As a younger man, I never felt very well-connected with my gender. Being male seemed somewhat arbitrary to me, like a random coincidence, and sometimes it was a category I was uncomfortable with. In primary school, all the other boys played football in P.E., but I was one of two who switched to play netball with the girls instead. In my teenage years, I even briefly tried using they/them pronouns online. I figured that being masculine wasn’t important to me. I was completely wrong; as I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered that being seen as masculine feels really good. It was more that I hadn’t found a way to be masculine that I liked or was any good at.

So I’ve come to really dislike a certain progressive view of masculinity which doesn’t see it as a real thing. I grew up believing things like:

1. Trying to be masculine makes a man less masculine. You just have to not care how masculine you are.
2. Masculinity is actually the opposite of what you think it is; you might think it’s strength, but it’s actually about being gentle. What makes a real man is being ok with seeming feminine. “Secure in his sexuality.”

It’s so confusing. To a young man who doesn’t feel masculine “enough”, these ideas read like bizarre emotional manipulation. He knows what masculinity is, and he feels his lack of it acutely. I know I see it sometimes in other men’s eyes, in the subtle pity they exude, like they don’t even class me as competition. I know when a woman treats me like a boy, because I’ve seen what she’s like with someone she thinks is a man. I didn’t used to notice this stuff, because I wouldn’t let myself believe it.

Masculinity is very culture-specific, but there are general patterns. I now know I feel masculine when leading a dance; when I’m calm and confident in a stressful situation; when I’m demonstrating my skills, or when people depend on me; when I’m assertive and expressing my sexuality and getting what I want. It feels like some people are uncomfortable talking about any of this, and it’s frustrating because I feel like something has been kept from me. I felt genderless, but it turns out I can feel masculine, and I enjoy it.

The messages above are confusing two different things. When someone says “masculinity is not caring how masculine you are,” what they’re really noticing is that men who easily read as masculine don’t need to care. In fact, the not caring actually makes them seem more masculine, because it highlights how effortless it is. Obviously, not caring about identity is not in itself a masculine trait—because an effortlessly-feminine woman doesn’t care either, and that makes her seem more feminine. Also, these people usually do care a lot about how they appear. It does take effort to meet gender norms, though some people attempt to downplay and disguise their effort (sometimes to themselves). All of the masculine qualities I listed take experience and development and practice to embody. It’s cruel to lie to people and tell them they can’t change.

The same is true of “masculinity is actually femininity;” clearly an absurd belief at face value, but what people are really noticing is that men who easily read as masculine can do some feminine things and it doesn’t affect their masculinity. In fact, it actually makes them seem more masculine, because it highlights how convincing their masculinity is. (This whole phenomenon is called countersignaling.)

Another place I see gender being erased is in online talk about sex and dating. As a straight man, I’ve been told that women en masse are tired of their femininity and sexuality; they want a genderless, fully-symmetric romance, where I treat them in the exact same way I treat men. So it’s genuinely been a bit shocking to learn how much some women love being feminine, being protected, desired, complimented, pursued; essentially, how much some women love masculinity. I learned this first-hand in bars and clubs. I used to treat every woman I met there like a blank-state human, refusing to make assumptions about her out of “respect”; it’s been shocking to see how baffling some of them found this. Now I realise that, surprise, people are actually deliberately communicating things about themselves with how they act. Maybe those two women who dressed up nice and came out to the club together do want guys to talk to them. Maybe I’m not weird and predatory for seeing an undertone of sex to all this. Maybe everyone already knows what’s going on, and I just managed to autism-brainwash myself into believing the opposite.

I’ve read so many stories about inconsiderate and oversexualising men, and tried to avoid making those mistakes, only to see the interest leave women’s eyes at my hesitation. Some women have even directly encouraged me to give in and treat them in ways I thought weren’t allowed. It’s also been enlightening to spend time around guys who are way more direct and open about their desires, talking about who they find hot and why—it’s made me realise how ashamed I am of being honest about my sexuality.

So much fuss is made about men: steering boys away from the Andrew Tates of the world, teaching them to treat women with respect, encouraging “healthy” masculinities. It feels like a committee is trying to re-design a safe version of their identity. Is it any wonder why young men might look to manosphere icons like Tate? Despite how wrong and harmful they can be, they are the only ones directly tackling the feeling of “I’m not manly enough.”

And I think safety is the reason no one else is tackling it. Masculinity is easy to misconstrue; if you encourage a man to be more assertive, for example, you risk him being assertive about the wrong things, in the wrong ways, and other people end up uncomfortable or upset. So the ideas that spread the easiest are those which “work” in every situation: don’t try, don’t trust, don’t take risks. Widespread advice doesn’t optimise for making you happy, it optimises for causing other people fewer problems.

Looking back at P.E. classes again, this time in secondary school, I see now how attentive one or two male teachers were to me and how they went out of their way to challenge me and push me. I think they saw something under-developed in me, in the awkward, unfocused, uncoordinated way I held myself, and they were trying to help. They were doing what they could to tell me about all this, in ways words couldn’t be used. I guess at the time I thought they were frustrated by how hopeless I was at sports, and even though they couldn’t help much (my usual P.E. teacher had fully given up on my group), I’m still grateful that they tried. I would have liked to have had more of that guidance. I would have liked, in those football classes in primary school, for someone—a man—to have encouraged me and helped me make sense of what was going on and how to grow, instead of just being expected to figure it out in the chaos.

I guess that’s the reason I write posts like this and the rest of the From Mars project.