Evan Urquhart

So, what we think of as masculinity is some percent the effect of testosterone on human bodies, and some percent patriarchy justifying male supremacy/women's oppression.

These threads are incredibly hard to untangle several millennia down the line. Hard enough that my attempt to separate them may easily have gone wrong, falling into the mentality of "masculine/man things good, feminine/woman things bad" however hard I tried not to fall into that.

It's also the case that, while you can't simply declare yourself masculine, you CAN increase how masculine others perceive you to be. Synthetic testosterone is one way (lol). You can also study what's culturally associated with masculinity and work to project more of that.

That's called being socialized male. And the interesting thing about being socialized male is that it's MOSTLY about punishing anything feminine. Which makes sense, on a certain level, bc if you can't raise your testosterone you can still avoid anything socially coded as femme.

Culturally, masculinity becomes an extremely shallow game of never being caught liking the things women like. Then, since masculinity is culturally positive, women invariably start liking masculine things. So then the men have to abandon those things and come up with new things.

Then beneath it all, we have this deeper level of masculine/feminine based on deep voices, muscles, broad frames. These are traits some women also have, they're neutral, difficult or impossible to change, and have nothing to do with transitory sociocultural cues (like pink/blue).

And, because the culture is so fucked, there's a lot of shame around being a man and not having those traits. Not having the height, not having the muscles, not having the deep voice or the thick beard.

It leads to overcompensating, overdosing on the women-hating cultural masculinity to make up the deficit in testosterone-influenced natural masculinity. We're getting in to my third Big Question, here. What's left of masculinity without sexism?