The problem with the barrage of mixed signals teenage boys receive about how to define masculinity, is that if you’re a mature, confident man, YOU’RE NOT CONSTANTLY RANTING ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN. That’s just not something most grown-ups do. This means that the strongest signals coming through online are from people who are going on about it all the time, and a high proportion of those have some truly awful opinions on the subject. So now here I am, a guy talking online about how to define masculinity.
Shit. You made me do this.
If you were to ask me to define what a man was, my initial response would be that the man I aspire to be is someone who has maturity, the willingness to accept responsibility for oneself and others, who makes a constant attempt to exercise good judgement, who treats people with fairness and respect, who tackles problems and indulges in his passions, who is kind and rational and would like to leave the world in a better state than he found it.
However, this could be said to be the definition of ‘a good adult’, which might not be specific enough for some people, and I’m conscious that if you’re a boy or a young man reading this, it may not define masculinity in clear enough terms, compared to what you might see elsewhere.
So let’s address that. I’m going to be using the words ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, but we need to acknowledge up front that these are weighted terms, because our very language has developed in a society where woman have up until recently, and often still are, treated as second-class citizens, but these are the words we have, so I have to work with them. I’m also going to be talking less about what you are already, and more about what you can and can’t do about it.
What You’re Made Of
Let’s talk briefly about physical attributes, and get that out of the way. You have a certain amount of control over your how your body develops, but nobody gets to choose their genes. How healthy you are, your capacity for physical development such as building muscle or increasing your lung capacity, whether you have a disability or a chronic illness or not, whether you’re short-sighted, how tall or short you are, your skin and hair colour, whether you’ll get to keep your hair . . . these are things that were decided before you were even born, and you may or may not be able to compensate for them. You have to do the best you can with what you’ve got.
Biological sex and gender have become much more complicated issues than centuries of convention, religion and language have prepared us for, and I’ll talk a bit more about them further on, but let’s just say that this blog is for someone looking to embrace masculinity, and is struggling with how to do that in a way that’s healthy, self-affirming and worthy of respect.
Perhaps I should focus more on the qualities we acquire over the course of our lives, and which help define us as individuals: character, emotional maturity, self-determination (the ability to choose our own course through life), strength of will and ongoing self-development. These are admirable traits, and the kind of thing you’ll hear a lot about in the extended universe of websites, blogs, forums and podcasts that make up the manosphere, from people who’ve made lucrative careers out of trying to convince boys and men that they’re victims of oppression.
Lads, please. It’s the height of irony to believe that one of the qualities that defines a real man is ‘being scared of women’. Nor is it the ambition of every woman to emasculate all men. Anyone who spent any time actually having proper conversations with women would know this. Join the real world.
But it’s easier to make money out of you if you’re feeling threatened, and most of these guys are not in the ‘affirming masculinity’ business, they’re in the ‘profiting from insecurity’ business.
And you don’t need that shit.
Standing Alone
We are involved in constant interactions with others and it’s common to associate being masculine with being dominant, either by wanting to be in charge, or by being competitive, but as a means of assessing who or what you are, there is no version of this that works for every situation, or over the long term.
If you’re the type that likes to be in command of what’s going on, that can be a positive thing – if that’s where your competence lies, and people are willing to follow you. On the other hand, if you’re trying to take charge all the time when you’re not the best person for the job, or you are in charge but you’re woeful at it and don’t want to give up your position, well . . . then you’re just being an asshole.
There are a lot of benefits to being competitive as well; it can give you drive to improve and excel at what you do, and getting involved in sports or some other form of physical activity can give you physical confidence, which we all need, and this starts with rough and tumble play when you’re a young kid. But we can’t treat every situation as something that has to be won. There is a perception in society that men should be competitive and, historically, the more aggressively domineering someone has been, the more macho they are, the more masculine they’re considered to be, and that’s still a pervasive idea.
The lust to constantly win everything might make you a successful football player, but would make you a rubbish father. There’s a lot more to being a good human being than winning stuff, and in many pursuits, being competitive can be counter-productive, or even downright destructive. Having the judgement to know the difference is vital to being a grown-up, but it reflects a more fundamental issue; our tendency to judge our worth by comparing ourselves with others.
You are the only person in your specific body, growing up in your specific circumstances. Because each of us is starting from a different place, there’s no measure of quality that works for every aspect of our lives, and if you’re basing your self-esteem on making constant comparisons with others, it can drive you nuts. There will always be someone who’s smarter or kinder, better-looking or fitter or more skilled or taller or more thoughtful, or someone who has more money or a better job or a better life . . . We all do this, compare ourselves negatively with others, even when we know it’s not going to make us happier. We know. Some of it comes from that inbuilt desire to compete, while some is just wishing you had it better.
