Why true masculinity isn’t toxic at all.
Over the last years, the definition of masculinity has changed in a way, where it is seen as toxic to be masculine. I find it hilarious that you get judged by society when you want to be masculine, as if it were something evil. In my English class, we read some opinions on masculinity and general critical views on gender roles, which were depicted as bad. There was no contrary point of view. It was characterized as “toxic” or “bad” if you want to be assertive as a man. I didn’t agree with these opinions at all because it seemed that I had a different understanding of masculinity in my mind. For me, masculinity is so much more than just aggression and testosterone, nevertheless both play a significant role in the essence of masculinity. Masculinity has changed. Sentences like “It’s okay to be weak, men are meant to be submissive.” are the top of the iceberg. So what exactly is masculinity? You could argue that masculinity is the exact opposite of femininity but nowadays we don’t even know what femininity is. That’s why I start to give you some definitions on masculinity first.
Masculinity per definition: Masculinity (also called manhood or manliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors , and roles associated with men and boys. Source: Wikipedia
I personally agree with this definition. However, I find it rather helpful to understand the concepts of masculinity in that. What are the masculine attributes, behaviors and roles? Let me explain.
Masculinity and femininity are both forms of energy that are flowing to everybody. Some are more masculine because they have more masculine energy than feminine energy. The same could be said for the opposite. That’s why some men appear more masculine/ feminine than other men or some women appear more masculine/feminine than other women. It’s important to know that these energies exist inside of every human on the planet, regardless of their gender identity, sexual orientation, or personal predispositions. We all experience both feminine and masculine energy in ourselves and both are essential to live a fulfilled life. If you are a masculine man, you probably noticed the attraction to the feminine you are noticing everyday.
“Masculine men are attracted to forms of feminine energy: radiant women, beer, music, nature, etc. If a man tries to hide his attraction, it reveals some degree of shame with respect to his own sexual core.” David Deida
This polarity is key. Masculine men are attracted to feminine women, feminine women are attracted to masculine men, balanced men are attracted to balanced women. We are attracted to the complete opposite energy. Sexual attraction peaks when two complete opposite energies collide. David Deida talks about this in his book “The way of the superior man”. I learned so much from that book, that I’ve read it twice and probably will again in the future. With the help of this book, I learned to understand my own core and also learned to understand the feminine energy better. Deida emphasizes that both men and women embody masculine and feminine energies, and these energies are not tied to gender but rather exist within each individual. The "masculine" energy is characterized by direction, purpose, and clarity, while the "feminine" energy embodies openness, flow, and love. Here are basic traits and aspects of both energies.
Masculine Energy
Emotional & physical control
Discipline
Strength (mental & physical)
Strong sense of competition
Providing & Protecting
Controlled aggression
Taking responsibility
Order & Stability
Seeking freedom
Growth & Creation
Ambition & Direction
Purpose & Clarity
Feminine Energy
Flowing& moving
Love
Nurturing
Emotion
Expression
Pleasure
Sensuality
Fully experiencing the present moment
Radiance
Relaxing
Creativity
Masculine and Feminine energy are the opposite from each other (You could also refer to them as Yin and Yang). While the masculine is defined by logic, the feminine is expressed through emotions. The problem is that society has tricked men into suppressing their masculine core and women into suppressing their feminine core. I can relate more to the masculine aspect and the changes I’ve noticed over the last years. But what exactly has changed?
