Best 200 quotes in «masculinity quotes» category

Literature is the haven of fluidity, of slippage from one character to another, of movement. Women tend to read far more novels than men do, perhaps because this kind of ambiguous floating and flirtation is just what a self-protective masculinity needs to keep away from.

MacKinnon captures this is in her succinct lesson on the grammar of pornography and male dominance: 'Man fucks woman; subject verb object.

Male social conditioning encourages boys and men to aim to bed as many women as possible....so much so, that their self esteem and self worth become intertwined with the number of sexual partners they have; and when that number is low or even zero, so too is their self-confidence.

... male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around.

["Manning Up"'s] essays definitely nuance the idea of transitioning into a “shared manhood” (much like feminists of color have complicated the idea of “shared womanhood”). Trans men don’t all transition to just become “men,” which was one of the projects’ cornerstone concepts. They become black men, white men, queer men, straight men, working class men, affluent men, fatherly men, single men, spiritual men, etc. etc. All of these mean different things when filtered through social and intimate, familial lenses. One major boon of the growth in transgender literature ... is that we get to tease out these complexities in lives that will be popularly portrayed as monolithic unless we provide counter-scripts." - from a National Book Critics Circle interview with writer Rigoberto Gonzalez

Masculinity is mainly a construct of conditioned feelings around people with penises.

Men come to sex hoping that it will provide them with all of the emotional satisfaction that would have come from love. Most men think that sex will provide them with a sense of being alive, connected, that sex will offer closeness, intimacy, pleasure. And more often than not sex simply does not deliver the goods. This fact does not lead men to cease obsessing about sex; it intensifies their lust and their longing.

Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to "handsome" as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator's attention.

Men's pride is situated in their scrotums.

Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.

Men, the fact that a dream is unrealistic doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t dream it. You can dream big. You can imagine great things. In fact, you should hope for something big and great in your life. They key isn’t in squashing the dreams.The key is in understanding that difference between dreams and goals. The difference between a dream and a vision.

Men are wild, mighty, and fierce. Yet our culture wraps silky ropes around our necks, and shaves our faces, and trims our nails. The wildman isn’t quite socially acceptable. It’s not okay to have dirt under your fingernails, or to kill your own dinner. We don’t have to reject civilization entirely, there is a time and a place for manners and polite conversation and neckties and cologne. But I believe that all men, even the dandier, fluffier ones, have a call – drums beating in the distance – that beckons them into the wild.

Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf.

Many men no longer want to be identified just by their jobs," said Bengt Westerberg, the country's former deputy prime minister.

No matter that information abounds that lets the public know that gay males come from two-parent homes and can be macho and women-hating, misguided assumptions about what makes a male gay still flourish. Every day boys who express feelings are psychologically terrorized, and in extreme cases brutally beaten, by parents who fear that a man of feeling must be homosexual. Gay men share with straight men the same notions about acceptable masculinity.

No one can achieve their dreams, and become the kind of person they were meant to be all at once. It’s a series of little movements, and you can only take the step that’s right in front of you.

Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.

My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don’t cry. There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial. Science is such a category. The torture and death that Heinrich Himmler found disturbing to witness became acceptable to him when it fell under this rubric. He liked to watch the scientific experiments in the concentration camps

Of course, thousands of years of traditional masculinity weren't going away without a fight. They lingered in the vestigial memories of men, occasionally challenging a decision to read the directions or wear argyle, hoping for a day when a hurtling piece of space rock will send the world back to a time before the advent of styling gels.

No one owes you anything. If we live our lives expecting people to hand us anything, we’ll not only alienate all of our friends, but we’ll create a situation where our value is puffed up and manufactured, and not based on our actual value. When something goes wrong, when crisis comes, we are left feeling bankrupt.

Often, when a man encounters a moment of extreme trial, his inner fears come out in the form of a specific kind of excuse. I hate to dismiss those excuses as only that, because they also often reveal a deep truth about that man, and what he believes about himself. I am not strong enough. I am not smart enough. I am not rich enough. I am not young enough. I am not old enough. I am not MAN enough. Men. These are lies. These are weapons fashioned to bring you down.

One of the biggest things that hold men back from being the fathers, husbands, and leaders they are meant to be is that we are often unfit, unhealthy, or otherwise limping along.

