Quotes About Masculinity

#1. Unholy delight lit Giles's dark face to flashing brilliance. She realized that while he mightn't be handsome, he was breathtakingly attractive and brimming with potent masculinity more powerful than mere good looks.

Anna Campbell

#2. Hedi Slimane told me I was boyish in his eyes. For him femininity and masculinity are the same thing, the difference is not so interesting, he said.

Saskia De Brauw

#3. 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.

George Gilder

#4. I do think that stand-up comedy in general heavily favors masculinity and so I like to act a little feminine onstage.

Bo Burnham

#5. Without strength, masculinity becomes something else - a different concept.

Jack Donovan

#6. I briefly closed my eyes and imagined him in a Barbie minivan hoping to expel the way his masculinity made me want to strip down to nothing and throw caution to the wind.

Rachel Van Dyken

#7. It's love. It's two men - two strong, very virile men - finding that space in life where they can let go enough of their masculinity to feel the passion of love and respect and trust,

Clarence Clemons

#8. I got into sports because that was a way to prove your masculinity. I was good at it.

Caitlyn Jenner

#9. Some men can maintain cragginess and weary masculinity. Women just get old.

Meryl Streep

#10. We New Yorkers see more death and violence than most soldiers do, grow a thick chitin on our backs, grimace like a rat and learn to do a disappearing act. Long ago we outgrew the need to be blowhards about our masculinity; we leave that to the Alaskans and Texans, who have more time for it.

Edward Hoagland

#11. Hip-hop was started as a very egocentric, testosterone, machismo-driven art form. The way that people are trying to take away that masculinity that is a such an intrinsical part of hip-hop music.

Macklemore

#12. I'm not interested in going to see films that massively overrepresent men over women. It's lik,e how much more have we got to say about this? Like men in war and dealing with their masculinity in conflict. I just think we've exhausted the landscape.

Romola Garai

#13. I guess you're coming as my date now." Simon shoved the phone into his pocket.
"I'm secure enough in my masculinity to accept that," said Jordan. "We better get you something nice to wear, though," he called as Simon headed back into his room. "I want you to look pretty.

Cassandra Clare

#14. It's okay if you're intimidated by my overwhelming masculinity. I promise to take good care of you."
"How sweet of you. But let's be honest. I'd ruin you for other women, and I'm just too nice to do that to an adorable thing like you.

Katee Robert

#15. Largely excluded from the white masculine political sphere, black male scholars established intellectual organizations where they could not only distance themselves from women but also perform a masculinity parallel to that established by white male scholars.

Deborah Gray White

#16. What eleven- to thirteen-year-old boys fear is passivity of any kind. When they do act passively we can be fairly certain that it is an act of aggression designed to torment a parent or teacher ... Mischief at best, violence at worst is the boy's proclamation of masculinity.

Louise J. Kaplan

#17. In secondary school, a boy and a girl go out, both of them teenagers with meager pocket money. Yet the boy is expected to pay the bills, always, to prove his masculinity.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#18. Darcy's got the tempestuous masculinity and brooding looks, but Knightley is a kinder, softer man with no pretense or dissimilation.

Katherine Reay

#19. Toxic masculinity hurts men, but there's a big difference between women dealing with the constant threat of being raped, beaten, and killed by the men in their lives, and men not being able to cry.

Robert Jensen

#20. The sexual conquest is huge with men in terms of affirming themselves and their feelings of masculinity. That's a misguided kind of affirmation. That is not helpful, but that stuff happens.

Donald Miller

#21. Being pretty ... I'm just confused about it. I mean, I love getting my nails done, but I also like dressing like a boy. I think I feel most myself when I'm mixing femininity and masculinity. Like, fifty-fifty.

Jill Soloway

#22. Genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity.

Otto Weininger

#23. God looked and smelled so fucking delicious, like masculinity and aftershave. Day knew the grip on his neck was not to hurt him, it was to show him who was in charge. God's sheer strength and power had Day feeling like he could come right there in the small conference room. "Oh,

A.E. Via

#24. We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls.

Gloria Steinem

#25. He breathed a power brewed from masculinity and intelligence, not from an accident of inheritance.

