 1966 spaghetti western gives us a useful frame. Its three characters transcend the faux good-guy/bad-guy binary typical of the genre; 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. All men contain the capacity to be any of the three types. Men can be good in gender-specific ways—ways that earn them the right to see themselves as good men. “To provide and to protect” comes readily to mind. Men are expected to bring home the bacon, though society now relieves them of needing to be the sole breadwinner. Some say there is no longer any shame in being a house husband but speak to wives who make considerably more than their husbands and you often get a different story.
Men are to treat their loved ones with care and protect them from others—including, ironically, from themselves, which calls to mind a sardonic boast: “Today I rescued a woman from being raped. I stopped myself.” Restraint ranks high on the list of what is expected of masculine men. Men live by a code—keeping one’s word, following through as promised—with honor synonymous with male pride.
Men can also be bad in distinctly male ways. They abuse the privileges afforded them, act entitled, take advantage of position and power. They can be extraordinarily self-centered. Women can too, but many men justify the practice as a right granted by dint of being born male. Women just don’t think like that. I do not believe there is female equivalent to toxic masculinity.
And men can 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, stripped of their power, dominated, and possessed. That was another of Robert Stoller’s lessons. Most men ideally restrict these impulses to fantasy—arguably another box to check on the masculinity list these days.
Masculine Adjacent: Distinctive Features of Male Psychology
A quick inventory of the traits and impulses that differentiate men from women along gendered lines:
Aggression and the urge to dominate. Men grapple with significant degrees of hostility, aggression, and an urge to dominate—impulses that challenge men more than women. If anything defines healthy masculinity, it is the containment of these impulses.
Covert male dependency. Infant researchers have documented the extent to which young boys, relative to same-aged girls, rely on their mothers to help regulate their impulses and emotions. This need persists unconsciously throughout a man’s life, hiding behind a performance of autonomy and self-sufficiency. Many men spend their lives fighting infantile trends they never entirely outgrow; when the denial is taken to an extreme, it can curdle into toxic masculinity.
Male pride/ego. When I proposed this blog, the editor objected to “male pride” because it can evoke 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; men feel a forever need to prove a masculinity that can be called into question at any time. To collapse male pride into male supremacy is to miss the vulnerability underlying a man’s sense of manliness.
Men also have what women tend to lack: a rigid, narrowly defined sociocultural checklist of what it means to be manly. Women are permitted many ways of being without calling their femininity into question. 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.
Fear of emasculation. There is nothing in female psychology comparable to a man’s fear of emasculation. 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. We like to imagine men too strong and independent to care how others see them; largely, this is not the case.
Perversion is mainly a male thing. A final distinguishing feature is the mostly male practice of frank perversions—flasher-style exhibitionism, Peeping Tom voyeurism, the objectification of women reduced to mere body parts. Something inherently perverse runs through male psychology relative to female psychology. Fantasy and pornography provide a haven for the safe expression of 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. As Freud pointed out long ago, the sadistic impulse to debase women is distinctly male.
Approaching a Delineation of 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 must negotiate daily, often without realizing they are doing so. It is performed, inhabited, and policed—by other men, by women, and by the man himself.
The good, the bad, and the ugly are not three separate kinds of men but three registers within every man. The provider and protector coexist with the entitled patriarch and the man who fantasizes, or actualizes, his impulse to debase women. To pretend otherwise—to insist that good men are good through and through and bad men are an aberrant minority—is to misunderstand the territory. It also forecloses the conversation we most need to have. Honesty about what lives inside men is the precondition for anything resembling change.