On the drive to Paris, Michelle barely drew breath, speaking to her uncle about her holiday and pointing out landmarks to Delta. Secretly, Delta was relieved. She needed time to acclimatize to the potent force that was Édouard Valois. Sitting beside him in the front of the black Mercedes-Benz, she was all too aware of his presence: his sheer size, his stunning profile, his elegant hands upon the steering wheel deftly controlling the luxury machine, his dynamic and intriguing personality. He was living, breathing masculine perfection.

Our adolescent sons are eager to become heroes in our eyes, and in the eyes of the world.

Once upon a time black male “cool” was defined by the ways in which black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold. That burning process required high heat. Black male cool was defined by the ability to withstand the heat and remain centered. It was defined by black male willingness to confront reality, to face the truth, and bear it not by adopting a false pose of cool while feeding on fantasy; not by black male denial or by assuming a “poor me” victim identity. It was defined by individual black males daring to self-define rather than be defined by others.

Our American culture paints a picture of masculinity where a man is an island. A lone cowboy on the prairie smoking marlboros. A caped crusader who works better alone. A dad in his den, reading the paper, shooing the kids away so he can unwind. But this lone ranger mentality is dangerous. Even the actual Lone Ranger had Tonto. We are not made to be alone.

No wonder then that men who cared, who were open to change, often just gave up, falling back on the patriarchal masculinity they found so problematic. The individual men who did take on the mantle of a feminist notion of male liberation did so only to find that few women respected this shift. Once the 'new man' that is the man changed by feminism was represented as a wimp, as overcooked broccoli dominated by powerful females who were secretly longing for his macho counterpart, masses of men lost interest.

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

Our sons are on a Hero’s Journey. They are navigating a transformative passage from boyhood to manhood, which requires them to leave behind the well-known world of childhood and cross a threshold, filled with many challenges, into a new world where much is unknown. Along their journey, our boys need an abundance of real-life, positive role models – everyday heroes and heroines – to look to for guidance and inspiration. They also must begin to see themselves as heroes – the authors of their own lives, armed with the noble qualities and courage needed to complete their journey and arrive at manhood with integrity.

Physical development was alleged to assist spiritual and intellectual development, while also helping safeguard boys from the 'solitary and sexual sin' of masturbation.

our contemporary ideas about manliness, reflected in action movies and westerns, generally prohibit so-called real men from displaying high emotion, with the exception of anger. John Wayne doesn’t cry. By contrast, Achilles, the epitome of manliness in Homer’s Iliad, weeps openly and at length over the loss of his friend Patroclus.

Perhaps I am a rose-picker and a breeze-sniffer.

Policemen always have the idea that they can’t have emotions, that you are as hard as a rock, and that’s not true. You are no different than anyone else.

Our goal should not be to reshape masculinity but to eliminate it. The goal is liberation from the masculinity trap.

Rather than trying to prove our masculinity, we need to accept who we are in the spirit of the gospel. Instead of trying to live up to some cultural standard of manhood, we need to accept God’s grace, which says, “I accept you just as you are.” It is culture, not God, that alienates those who do not live up to the existing, narrow definition of manhood.

Raising our sons is among the most important social imprints we will leave on the world, for they will become the partners, husbands, fathers, friends, lovers, creators, and leaders of tomorrow.

Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.

Sarah DiMuccio, an American researcher and PhD student at New York University, published a paper in Psychology of Men & Masculinity that offered a simple, cultural definition of that type of manhood that stuck with me. Comparing the Danish idea of masculinity with the American one, she found that the major difference between them was that in Denmark, men said to 'be a man' meant not being a boy. American men said that to 'be a man' was to not be a woman. That is, Niobe Way says, where all the trouble starts. If being 'feminine' is the opposite of being a man, then many qualities that Americans associate with women (such as empathy, which shows up in boys as well as girls) are not just frowned upon, but destroyed in boyhood. 'You're only a man by not being a woman,' Way told me. 'That's basing someone's humanness on someone else's dehumanization.

Scientists can test only what they do not take for granted. That can make studying familiar phenomena particularly challenging...This may be especially true of masculinity, femininity and sexuality, because certain ideas abut gender and sexuality are so broadly shared in our culture

Sir, you have a purpose. You are here, breathing, moving, living, for a reason. Part of that reason is the process of discovering it, and discovering yourself.

