When I was younger I felt quite disconnected from my gender. I mean, in primary school, I hated playing football with the rest of the boys and so ended up being the only one who switched to play netball with the girls instead. In my teenage years, I even briefly tried out using they/them pronouns online. I figured that being masculine wasn’t important to me. I was wrong, though; as I got older, I discovered that being seen as masculine felt 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 grown to really dislike the online, progressive view of masculinity, which seems to see it as a bad thing. I grew up absorbing messages like:

1. Trying to be masculine makes a man less masculine. The actual way is to just 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. It’s actually about femininity, i.e. what makes a real man is being ok with being a bit zesty or feminine. “Secure in his sexuality.”

It’s so confusing. To a young man who doesn’t feel masculine “enough”, the first conflates masculinity with maleness, and essentially tells him his feelings aren’t real. The second tries to define it as its exact opposite; it might inadvertently tell him he is already very masculine, even though no one seems to treat him that way.

Masculinity has no single definition, 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.

I think the messages above are confusing two different things: what masculine men can do, and what masculinity is. Very masculine men don’t need to care about how they come across: basically anything they do will read as masc, which then reinforces it further. Similarly, a strong person being gentle with someone signals protectiveness and care, whereas a weak person has no option but to be gentle. Hence, it’s not the indifference or the gentleness itself that make up masculinity, but the combination of it plus some other, undiscussed masculine qualities. (This is true for other social attributes too; it’s 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 are tired of femininity and sexuality, that romance should be genderless, and that women want me to treat them in the 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 while going out a lot to bars and clubs. I also 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. 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.

(I’m not saying all women prefer this, I’m only saying not all women dislike it. Nor am I saying that men should be a certain kind of masculine—but it should feel like an open possibility! Also, lots of this may apply to women and femininity too; I’ve known women who have felt ashamed of having feminine desires.)

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 progressives don’t like talking about certain kinds of masculinity. It’s easy to misconstrue. For example, if you encourage a man to be more assertive, 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.

The issue is that the manosphere’s perspective is just as bad, if not worse. There is such a dire lack of good influences for men in this situation. The good news is that you’re not alone and it’s still possible to improve your relationship with your gender and identity, whatever that may look like for you. It’s the reason I write posts like this and the rest of the From Mars project.