How Do We Define Modern Masculinity?
Thomas Pluck has finally come up with a definition he can live with.
By Thomas Pluck
A while back I took the mantra “be the change you want to be in the world” and applied it to manhood. Be the man you want to see next to “man” in the cultural dictionary. But I never thought of actually defining it until I read Alison Nastasi’s article in Flavorwire about 12 Men Who Define Themselves as Masculine (warning, some photos are NSFW).
Not many of the subjects give masculinity a lot of thought; one fellow seems to be trolling, both physically and verbally. For some time, me and my friend Zak Mucha, a LCSW in Chicago, have wrestled with a new definition of manhood to appeal to young men seeking elusive role models. “Protecting the weak” implies value judgments that aren’t always easy to make. Can a strongman be oppressed? Does that make him weak? And so on. It needed to be simpler. I needed to distill my thoughts on masculinity to a single short sentence.
I came up with “applying strength toward justice.”
Because what differentiates man from woman, besides a chromosome? If we strip all cultural conventions and socializations, if we try to imagine Skinner-box grown lab creatures, one is larger and has more upper body strength. The other has…