You are the only person in your specific body, growing up in your specific circumstances, so the only true way of gauging how well you’re doing as a human being is to compare with your past self, and see if you’re making progress. Confidence, self-respect and maturity lies in competing with your past self and doing better. Except for physical achievements like sports, of course. After a certain point, we all start getting old and slow. Mortality’s a real pisser.
Making More Humans
Our answer to mortality lies in another common trope of traditional masculinity; spreading your seed. There’s a lot of pressure from society for people to have children, and it used to be an accepted idea that everyone should, but that’s not the case any more. Being a parent should be a very conscious and deliberate choice, and there are as many reasons not to do it as there are to do it. It’s not a single act, it’s a long-term occupation, and if you don’t want the job, then you shouldn’t apply. We don’t need as many new humans as we used to, but we do need to put more care into the ones we’re making. Although I love being a dad, it’s a huge responsibility, and if you’re not going to treat it as a huge responsibility, then you shouldn’t be a father. Getting someone pregnant is not one of the measures of a man. That’s just biology doing its job. Being there for all the years it takes to try and ensure your child grows up a happy, well-adjusted human being? That is a measure of your character.
And I’m not just talking about being a provider. There is a longstanding belief that a family consists of a father, a mother and their children; that it’s a mother’s job to nurture and raise the children and a father’s to provide material support, but otherwise, his involvement is voluntary. You would think that we’d shaken off that belief over the last couple of generations because in the real world, there are so many different types of family and most of us grew up in a home where, if both parents were living there, they probably both had jobs and they both had to do housework and look after the kids.
But ‘man as the provider’ is another one of those ideas that has persisted, despite the progress we’ve made. With the clamour of the manosphere, the online flood of US Christian nationalists and phenomena like the ‘trad wife’, the idea of women as the homemakers while men go out into the world and do all the paying work seems to be trying to make a comeback.
And not only is this a deeply misogynistic view, it’s also messing with men’s heads too. It promotes the belief that we shouldn’t change our kids’ nappies or clean up after them when they’re young, or comfort them when they’re upset; that we shouldn’t show love and empathy for our children, or indeed, any tender emotions, or cry or show any vulnerability, because to do so would make you less of a man. And I feel a great sadness for the men who fall for that lie, and fail to build a close relationship with their child in those crucial early years. It’s a lie that has its roots in the history of opposition.
Opposites Repel
If you look at the qualities I mentioned further back, character, emotional maturity, self-determination, strength of will and ongoing self-development, you’ll notice they’re all internal traits – they’re not reliant on who or what other people are. If someone exhibits a certain quality; say they’re brave or funny or smart, that doesn’t mean that you can’t also be brave or funny or smart. What they are takes nothing away from what you are.
Weirdly though, for centuries, humans have tended to believe that this is exactly the situation between men and women. Not only was there the perception that it was a strictly binary thing, that there could only be two genders, but those genders were opposites. It did vary from one culture to another, but it was a thread that ran through most. If you were on one side, you couldn’t have any of the qualities that were associated with the other side. And given that men were generally the ones making the rules and controlling the language, and that they intended to keep it that way, harder, more dominant qualities came to be seen as masculine, while softer, more submissive ones were seen as feminine.
Men were strong, intelligent, brave, aggressive, competitive, rational and ambitious. Women were sensitive, attractive, kind, empathic, cooperative, emotional and nurturing. And crucially, it was considered unseemly for either gender to exhibit too many of the other’s characteristics. Women were not expected to be brave, men were not expected to be nurturing. Men were not emotional and women could not be rational.
And the same went for who you were sexually attracted to; men liked women and women liked men, that’s all there was to it. Any deviation from this traditional archetype was an abomination.
All of this is, to be quite blunt, total and utter bullshit. Yes, men and women are different, but they are not opposites. A man can be brave, competitive and intelligent, and whether a woman has the same qualities or not has absolutely no bearing on that. A man can be kind, empathic and nurturing and it doesn’t make a woman any less of a woman. Most people would laugh at such backwards ideas now – unless they had ulterior motives to promote this nonsense; like say, some guy who’s perpetually angry that women won’t sleep with him, or he’s running a manosphere podcast. Or y’know . . . both.