Purpose answers the question, “Why do I exist?” And as we ask it and explore it, I encourage you to study and look at the purpose statements of others, and of organizations, to fully understand the idea. Remember that your purpose is transcendent, and it is permanent. It doesn’t sway with the seasons of life. It is something that brings you fulfillment at every part of your life, and guides you.

So many times I have tried to get my life under control, and to make changes. So many times I have tried to conquer my weight, to be a better husband, to get a better job, to manage my business and finances better, and I have often felt like a juggling circus clown with one too many balls (or chainsaws) spinning in the air. I’m learning that we cannot do everything at once.

Some feminists are really very interesting people. Science cannot unambiguously clarify which one — nature or nurture— fundamentally determines personality traits and human behavior, but some feminist movements already distinguish sex (biological factors) from gender (social factors), insisting that social cultivation can significantly modify social roles and behavior patterns and radically change the perception of traditional masculinity and femininity in the social system. In fact, without reliable scientific verification of the relationship between nature and nurture in the predestination of future human life, they offer a firm ready-made belief in changing this life with education and upbringing. And this is one of the essential differences between science and political ideology, which also includes feminism among others.

Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but—as the saying goes—perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do something I had never witnessed before: 'try on' a pipe. In case you ever wish to do this, here is the form: a solemn assistant produces a plastic envelope and fits it over the amber or ivory mouthpiece. You then clamp your teeth down to feel if the 'fit' and weight are easy to your jaw. If not, then repeat with various stems until your browsing is complete. In those days I could have inhaled ten cigarettes and drunk three Tanqueray martinis in the time spent on such flaneur flippancy, but I admired the commitment to smoking nonetheless. Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies' dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. 'Mariam,' he said as if by way of explanation, 'has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.' On another occasion in Manhattan, after acting as a magnificent, encyclopedic guide around the gorgeous Andalusia (Al-Andalus) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he was giving lunch to Carol and to me when she noticed that her purse had been lost or stolen. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and advisor until she had selected a suitable new sac à main. I could no more have proposed myself for such an expedition than suggested myself as a cosmonaut, so what this says about my own heterosexual confidence I leave to others.

Sometimes, we fail at a challenge. That can be a disappointment, but it can also be the thing that helps us learn how to rise above and meet that challenge on the next go round. Failure can build discipline and strength and wisdom. It’s up to us if we choose to let that failure rip our confidence away. We get to choose to keep pressing in and charging forward to meet the challenge.

She was so delicate that, while we sat beneath the linden branches, a leaf would fall and drift down and touch her skin, and it would leave a bruise. So as we sat in the afternoon hour, beneath that fragrant linden bower, I had to chase all of the leafs that fell away.

Suicide has overtaken car accidents, heart disease and cancer as the biggest killer of British men under the age of 45, and male rates of substance abuse, violence and imprisonment are eye-watering. And yet dysfunctional emotional regulation continues to be aligned with alpha masculinity.

Sweden had paternity-leave policies in place for years but found that few men were taking advantage of the benefit. While women felt comfortable taking time off to be with baby, men worried that they would look less dedicated to their careers if they did the same. So the Swedish government implemented a “use it or lose it” policy, mandating that the country’s thirteen-month parental leave cannot only be used by one parent – the other parent must use at least two months of the leave, or both lose those months entirely. Today 85% of Swedish fathers take paternity leave. The policy has helped redefine notions of masculinity and femininity in the already-egalitarian country.

That's what a man is supposed to do for his wife. Listen, if a nigger didn't get lynched every now and then, well, there's just no telling what they'd do to us." "Who?" Lily asked. "Why, honey, the niggers and our husbands both. I don't care what color they are; men build up steam. And they gotta let it out somewhere. Colored men. White men. They both crazy. Honey, the point is you gotta look at it this way: A whole lotta women can't, "I got a man who'll kill for me."

The answers to today's problems are not to eschew masculinity. We do not need to redefine masculinity. We need to reclaim it. We need to affirm the masculinity, the rough and tumble, the competition, and the discipline needed to teach boys right from wrong. We need to be able to give them safe avenues to express themselves, and to model for them what it means to accept and love people. We need to teach them things like honor, perseverance, integrity, adventure, justice, tenderness, determination, hope, love, peace, and freedom are all masculine virtues, and they are a part of what it means to be a man.