Men have lost contact to healthy masculinity
Most men have lost their sense of direction and they have abandoned there pursuit of healthy masculinity altogether. Instead of being in charge of their own lives, they settle for less, become lazy and stop taking the actions which are necessary for the future they desire. In short, Men stopped taking responsibility for their own lives, they stopped being the leaders of their own existence. This created men without a spine, without a purpose, without power, without a reason to exist. The other extreme is the so called “toxic masculinity” or false masculinity like I refer to it, which so many young men fall prey to. They have fallen to a version where aggression, dominance and violence became their foundation of existence. The effect is men without virtues, who only see women as sexual objects instead of existing equals and spiritual beings. Society’s solution is the deconstruct of masculinity. This leads to nothing, but destruction of society, destruction of families, destruction of femininity and the destruction of polarity. I think that this would do more harm than any good. Masculinity needs to go back to it’s fundamental roots, back to healthy masculinity. No I’m not saying that all men should beat their wives and take away their right to vote, this has nothing to do with healthy masculinity. It’s time for men to take responsibility for their own lives, their own future, to evolve, grow, and lead – to pursue a version of masculinity that goes beyond gender stereotypes and outdated masculine ideals.
Masculinity is nothing that you can achieve instantly, you have to work for it every day. Society has fooled us that the ideal life looks something like that: Marry in your 40’s, get a house, have two kids and retire in your late 60’s, live the rest of your life in this house and die. If you truly want that life, there is nothing wrong with it, but you have to actually want it. If not, don’t pursue it, don’t settle for less, you’re working against your masculine core. There is no own sense of action, no purpose, no direction for a masculine men, when you live your life not like you want it. I want to build my own future, I want do define my own fate, I want to change my life to my own happiness, instead of living up to the expectations of other people, companies and society itself. I want to live, not exist.
How to become a man and how to stop being a boy.
1. Take responsibility
Men take action, boys complain all the time. You need to act when you want to change something. Men search for the problem in themselves first, boys blame others for their mistake because they won’t admit their failures. This immature behavior brings you nowhere. You gain power over your own life and over people around you when you take responsibility. When I understood that, I searched for mistakes within myself instead of blaming other circumstances or humans. Guess what, my grades in school and my overall well being got better. So stop blaming the world cause it doesn’t give a flying fuck about your little problems because you aren’t 5 years old anymore.
2. Men embrace pain of growth, boys seek comfort.
The comfort zone is killing you. It’s like a wasteland, nothing grows from there. It takes courage, the courage to deny comfort and pleasure in order to become a man. It’s easier to watch TV when it’s dark and cold outside instead of going to the gym. “But I don’t feel motivated!” So? Do you want to become a man or do you want to stay a little boy who’s transforming into a weak man child? When a man is too engaged in comfort he loses himself and becomes a degenerate, weak shallow of himself. Pain and discomfort are normal and you will face a lot of that and that should excite you. The more pain and discomfort you’ll face, the more you’ll grow. It’s like a video game where you don’t level up by staying in the same starting area all the time. Nobody would want to play such a boring game. Why the fuck would you want to live your life like this then?
“Always, always embrace the suck, adapt to the suck.” David Goggins
Men are built through stress. The more stressful situations you overcome, the wiser and stronger you get. Everything in life worth doing is uncomfortable. You find that women attractive but don’t want to talk to her? Fine don’t do it, the next dude who knows what he wants will get her, but don’t complain afterwards. If you genuinely think that “all women are hoes!”, or “they don’t want guys like me!”, you are fucking pathetic. Embrace the ugly and the miserable and you will grow as a man. Why do you think is it that some of my friends including myself got into nice relationships in our lives? I can tell you that we all had one thing in common, we all were embracing the difficulties of life for months before the opportunity seemed to fall from heaven above. Do you think you’ll get a nice job or a beautiful woman by playing video games all day, eating bullshit and not exercising? If you are getting angry right know because I am hurting your feelings, you might have more feminine energy than masculine energy sunshine. And that’s okay if you want to live like this. If you want to succeed in life, especially as a man, you’ll need to improve yourself. You can either get bitter, or better.
3. Men master their bodies, boys get enslaved by them
I’ve talked so much about the importance of being in great shape all the time cause it’s true. If you don’t have the power over your own body, you don’t deserve power in other aspects in life.