To listen to some of these guys, you’d swear humans came as two halves, created as pairs, mirror images incomplete without each other – jigsaw pieces, as if a penis was an inside-out vagina. But we are different, and there are many more degrees of difference than we first thought. People are complicated, biology is complicated, and gender is not a flat coin, lying one side up or the other.
So creating an identity for yourself by trying to be what other people aren’t, trying to define yourself by your opposition to something is a pointless exercise. And you don’t have to, because you are your own person. What they are shouldn’t matter to you at all.
When Ideas Advance Faster than Language
Up until 1930, there were eight planets in our solar system – that was a scientific fact. Then Pluto was discovered, and we ended up with nine. It was small, thought to be smaller than our moon, but it was there. That was a fact too; we had nine planets in our solar system. Every chart of the planets I saw growing up had nine planets. Nine. But astronomers kept looking out there and decades after Pluto was discovered, they started finding other lumps of rock and ice nearby, in the region that became known as the Kuiper Belt. It turned out that Pluto was just one of many icy bodies, and some were around the same size. In fact one, Eris, was even thought to be bigger.
So they had to decide if they were going to have to list all of these new lumps as ‘planets’ or demote Pluto. They had to really nail down the definition of a planet. And that’s how, in 2006, Pluto got relegated to the category of ‘dwarf planet’, and found itself listed alongside the biggest body in the asteroid belt, Ceres, and other large Kuiper Belt Objects such as Eris, Quaoar and Sedna.
And that’s how we’re back to having only eight planets in our solar system.
The issue of gender has been another means of making young men feel insecure about their masculinity, because if you build your identity on the basis of ‘not being a woman’, then the blurring of the definition of a woman has a knock-on effect on the image that men have of themselves. The language we use to define gender is based on the absolute conviction that it is a binary situation, that someone is either a man or a woman, despite the fact that the existence of what were once called hermaphrodites – someone born with both sex organs, or whose sex is in doubt – has been recognized for a very long time.
The term ‘hermaphrodite’ is no longer used because it’s not accurate and is now considered outdated and even insulting – it’s better to use the term ‘intersex’. Because we know a lot more about biology and genetics these days, like the discovery of the Kuiper Belt, our understanding of a person’s sex has developed and we know that it is not a binary situation, it’s a whole spectrum – and that’s just the physical side of things. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, expectations, and behaviours that are often ascribed to the different sexes, and this too is a spectrum. Sometimes your gender aligns with the sex you were assigned at birth, sometimes it doesn’t. If you’re like me, and the two do align, then you’re cisgender. If it doesn’t, then you’re transgender.
And there’s no one who can decide that for you except you. Nor can anyone else decide who you are sexually attracted to, which is a different thing again, and just as individual, just as internal a quality. How could they know?
If I asked you if you were right- or left-handed, you’d be able to tell me without any doubt. If you were left-handed and I insisted that nobody was left-handed, that everyone favoured their right and you had to get with the programme, you’d think I was an idiot, even though there’s no way to prove what you know about yourself. We can’t cut you open to find the thing that makes you left-handed or prove it with your DNA. You can only show me that you’re better with your left. Discrimination against left-handers is not a theoretical situation; there was a time when left-handed kids in school were forced to write with their right hands and were beaten if they disobeyed. And it wasn’t that long ago.
Nobody can tell you what gender you are or who you’re attracted to except you, and society is starting to accept that, but the problem is, we’re trying to define a new situation with old language, terms that developed on the basis of outdated ideas, and it’s very hard to shake off those ideas when we’re all forced to use the language that’s based on them. And particularly the binary thing: man or woman, male or female, masculine or feminine. It constantly channels our thinking back into either/or. It’s like trying to talk about colours when you can only refer to black or white.
So if you’re a boy trying to understand his masculinity, and the world around you is showing you a whole spectrum of identities but some people are telling you there are only two types, that can be confusing. And when you’re confused, simplistic answers are easier to take in.
The Real Predators
This is not a post about trans rights. That’s not my story to tell, and if you want an informed opinion, you need to go and read some trans writers. But recognition of those rights is causing brains to explode across the manosphere, because it doesn’t fit their binary, either/or template, and yet it does allow them to portray this as a threat to their simplistic, conservative world order. It gives these ‘real men’ another reason to play the victim and it gives them something else to sell, enabling them to prey on the insecurities of others in order to big themselves up and make more money.
For women, there’s a different version of this resistance, and it plays on the very real history of domestic abuse and sexual assault of women, society’s response to which has always been woefully inadequate. According to an analysis carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2021, one in three women globally have been subjected to physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes. Given that it’s (almost always) men doing the assaulting, it’s understandable that women often feel threatened by men.
