open-ended question! tangents encouraged!
how has your perception of your gender/masculinity changed over time – maybe throughout high school, or after puberty? has it become more or less important to you?
r/AskMen
open-ended question! tangents encouraged!
Comments
I never really thought about gender and masculinity and never really cared. I just live my life.
I never cared.
I am mostly stereotypical masculine because that who I am.
I am a lot more judgmental of people that are cunts regardless of gender than if a man doesn’t like lifting.
The only place it really comes up is in this sub, tbh.
I never spent much brainspace on it and still don’t
For something to be masculine it must be something done be a man. I realized that I define masculinity because I’m a man. That means no matter what I do, I do it in masculine way.
In other words, I quit caring about what others think. I do my thing.
I tried being more manly and stereotypical, but I’m almost 30. I stopped caring. Being “manly” is entirely subjective and you should do what makes you happy.
I feel like somewhere between like 10 and 18 years old, all the things I thought were super manly shifted to being super cringey.
It’s become very important.
It’s hard to talk about. I think in my youth, going through school I felt like my masculinity was suppressed and I was not happy almost sad. It wasn’t till after college I started embracing my masculinity I’ve become more happy and confident in myself.
Looking back, society has really made it difficult to be masculine and that has made me very upset with society and i don’t want that for the next generation of men.
I’ll be real, I used to care a fair amount. In the early 2000s, gay and f***** were still very common insults, and their negative connotation definitely pressured a lot of young men like my childhood self to avoid anything that could be seen as feminine or unmanly. Being a “real man” was an ideal to strive towards. Over time, my understanding of that phrase has certainly changed. Being a man isn’t just fighting, drinking, fucking, lifting, and eating unhealthy crap. It’s honoring your word, being dependably good, having a code and sticking to it. I don’t find myself less masculine now that I don’t fight, don’t drink to excess, and eat healthier, because those things don’t define masculinity for me anymore. Nonetheless, the things I now view as being a “real man” are equally if not more important to me now than they have ever been. Make of that what you will, but ultimately I think it’s a good thing if young men today can still find some ideals to strive towards in the virtues of what real men think that real men should be.
So- growing up I hung out with a lot of physically imposing television ready alpha male types.
I was military. I was a firefighter and EMT for a while. I boxed, played baseball and, in my misspent youth I will admit- even went to jail a few times (usually for engaging in that most manly of activities- fighting).
When I was younger my thinking around manliness/masculinity focused a lot more on physical toughness- a sort of “oh man that guy can really fight / lift heavy objects — he is a REAL man— I’m going to hit the gym for another two hours to be a REAL MAN too….”
But as I got older I came to realize that this is really shallow thinking.
I met guys with biceps bigger than my waist who would cower and cry like little bitches when the bullets started flying.
I met kids with noodle arms and (somehow) overhanging guts who would (I have no doubt) jump on a grenade in a heartbeat.
My point here is: as you get older and become a deep thinker the whole “Hollywood image” of what makes a tough guy (good looking, swagger, fit) melts away and I learned that manliness is more of a measure of intestinal fortitude than physical swagger.
Winston Churchill was manly af…. And he was a little cigar smoking dude with a paunch who despised exercise.
Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela…. These were fuckin MEN— NOT because they had Dwayne Johnson’s biceps but because they had an internal strength and moral clarity that said “fuck what the rest of the world thinks- I’m gonna do what’s right!”
And that’s a big change over time; the gangster teens I met in juvie (I’ve never been to prison as an adult will admit) were tough only insofar as they would punch you in the face repeatedly and could take a beating better than Churchill or Lincoln or Martin Luther King ever could… but they weren’t men… they were, despite their physical prowess and toughness, just scared little boys.
The 270 pound out of shape accountant with the beer belly and horn rimmed glasses and stupid mustache who will drive two hours to pick up YOUR drunk teenager and bring her home from a rough situation is more of a man than the Arnold Schwarzenegger clone who won’t lift a finger unless it directly benefits him.
Because real men do what’s right…. Not what’s easy.
So that’s probably the biggest way- being a man is about not fucking giving up on doing the right thing.
I do not class myself as non-binary or anything but perhaps I would meet that definition. I am just ‘me’ in my eyes. Some days I am more masculine and have more masculine traits, some days more feminine.
