The Masculine Man
- 8 hours ago
- 8 min read
The good, the bad, and the guys who just need to try a little harder
‘Ridiculously overmuscled man’ AI image request generated by Poe, because even the Hulk wasn’t he-man enough for this!
I need a hero, I’m holding out for a hero
‘Til the morning light
He’s gotta be sure
And it’s gotta be soon
And he’s gotta be larger than life (Larger than life!)
-Bonnie Tyler, I Need A Hero
I wrote recently about manipulative men and the younger women easily played. Modern feminism—two waves past my own—has often failed at teaching younger females how to navigate the vagaries of dating and mating. A more power-centered feminism emphasizing personal agency attempts to counteract the sabotaging message of self-imposed victimhood—if the message reaches the vulnerable. And if the vulnerable are amenable to the message—which they aren’t always.
For someone who never had a date in high school until a week before graduation, I nevertheless managed to avoid a lot of the potholes other young girls didn’t when I started dating in college.
It helped that I wasn’t desperate for male attention. I graduated with a keen nose for lower-quality males based on my high school observations—the ‘burnouts’, the self-impressed jocks, the bullies, the jackasses—and avoided them. I observed that guys from working-class or lower-class families treated girls less respectfully than middle-class boys. I wanted a ‘nice guy’, although he needed to be cute.
Some of this development in good taste I can lay at the feet of my late mother. The rest I figured out on my own.
“How?”
My first encounter with misogyny came from the little boy next door. Billy possessed a weird phobia about girls I found mystifying. Sometimes he played nice with me and sometimes not. I asked my mother why little boys hated girls and she couldn't answer. That's just the way they are, I think she said.
It seemed pretty stupid.
In grade school, I learned to recognize the 'nice' boys who didn't hate girls versus the little jerks. (A few of the 'nice' boys I now suspect were gay, although I had no concept of that at the time.)
In middle and high school I began to connect hypermasculinity to misogyny. In college I connected homophobia to a hatred of women. Homophobia became a red flag for identifying the misogynist male, who got the cold shoulder.
As I entered the dating scene in college, I found I attracted mostly ‘nice’ boys, and they were attracted to me. The macho he-men didn’t have much interest in me, nor I them. It seemed, I thought, as though they could tell I wouldn’t put up with any hairy-chested strongman bullshit. Hyper-masculine men, like the characters in the-then Golden Age of action heroes, were very sexy, but I recognized real he-men were Bad News.
I did notice that hyper-masculinity worked very well, nevertheless, on other women, and I privately felt sorry for them. I figured they must be getting abused or mistreated.
But what about the good ones?
What I know now that I didn’t then is that not all hyper-masculine guys are guilty of toxic masculinity. Nor do they deserve the hatefest they get from certain ‘progressive’ feminists.
Sometimes the biggest badasses are the nicest guys. Years ago, when I worked downtown, I had to take the streetcar to work. At Spadina station, a group of kids clustered every morning who seemed, for lack of a better word, developmentally disabled. One particular large, heavily muscled, tattooed, pierced transportation worker looking like a bouncer at the toughest nightclub in Toronto, treated the children with genuine friendliness, and knew their names, and talked to them while we waited for the streetcar. I felt envious of his wife. She had found a good one.
‘Hyper-masculinity’ must be approached with caution. And one mustn’t believe the movie fantasy, which is this: Action movie characters, hyper-masculine AF, always ‘nice’ guys, heroic types, often very violent, but never toward women. They consistently play The Protector. In reality, it’s much harder in Real Life to prevent emotional violent spillover. Some men can do it, but many can’t—like police officers and military men, both of whom offer a higher risk of domestic violence. For many women, regular masculinity is just fine, and safer.
Hyper-masculinity need not be demonized, even as we recognize the capacity for violence. For men who consciously adopt that persona, they need to understand that it is, on its face, threatening to the more canny women. Women who consciously avoid abuse will be naturally wary of them, and if they aren’t looking for women who accept abusive behavior, they’ll need to exhibit patience and to prove themselves non-abusive first.
But what about the less masculine man?
Taylor Swift and the transgender fish
‘Romantasy’’ is a primarily female-focused fiction genre—a romance/fantasy mashup. According to Bill Maher, it’s fiction built around women falling in love with and having passionate sex with vampires, werewolves, fairies (or ‘fae’ as they’re called), demons, elves, even a Minotaur. Anything but human males.
Maher blames it on the lack of masculinity in modern males, and says Taylor Swift ‘epitomizes the entire journey women have been going through’. He’s serious. He notes that until she landed Travis Kelce, a six-foot-five smokin’ hot football player from Ohio, Swift “…dated a procession of skinny, fay, gay-adjacent, meek, porcelain doll shy guy twink-like tortured poet metrosexuals in America and Europe,” and finishes, “but the second she got some old-school wood from the heartland, it was game over.”
Kelce doesn’t do it for me, but I get why Swift and other women fancy him. He’s reputed to be a genuinely nice guy, described as generous, fun-loving, charismatic, supportive of the family, and authentic, a trait sorely lacking anywhere anymore, especially on the left where one is taught that whatever you are, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Kelce is also a generous philanthropist, including a foundation he created called Eighty-Seven & Running, for ‘empowering disadvantaged youth’. He established a Robotics Lab at a Missouri-based non-profit, and gave money to some Ohio school foundations to help them weather the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s even paid for repairs to a senior former athlete’s home.