Men attack women, and they do it a lot.
However, this fear has been weaponized against trans women, making them out to be predators who are intent on invading women’s bathrooms and assaulting them. I hate having to post on this bullshit at all, but the level of media attention this accusation gets is mind-boggling – pumped up by public figures like JK Rowling, Graham Linehan and numerous other celebrities. This is especially remarkable considering that a) only about 0.5% of the population is trans, about half of whom are trans women, and b) trans people are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
Transphobes would have us believe that people are pretending to be trans in order to hide what they really are, when the whole point of coming out as transgender is to show the world who you really are.
Have there been cases where trans people have committed sexual assault? Yes there have, humans are humans after all, but it’s a tiny percentage of the 0.5%, so why is it constantly being brought up? There are far more cases of parents sexually abusing their own children, but there’s no outcry in the media calling for banning parents. Because that would be stupid. And I’m conscious that this whole issue is deeply offensive for trans people, that it’s upsetting to have to see it in the media all the time and here I am trotting it out again, so I apologize for that. I can only imagine what it’s like to see the largest proportion of mentions of your identity taking the form of debates about your right to exist.
But the main problem with the transphobe feminists’ claims that real women are being robbed of their identity is that they can’t even agree on what a ‘woman’ is. In a recent boxing match in the Olympics, Angela Carini pulled out of the bout forty-six seconds after it started when she was punched in the face by her opponent, the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. It didn’t take long for JK Rowling to post a photo of the two fighters, where Khelif is patting Carini on the back and wrote above it: ‘The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.’
Khelif is a professional-level boxer, so she has a muscular frame, but Carini is pretty much the same size and weight. However, Carini’s face looks more feminine, and that apparently was enough for Rowling to decide that Khelif was a man. But Imane Khelif is not even trans. She was assigned female at birth, it’s on her passport, she was a raised as a girl and only ever competed as female. She lives in a country where it’s illegal to identify as trans. Nor is she some testosterone-charged, unstoppable punching machine – she’s lost plenty of matches to women, including to Ireland’s Kellie Harrington back in the Tokyo Olympics.
Angela Carini was in a competition where punching your opponent in the face is the aim of the sport and she lost. But because she broke down crying and she looks more feminine than her opponent, that champion of women’s equality, JK Rowling, decided that Imane Khelif must be a man and said so to her massive Twitter following. So the pile-on ensued, and we learned from the transphobic onslaught that being born female with a vagina was apparently not enough to qualify someone as a ‘real woman’.
And yet they still say there are only two genders, and you are what you’re born with.
Show Them Who You Are
This is the quandary that young people face today, as they try to create an identity for themselves: The men who claim to represent ‘real men’ can only define their identity in terms of its opposition to women, and the women who represent ‘real women’ can’t define what a real woman is. And the reason that neither of these factions can offer any consistency or solid principles, is that they’re grounded on two false beliefs: 1) That gender is a binary, black or white system, and 2) That the two sides have to be the opposite of each other and cannot have the same qualities.
We are influenced by those around us. We’re all reliant on one another; nobody grows up in complete isolation without human connection. Our society is built upon cooperation, it’s our greatest strength. We are all vulnerable in one way or another, we all need help from others to live our lives. But while you are meant to have people around you, who and what they are doesn’t have to affect who you are.
I am comfortable in my masculinity, not because I have an image of what a woman should be and I have chosen an identity that is in opposition to that, but because I’ve tried to live my life according to certain principles, primarily reason and compassion. I try (though I don’t always succeed) to behave in certain ways that I think will make me a good adult and help me live a rewarding life and I find that works. I try to be strong for those around me, but I also rely on the love, strength and kindness of others. It gives me confidence and where appropriate, I project that confidence. I try to set a good example for my children. How I see myself and the manner in which I behave manifests as more masculine than feminine, at least as society would judge it, but that’s just what felt natural for me – it’s how I turned out. It’s an element of my character, not a measure of my quality as a human being.
If that’s an identity that fits for you, then I’d urge you not to listen to the guys who talk constantly about being ‘real men’, expressing it as hate and suspicion of women or trans people. That’s not being a man, that’s being an asshole and a chickenshit asshole at that. Don’t worry about what other people are, or whether or not you’re different to them. Nobody else is starting from the exact same place that you are. Find some principles to live by, try and stick to them, respect other people and live a fulfilling and passionate life.
Nobody else is going to make you a man . . . that’s up to you.