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” ~Socrates
If you aren’t in shape, masculine men and feminine women won’t respect you. The women might respect you, but the majority of them won’t sleep with you because they find your body and your personality unpleasing even if they don’t want to admit it. This halo effect is the reason why guys could be accused of being a pervert or a weirdo for saying the same sentence to a girl as the 6’2 tall, jacked chad before them. If you don’t look nice, you aren’t in good shape and you aren´t intelligent enough, you won’t have a chance to attract feminine women and get actual respect from masculine guys unless you start to improve yourself. Embrace discomfort. Me and my friends automatically don’t have that much respect for a guy who isn’t in shape and isn’t taking care of himself. You can blame us for that behavior but it’s pure evolutionary coded in our DNA. I always try to motivate and encourage other guys around me to strive for more or to improve themselves. If the don’t want to, it’s their opinion but I have more respect for a 16 year old boy who’s trying to get in shape than for a 18 year old boy who isn’t working out at all. Men notice if another man is masculine or not. This goes from body posture, to body language as well as to conversations in general. The sheer amount of sloppy handshakes that guys gave me in school is astonishing. It has gotten better right now which is a good thing but it’s a basic check that guys are doing unconsciously when greeting each other ( women as well btw). When the handshake of a man is strong and firm, you’ll respect him more, hence he seemed as a equal rival because he showed his presence which is a sign of respect. Feminine women also notice this subconsciously. When a guy gives them a shaky, sloppy hand without any pressure behind it, it seems like he has no power which is then a signal that he is incapable of protecting her. By looking for gestures like this, women secured that their partners where good enough for them. They seek security and stability in order to bear children without having any worries. This is why feminine women always seek the best option in men for them. It’s all evolutionary and in their DNA, so don’t blame the women, blame yourself for not fitting into the standard of being a masculine man. Everything in a man’s life is better when he prioritizes and protects his health. And everything suffers when he doesn’t. Eat junk food and drink alcohol all day long, but don’t complain afterwards why you have gotten fat and unhealthy.
4. Men respond to their emotions, boys react
No I’m not saying that real men don’t feel anything and that they should suppress their emotions until they kill themselves due to depression. This would be toxic or false masculinity. You are not a man, if you don’t have any emotions. Love, fear, anger are all feelings that a man is feeling the same way a boy does. The difference lies in the way he is dealing with them. When a little boy is angry, he shouts and punches everything around him and becomes aggressive. When a man get’s angry, he responds calmly instead of punching around. Men are in control of their emotions, boys are controlled by their emotions. You can choose your response as a man all the time. The masculine is defined by logic, the feminine is expressed by emotions. It takes discipline but this is also a trait of being masculine no matter your gender. A masculine person does what needs to be done, no matter how they feel. You don’t want to go to the gym? Do it anyway. Boys act on their first impulse. Man act on their values and virtues.
5. Men respect the feminine, boys deny or blame it
When a woman is getting angry at you for something, it’s one of her best qualities for a man. WTF you just said? Yes, you’ve heard me right. The moment you are getting critic by a women that loves you, you should listen. It’s one of the best indicators that you lack of something which she wants and craves in you. Let’s say she is angry at you because you promised her to take out the trash bin but now you are watching a football match instead. Most guys would get angry and think to themselves why she is so over dramatic. It’s just a trash bin right? Wrong, they don’t care about the trash bin at all. The are pissed because you gave them your word as a man and didn’t act on it. Why should she trust this man, if he isn’t capable of keeping his promise and staying true to his word. Sometimes the only thing a man has is his honor and his word, so keep your word guys.
Boys see women only as objects for pleasure, as sexual objects. My school is a good example for it. You have two types of boys. The first type of boys consist of the nice guys, who are doing everything for a women until they will acknowledge them, for their “worth” instead of telling the girls what they want. They all end up in the same place: The friend zone. The biggest problem is that they will start to blame the women, instead of themselves. Try to understand feminine energy and masculine energy and you’ll notice why these women treat you like their little best friend. The other type are the so called bad boys, who manipulate and seduce women in order to sleep with them. They are more successful than nice guys but they lack honor and personal values. In the end both guys are the same despite having their differences: The first try to get approval and validation from women for themselves, the second type of guys see women as things to be conquered and seek validation by sleeping with many women to prove that they’re a “real” man. A grown man instead is respecting the feminine.