Kelce advocates for social justice, calling for less homophobia in American football, and support for Black Lives Matter.
All told, he seems an all-around good guy. He’s not perfect but criticism of him seems pedestrian, like his admittedly declining abilities in football, but at 36, that’s not surprising. He’s got a few old tweets he probably regrets, but most of the criticism is aimed at occasional disrespect (we’re all guilty of that), being a ‘clout chaser’ (maybe, or maybe just critical jealousy), and unprofessional behavior like making obscene gestures or shoving a teammate during a game.
No critical sexual assaults alleged, bitter ex-wives spilling it to the NY Post, or Surprise Babies in his family tree. No mention in the Epstein Files!
Maher suggested a point he didn’t explore: Travis Kelce is a manly man and what would seem to be a healthy mix of the best of both liberal and conservative values: He’s gay-supportive, wants to marry and start a family and he wants to make a positive difference in others’ lives.
I don’t know if they’ll be happy together—she’s a billionaire and he hasn’t even cracked $100 million in net worth yet. That kinds of pressure can break the strongest, most loving partnerships. Or, the pair could turn out to be like Pat Benatar and Neil Geraldo, still together 44 years later.
Maher was perhaps a bit harsh in his assessment of modern masculinity, or lack thereof. There is some evidence, not yet conclusive, that synthetic hormones in the water may be feminizing human males. What is established is that it’s definitely feminizing male fish, producing ‘intersex’ specimens who produce female eggs inside the testes, and these are fish that aren’t hermaphrodites. Other effects include reduced sperm count and resulting population declines.
One of the primary culprits is suspected to be synthetic estrogens, originating in birth control pills and HRT replacements, that aren’t completely removed by wastewater treatment, as are plant-based estrogenic sources as well.
There’s an interesting video making the case that male celebrities looked much older and more masculine in previous decades than today. It’s from the NY Post, not the greatest source ever, but not the worst either, and it makes a provocative case.
What it all comes down to
Travis Kelce strikes me as a good model for the new Modern Masculine Male - if you can look beyond his less important manly looks and towering height. I honestly don’t think that matters quite as much as many think. I’m a ‘sapiophile’ myself; I’m drawn to very smart men, and I don’t care if they’re short. (Many other women don’t, either.) I discovered my sapiophilia in high school, with crushes on some of the brightest students, not that I got anywhere with any of them. One turned out to be gay. Most were too shy to deal with girls even if they weren’t. But many of us also value a man who’s strong but not abusive. It’s a spectrum. The ‘porcelain doll shy guy twink-like tortured poet metrosexuals’ are on the low end, with the Highlander Kurgan on the other end. The best men are somewhere in the middle.
I like to be hopeful, and with the extended end of wokeness, I’d like to see normal, decent men ‘come out of the closet’, ar ar, and challenge the crazed harpies bathing in male tears. They’ll have plenty of support from women too. I run into many like myself, fans of neither patriarchy nor Patriarchy Derangement Syndrome. I listened to Rafaela Siewert’s interview with neuroscientist and sex researcher Debra Soh on The Free Press, where Soh discussed how hypermasculine men are often temporary flings for women, but not someone you necessarily bring home to Mother.
I mourn the loss of normal, manspreading, chest-exposing, at least reasonably-groomed masculinity fraught with sexual tension and playful romantic banter, a prelude of possible things to come while getting to know someone. I miss guys who know how to flirt. It’s one cock fight where Canada actually led the United States. When I left in 2005, American single guys were still fairly, you know, average-masculine—enough to pique one’s hormones. After I moved to Toronto, I found a distinct lack of masculinity in the native locals. Today, even the immigrants are beaten into submission by over-the-top #MeTooism and, although I can no longer speak from personal experience, from what I’ve read, so are American men.
It’s not all men’s fault, though. The manosphere exists in a symbiotic relationship with toxic feminism.
Which means women have to change too, and I’ve spilled plenty of electrons writing about that for the last several years.
I reiterate: You don’t need to be Travis Kelce or a fireman charging into a burning World Trade Center to be a Real Man. Heroes come in all forms, not just male, but also female and four-footed furry. Even children can be true heroes. Heroism doesn’t always require big muscles. One of the greatest historical heroes is Vince Coleman, the man who saved 300 lives in 1917 during the Halifax Explosion by bravely staying at his telegraph post warning an incoming train that a ship in the harbor was about to explode—knowing by staying he was surely to die.
You don’t have to be a man to be that heroic, but it helps. The desire to protect the weak is ingrained in almost all of them, even if some fall tragically short. Men possess a unique testosterone-driven courage many women don’t. We chickie-boos freeze, even when we have the ability to protect ourselves.
Ask yourself: Would you willingly leave your family forever to save 300 strangers’ lives the way Vince Coleman did?
Now that’s a man who had courage we only aspire to, and the strength to stay in place until the train stopped.
I’d like to think I would have, but I know: I’m not even close to being the man Vince Coleman was.
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