50 Masculinity Quotes

I hate the whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It's such bull. You see these dudes greased up, in their underwear, talking about how they don't want to be a sex symbol.

As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence.

Men were only made into 'men' with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally 'a man' any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with 'usefulness' and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems.

'Unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom empty, a limp nullity. While the female body is full of internal potentiality, the male is internally barren. Manhood at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action.'

'The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.'

The most unsatisfactory men are those who pride themselves on their virility and regard sex as if it were some form of athletics at which you can win cups. It is a woman's spirit and mood a man has to stimulate in order to make sex interesting. The real lover is the man who can thrill you just by touching your head or smiling into your eyes or by just staring into space.

I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music, they just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male. (1991)

The two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son. ~ Ch. 2

It's not easy being a man! Oh no..I had to get dressed today... and there are other pressures.

Je ne concois guere (mon cerveau serait-il un miroir ensorcele?) un type de Beaute ou il n'y ait du Malheur. Appuye sur - d'autres diraient: obsede par - ces idees, on concoit qu'il me serait difficile de en pas conclure que le plus parfait type de Beaute virile est Satan, - a la maniere de Milton.

The idea that lack of paternal guidance can explain today's masculinity crisis doesn't make sense. I suspect rather that underneath the sons' charge that their fathers did not teach them how to be men lies another, unadmitted complaint - that their fathers taught them only too well how to be men, and they are choking on the lesson. These men, as boys, faced the age-old tradeoff: If you undergo the painful process of renouncing the 'feminine' aspects of your humanity and follow your father into manhood (and what choice do you have, really?) you will share in the spoils of the superior half of the race. Now, as men, they find that the spoils are far more meager than expected. No wonder they feel betrayed.

But after the intimacy-inducing rituals of puberty, boys who would be men are told we must go it alone, we must achieve our heroism as the Lone Ranger, we must see the other men as threats to our masculine mastery, as objects of competition.

Here are some more men who oughta be strapped to a gurney and castrated with fishing knives. White guys who shave their heads completely bald. They're so ashamed they lost eleven hairs, they try to turn it to some kind of a masculine statement. I say hey, you goofy-lookin' baldy-headed fuck! Looks good on black guys, on you it's ugly, repulsive and disgusting. You wanna be bald? Do what I did - wait a while. In the meantime there's no excuse for running around looking like a freshly circumcized dick.

'[T]he boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.' (Dr. Nicolosi - excerpt from transcript [2]

[Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife] is for me a secretly deep history of a generation of middle-class American males, my own, which was taught by parents and athletic coaches and scoutmasters and military chaplains and quack doctors and so on to be deeply ashamed of masturbation and wet dreams. And the hidden plea in the book is one which first appeared in my eyes when I was fourteen, say, and which has not vanished entirely to this day. It is part of the mystery of me. The plea is addressed by old-fashioned males forever full of jism to any pretty human female, on the street, in a magazine, in a movie - anywhere. The plea is this: 'Please, pretty lady, don't make me play with my private parts again.'

I would be happy to have a gay child. He would be a Boy Scout, and he would teach all the other Boy Scouts how to build a fire with two sticks and a back-handed compliment.

This presidential race is the biggest dick contest in history. 'Your dick is indecisive!' 'Your dick started an unnecessary war!' 'Your dick didn't get injured enough in Vietnam!' 'Your dick didn't even go to Vietnam!' 'Your dick is soft on terrorism!' 'Your dick started terrorism!' 'Your dick blamed Vietnam vets for atrocities that made all vets unable to come home to a hero's welcome.' 'Your dick forged its way out of military service!' Has this kind of dick waggling happened before outside of a pro- wrestling context?

Most men were like this - relatively unconnected, unbound, alone. But these men were particularly untrusting and ungiving, and so the bonds that held them to each other was fragile indeed. It was not love at all, really, but rather a yearning for the honor and respect of the other men that held them. Pride, then... Indeed, all their connection with each other at this moment was tied up with the respect they felt they were earning by their actions.

To a certain sort of half-wit, obscenities are testosterone turned into the spoken word.

Victor: White people won't respect you if you don't look mean. You have to look like a warrior, like you just got back from killing a buffalo. Thomas: But our tribe never hunted buffalo. We were fishermen. Victor: What, you want to look like you just caught a fish? This isn't Dances with Salmon, you know!

He hated to leave, but he loved his work. He was a man, and men needed to work. More sexism! More masculine tunnel vision! More need for gender-sensitivity workshops!

'In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them.'

Having an interest in clothes is a sign of vanity and English men don't like to be seen to be vain. That's what is so fantastic about this format, it gives men permission to take an interest in clothes and their appearance. And as a result their self-esteem goes up.

Charlie McCarthy: 'Say, Mr. Fields, I read in the paper where you consumed two quarts of liquor a day. What would your father think about that?' WC: 'He'd think I was a sissy.' (from a radio show)

I'm a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That's what kind of man I am. You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science.

'El Hombre' from Al Que Quiere! (1917)

Well, that glove's fulla vaseline. Vaseline? What the hell for? Well, I tell ya what - Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife.' Ch. 2, p.29

I am a total family man. I drop my kids to school every day and if I knew how to cook I would even cook for them. According to me, doing things for my kids is very macho. - Shahrukh

You claim to be a playa but I fucked your wife/We bust on bad boys, niggas fucked for life

See they ask me if I shed a tear, I ain't lie/See you gotta get high or die, cause even thugs cry

Are you calling me a pussy?

You know how they separate the men from the boys in Greece, Phil? With a crowbar. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh:

I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!

And me I'm in the bathroom crying out my eyelids because it's hard to be a man when you're scared, just like a little kid.

The movie is not that violent. There are ideas in the movie that are scary, but the film isn't about violence, the glorification of violence or the embracing of violence. In the movie, violence is a metaphor for feeling. It's a film about the problems or requirements involved with being masculine in today's society.

All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.

For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.

The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not?

Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes. I spent the first twelve years or so of my married life assuring myself that I 'just liked to drink.' I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can.

SA men should be leaders, not ludicrous apes.

Tough Guy