I have always gotten along better with women as (apart from riding a motorcycle) I have no ‘manly’ hobbies, no interest in sports, fitness etc. I do not often enjoy the company of other men unless a) they are a father figure (as I did not have one for a good chunk of my life, at least not in person, after my parents divorce and then after my dads death) or b) they don’t fit the stereotype themselves.
I know there is a lot more than the ‘typical manly man’ stereotype but as my father fit this, and expected me to conform to it to when it wasn’t me at all, I can’t help seeing other men in this light if you get me.
I am confident in my (lack of?) gender identity. I tick male on all my forms and select he/him pronouns but I just honestly see myself as just myself as I said before.
I work in a female dominated field in phlebotomy and that suits me fine. Often a courier will come in and say “hello ladies” while I am there and it’s never bothered me in fact it’s kind of affirming when I feel more feminine, but even if it’s a masculine feeling day it hits the right places. It’s weird.
I’m looking to quit my job and go to an even more female dominated industry, dental assisting. I truly feel like it’s the next chapter of my life. Again not bothered, why would I be? I am extremely confident in my identity.
The only typical masculine thing I did have to break out of is that “men don’t show emotion”. My father drilled this into my head, he was a handshake not a hug kinda guy, barely ever said I love you unless it was a real dire kind of situation. I never saw him cry, not even when he lost his mum stuff like that. So I emulated this habit and it took me a long time to get out of it. When he died I didn’t even bat an eyelid at his funeral, I couldn’t cry I had to be a strong man all that stuff.
Now I’m over that and a lot more expressive with my emotions, it’s good to cry, you shouldn’t keep it pent up. Now my antidepressants make it near impossible to but the feeling of need is there, just that raw bit of emotion, that was never there before. Even though I can’t really unless it’s a very very sad moment (like finally seeing his grave) I just can’t.
I feel like the fact that people just can’t stop talking about it is a psyop at this point.
I wanna be hella ripped
As a kid I didn’t give a fuck and couldn’t for the life of me understand why it was important to people or what the whole “girls/boys are icky!” thing was about. I always had friends, some were boys, some were girls.
When puberty hit and girls became sexually interesting, it became a huge problem because I couldn’t fulfil that gender role. I still treated women just as I would friends and as a result, I never had dates, sex or a relationship. Because I was the safe male friend.
Now as an adult, I couldn’t care less. The entire concept is pointless and has no value. It would be nice if we could just collectively forget it.
If I’m at peace, stable & independent I consider that to be my own relative baseline
Never given it any real thought since i was maybe 15. I was shy but still wanted to be a “man”. Times were different then. Nowdays i really dont care what is masculine or not. I do what i like and if people wanna label it with something, then go ahead but i dont care.
I have thought about it very little other than when this trans stuff has come up.
Never cared for trying to be as masculine as possible. I have long hair, never played/watched sports instead opting to go the band route as a kid, did ballet in my late teens/early 20s. During high school I helped 2 friends come out and be comfortable in their own skins by holding hands with them while we walked to classes despite being straight myself. Even now the majority of my friends are women and in a crowd/party setting I always get absorbed by the women as opposed to the men, without “acting feminine”. The only “manly” things about me are my voice being the equivalent of Drop Z on guitar and the fact that I basically live in the gym, but even then I have a female friend and her mother as my running partners.
I always find it eye rolling-ly dumb when I see people hyper fixating on whether something is manly or not. If you enjoy something you should just be able to do it without wondering about what others might think of it.
Edit: most actors that are known to play the “masculine men” that many idolize still had to go the theater/drama school route.
Throughout my teens and early twenties I rejected it, wore long hair, make up and dangly earrings throughout most of my teens but was still fiercely heterosexual. I tried to look like a finial fantasy character…
Then I started looking more traditionally masculine, gained muscle, grew my beard out, even cut my hair short but I also started dating men, trans women and basically everyone under the sun. Looking like a guy from an action movie gave me the confidence to do so I guess.
Later on in my twenties I realised I was still defining myself too much in other peoples notions of masculinity.
Now I’m just doing my thing, openly pansexual gardening, building race cars with flowers on them, barbecue with the homies and shopping sprees with my wife and her friends, life is good!