Masculinity Quotes

We must dare to face the way in which patriarchal thinking blinds everyone so that we cannot see that the emotional lives of boys cannot be fully honored as long as notions of patriarchal masculinity prevail. We cannot teach boys that real men either do not feel or do not express feelings, then expect boys to feel comfortable getting in touch with their feelings.

~ Bell Hooks

A man's level of toughness (as assessed by other men), will determine whether or not his girlfriend will get hit on by other guys right in front of him in public places. If you're deemed a p*#%y by other guys and they want your girlfriend, even in your company she'll be considered fair game.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

Guys, you don't have to act manly to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. You don't have to prove your masculinity to anyone.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

Guys, you don't have to act manly to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. Don't let society make you believe you have to prove your masculinity to anyone because you don't. You are you and you are worthy, full stop.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

Don't tell me I'm too tall just because my height happens to threaten your rather fragile sense of masculinity. The fact that men cannot physically look down upon women who are taller than them is the very reason that many men find tall women so intimidating.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

I quickly found the dating/hookup app to be a dangerous addition to my iPhone. A friend recommended it after shit hit the fan with my boyfriend. With enough breakups under my belt, I knew that the healthiest remedy was a solid rebound fuck or two. Tinder made it easy- too easy. Suddenly, I could sit in traffic, on the toilet, or in line at the DMV and carelessly swipe, swipe, swipe my way to dick-on-delivery. Tinder selections are based on proximity via smart phones, so there are tons of tourists, travelers, and young professionals on business trips swiping through new hunting grounds. Its loose, easy-come-easy-go method made hookups as convenient as picking up lunch. Tinder’s nonchalance went both ways. We had nothing to lose.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

Those four effects described above—shaping a male-dominant view of sexuality, initiating victims, contributing to difficulty in separating sexual fantasy and reality, and providing a training manual for abusers—are at work just as much with men who have not engaged in activities that meet the legal definition of rape. Here we have to let go of a comforting illusion—that there is some clear line between men who rape and men who don't, between the bad guys and the good guys.

~ Robert Jensen

Our goal should be not to redefine masculinity, but to abolish it.

~ Robert Jensen

For my relationships with men to change, I needed to change my relationship to myself as a woman.

~ Gloria Ng

This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. We will never dismantle misogyny as long as domination is eroticized. We will also never stop racism. Nor will we mount an effective resistance to fascism, which is the eroticization of domination and subordination–fascism is in essence a cult of masculinity. Those are all huge spin-outs from the same beginning. The result is torture, rape, genocide, and biocide.

~ Lierre Keith

The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gyn/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behaviour, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power… Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women.

~ Sheila Jeffreys

The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

~ Camille Paglia

The old 'qualities' of masculinity - a narrow focus on life, domestic incompetence signalling a mind on higher things, emotional reserve and acts of endurance - have become absurdities, signs more of incompetence, insensitivity, lack of intelligence than of strength.

~ Rosalind Coward

Great men have great discipline.

~ Habeeb Akande

We need to begin to see hyper-masculinity as the disorder it is, and not as a strength.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I never trust a man who tucks in his shirt by choice or neglects coffee in favor of tea.

~ Brian D'ambrosio

There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.

~ Norah Vincent

One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sports and gambled on it. He had never looked at that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.

~ James Jones

Is there a support group for people who didn’t like ‘Brokeback Mountain’? We must, if the rave reviews and the newspaper reports are to be believed, be a very tiny — not to mention vulnerable — minority. Am I dead inside because I didn’t experience the torrent of emotions I’ve been reading about? Am I as emotionally crippled as Ennis because I didn’t blub and hug after sitting through this ‘visceral’ movie, but instead wanted to go and ‘help with the roundup’?

~ Mark Simpson

... 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.

~ Iris Murdoch

No matter how exotic or seemingly different another man is, there's always some reflection of self in another male.

~ Jack Donovan

If anything has made men more effeminate in the past half-century, it's been the running feminist critique of masculinity.

~ Jack Donovan

The natural gods of men are other men, mythic or real, who embody manhood in men's eyes.

~ Jack Donovan

I am tired of men hurting women and each other and themselves.

~ Carlos Andrés Gómez

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.

~ Matt K. Turner

Men's pride is situated in their scrotums.

~ Marjane Satrapi

Indeed the very worst kind of man for a women to be in an intimate relationship with, often a truly dangerous man, is the one considered most sexy and desirable in the popular culture.

~ Jean Kilbourne

To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cultures were to initiate the youth into a simpler society, a more homogenous culture than ours. As well, their interest lay not in the individuation of the person but in the integration of the unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity. Still, take away such psychically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world.

~ James Hollis

Few men realize how much of their lives are lived in pursuit of the values our culture has traditionally associated with masculinity. These values – a primary focus on work, logical thinking and always being in emotional control – have many benefits to men and their families. When taken to extremes, the pursuit of traditional masculine values becomes a cage for feelings, a stranglehold on life itself.

~ Mary Crocker Cook

As for men, they must learn bravery and live for Pleasure and for Beauty. More important than those two things should stand only one thing for him... Honor. A man's honor should be more sacred to him than his life — especially in our age, a time when very few men know what honor is.

~ Roman Payne

Both spouses are equal, yet different. One of the most beautiful things about a relationship is that the feminine energy can feed a masculine man’s heart. And, the masculine energy can totally light up the feminine energy.

~ Renee Wade

We are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world.

~ Christina Hoff Sommers

By the way, don't 'weep inwardly' and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we - and especially, my sex - don't cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn't we?

~ C.s. Lewis

You become a man not when you reach a certain age, but when you reach a certain state of mind.

~ Habeeb Akande

If Jesus looks too feminine to us, maybe it says more about our understanding of masculinity than it does about a possible conspiracy to feminize the church and men.

~ Nate Pyle

By the end of the seventies the feared yet desired black male body had become as objectified as it was during slavery, only a seemingly positive twist had been added to the racist sexist objectification: the black male body had become the site for the personification of everyone’s desire.

~ Bell Hooks

I think I am a rare breed, a homosexual who doesn't like men.

~ Michel Tremblay

Stop looking for the path of least resistance and start running down the path of greatest glory to God and good to others, because that's what Jesus, the Real Man, did.

~ Mark Driscoll

I could settle for being a man, or I could struggle to become a human being.

~ Robert Jensen

In the case of our fair maiden, we have overlooked two very crucial aspects to that myth. On the one hand, none of us ever really believed the sorcerer was real. We thought we could have the maiden without a fight. Honestly, most of us guys thought our biggest battle was asking her out. And second, we have not understood the tower and its relationship to her wound; the damsel is in distress. If masculinity has come under assault, femininity has been brutalized. Eve is the crown of creation, remember? She embodies the exquisite beauty and the exotic mystery of God in a way that nothing else in all creation even comes close to. And so she is the special target of the Evil One; he turns his most vicious malice against her. If he can destroy her or keep her captive, he can ruin the story.

~ John Eldredge