He respects women as equals and sees them as neither toys for his pleasure nor goddesses who dictate his worth. He embraces the feminine qualities of his partner and knows that their differences are what add flavor and excitement to life.
He knows that the union of the masculine and feminine is meant to magnify the experience of life for both, and he acts accordingly. In the end these are the guys that end up with beautiful relationships or with all the beautiful girls they like, depending on their preferences. They don’t put women on a pedestal like the nice guys but they don’t treat them like shit either. They prioritize their mission and goals in life over women. This absurdly is so attracting towards the feminine.
Please read the following excerpt of Deida’s book The Way of the Superior Man. It is so fascinating how feminine and masculine energy operate and how they both have a dark side which should be embraced from time to time.
“Among many other qualities, a woman wants the “killer” in her man. She is turned off if her man is afraid and wants her to kill the cockroach or the mouse while he stands on a chair and watches. She is turned off if her man wants her to get out of bed in order to check out the strange sounds in the house to find out if a burglar made the noise. Fearlessness, or the capacity to transcend the fear of death for the sake of love, is a quintessential form of the ultimate masculine gift.” The dark masculine energy of the warrior, the one who could face death and kill when necessary, is an essential part of you. Today’s current fashion is to suppress both the dark masculine and the dark feminine, so we have a large population of wimpy men and polite women. But beneath the nice veneer of most women lies the wrathful goddess who would chop the head off of every mediocre “new age” man. And beneath the patient smile of most men lies the warrior of love who would ravish his woman into bliss rather than listen to her chat in pointless emotional circles. But the dark masculine energy has been suppressed so thoroughly these days that the ordinary man would prefer to paste a smile on his bored face, rather than penetrate his woman’s tension with uncompromising love. And he’s just as cautious about disrupting his own well-planned life of comfort and security in order to penetrate his own fear of death. Although she may resist it at first, your woman, if she has a feminine sexual essence, wants to feel your fearlessness. She wants to feel your capacity to face her closure, anger, and tension, without trying to minimize her feminine force. She wants to feel your persistence in loving, so that her fury cannot turn you away. She wants to feel your capacity to stand strong in your own desires and ravish her because you love her, unafraid of her dark energy. She wants to feel this dark masculine capacity not simply because she wants to be ravished, but because it is a sign of your overall capacity to face and know death, your own and others’. And it is this capacity that makes you trustable as a man, both as a human warrior and as a spiritual warrior. The knowledge of death makes you humble and courageous. The knowledge of death strips the armor from your heart and allows the knowledge of love. ~David Deida The Way of the Superior Man
This explains why most women fantasize about guys who are capable of being extreme dominant, whilst treating them like a gentleman would. This seems like bullshit on first sight but makes complete sense when you look at it from the feminine perspective.
6. Men serve, boys seek approval
The most important thing about leading is serving. My dad always told me that I have to learn how to serve before I can learn how to lead. Boys seek approval by feeding off their ego. They lie, cheat, everything in order to please their ego. Linus mentioned in a previous blog that ego is the enemy and that’s true. Jerking of your ego is childish. I stopped that behavior because it wasn’t good for me. If you guys also have a big ego like me, it’s best to remember that you aren’t special and especially mortal. Do that from time to time and be more humble. Men understand that the fastest way to help themselves is to help others. They seek to live in such a way that they make the world a better place for all. And they understand that doing what is right, even when it’s not easy, is the cornerstone of masculine behavior.
“I do not love the sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. " - Faramir
“For he was a gentle heart and a great king and kept his oaths; and he rose out of the shadows to a last fair morning.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
7. Never, never lose hope.
When you have nothing, hope is the only thing that you can hold onto. Nowadays, men lost their own confidence. They lost their shining gift of inspiring hope in others. When life seems to be dark, remember that darkness only exists in duality to the light. Remember that some people are grateful for the things you take for granted. I always was optimistic when I felt down in my life. This is crucial. Be optimistic and never lose hope. One of the best attributes of healthy masculinity is to encourage and inspire others. I always liked doing that and felt a sense of protection for people who are weaker than me. Like I mentioned before, protecting, providing, and encouraging others are all noble attributes and a sign of honor and values.
“Aragorn looked at the pale stars, and at the moon, now sloping behind the western hills that enclosed the valley. 'This is a night as long as years', he said. 'How long will the day tarry?'
'Dawn is not far off', said Gamling, who had now climbed up beside him. 'But dawn will not help us, I fear'
'Yet dawn is ever the hope of men', said Aragorn.”
―J.R.R. Tolkien,The Two Towers
“It's like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer. I know now folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something. That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.”
― Samwise Gamgee
The media has changed masculinity towards a joke.
The average dad in a Netflix series is dumb, fat and only exists for the jokes. The funny thing is that this has become the norm nowadays. The average guy has become exactly that. The average guy lives in mediocrity, beneath his possibilities, no purpose, no ambition, no gift for the world. It wasn’t always like that. The movies back then were so much better. They seemed to actually tell a story from which you can learn all the time. Quality was the priority not quantity. Today they want whats showy, what looks nice but these things lack substance. I have to admit that women and men are different when it comes to movies. Masculine men want to watch movies where topics like, suffering, striving for freedom, fighting and dying for the greater good are mentioned. I never liked love movies and probably will never like them. I find them boring, predictable and overall not nice? Why would I want to give a shit about that girl which falls in love with that co-worker but then they break up and she meets a millionaire but in the end she goes back towards her ex? Feminine women love that. The women that I’ve been with loved such movies and I don’t blame them. This only showed me that they were very feminine, which I liked. The movies I craved didn’t focused on love, they focused on purpose, freedom, fighting and death. Movies like: The Lord of the Rings, Gladiator, The last of the Mohicans and The last Samurai became my favorites. I always felt more connected towards the men that were portrayed in these movies. They all suffered, were noble, selfless and fought for the greater good, instead of jerking off their ego. Some of them even died in the process and the only time when I’m crying in movies is when a person is dying whilst they are fighting for a thing which has more meaning than their own life or when something involved with honor happens. I find that relatable. That’s why some feminine women seek the life the women in these movies are living and some men daydream about being in a last stand where you sacrifice yourself so that your friends can survive. It’s strange but the ultimate desire of the masculine is freedom. The ultimate desire of the feminine is love. I wish there were more movies which portray this healthy masculinity.
By watching these movies, I’ve learned so much for my life. I created my own moral code, my values and my personal virtues because I was influenced by these portrayed men. Obviously these movies didn’t shape my life to a point where I can say that all of my existence is due to these movies. Nevertheless, I strongly advocate for seeking role models in your live. My parents taught me very much and I am grateful for having a loving family. However, not everybody is blessed like me. What if kids without good parents or kids without parents at all watched these movies? I don’t know but I think that they would try to their best and strive for more instead of becoming degenerate drug addicts and depressed because they’ve gotten into wrong environments with bad influences.
This little moment showed, why healthy masculinity is important. The boy probably died that night in battle. Aragorn himself is probably questioning if he will die that night but still he encourages and inspires this young man. This is a scene which I always liked. For me the character of Aragorn is the epitomy of healthy masculinity. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch lord of the rings.
In the end you decide how you want to live your own life. You either have a masculine, feminine, or a balanced core. I hope you can now categorize yourself in terms of your own energy and live up to your true core. I strongly recommend you to buy David Deida’s book “ The Way of the Superior Man” it has opened my eyes and I have learned so much about masculine and feminine energy. It’s not only for men, women also profit from the value he gives with this book.
He also has written books which were predominatly for women like “ Dear Lover” but I didn’t read those. I hope you found that article helpful and I would be more than grateful if you leave a comment down below.
Strength and Honor