Eloisa James

#26. I think when we start to understand what masculinity and femininity is, then men won't fear so much the feminine side coming out. And the masculine side for women coming out won't be such a burden, in a way. Just be ourselves.

Hamid Drake

#27. My masculinity isn't hinged on whether or not I knit.

Robin Green

#28. Anne's is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity - but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity.

Jude Morgan

#29. People of all sexes have the right to explore femininity, masculinity-and the infinite variations between-without criticism or ridicule.

Leslie Feinberg

#30. I just think it was time [in THe Neon Demon]to do a film about women. But not just women, I wanted to do a movie about a teenage girl. It was a great counter to the masculinity of "Drive."

Nicolas Winding Refn

#31. 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 look down upon women who are taller than them is the very reason that many men find tall women so intimidating.

Miya Yamanouchi

#32. We define masculinity in very narrow way. Masculinity is hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak
a hard man,

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#33. 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.

Frank Pittman

#34. It's great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.

James Salter

#35. But if we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of proving their masculinity by material means.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#36. He clings to his masculinity, his solitude and his feigned indif- ference so he can maintain his role, so he'll never, ever have to show his feelings. Poor Peter, how long can he keep it up? Won't he explode from this superhuman effort?

Anne Frank

#37. Coexisting with the radiant masculinity of Apollonian Keats is a lunar poet of enchanted night in thrall to the goddess Hecate.

Nicholas Roe

#38. The sacraments infuse holiness into the terrain of man's humanity: they penetrate the soul and body, the femininity and masculinity of the personal subject, with the power of holiness.

Pope John Paul II

#39. Some men develop their own singularity. Football makes men conform to stereotypes: the warrior or the hunter. Football produces a certain kind of masculinity - the drunk kind, the king who will yell the worst nationalist's ideas. In front of those, it is very difficult to be a dignified woman.

Orlan

#40. You know, all through the centuries, pathetic men have abused strong women who threaten their masculinity,

Gillian Flynn

#41. I decided to throw out everything I thought I knew about following Christ, being a woman, being a godly wife, masculinity, and marriage.

April Cassidy

#42. I'm very empathic to the construction of masculinity within our culture and how we build these identities up.

Catherine Opie

#43. His power, his intense masculinity, hit me like a semi, sucking the air out of my lungs. He doesn't help matters when he steps closer, forcing me to look up at him. My five seven is no match against his six three.

Magda Alexander

#44. He is obviously proud of his shock of curly gray hair; it is the symbol of his aging masculinity. This is not a hairstyle; it is a world view.

Pierre Lemaitre

#45. Our whole journey into authentic masculinity centers around those cool-of-the-day talks with God. Simple questions change hassles to adventures; the events of our lives become opportunities for initiation.

John Eldredge

#46. In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.

Sigmund Freud

#47. 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

#48. My whole life long I have done nothing but interpret my dreams of ultimate masculinity, and draw them.

Tom Of Finland

#49. Masculinity is a terrible problem, as we construe it and shape it.

Susan Griffin

#50. Bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production; at any rate, the tinge of masculinity within me helped me in my work.

Kathe Kollwitz

#51. Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality. It is a hard, undigested, tasteless, devitalized proposition. It is a half-fledged, unmusical, Promethean abomination. It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity.

John Boyle O'Reilly

#52. To me the definition of true masculinity - and femininity, too - is being able to lay in your own skin comfortably.

Vincent D'Onofrio

#53. In those rare individual cases where women approach genius they also approach masculinity.

Otto Weininger

#54. Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now ... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.

Bell Hooks

#55. I can only approach it as a woman. Masculinity has been depicted in very black-and-white terms. There never seems to be a wide range of emotional definitions of men.

Collier Schorr

#56. I'd like men to think about evolving into something more sophisticated, more seductive. To explore the possibility of an entirely new masculinity.

Hedi Slimane

#57. Only real men can pout without losing their masculinity. I have nothing to worry about there. ~What A Boy Wants

Nyrae Dawn

#58. The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.

Bell Hooks

#59. our objective as moms and dads is to transform our sons from "immature and flighty youngsters into honest, caring men who will be respectful of women, loyal and faithful in marriage, keepers of commitments, strong and decisive leaders, good workers, and men who are secure in their masculinity.

James C. Dobson

#60. Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

Sheila Jeffreys

#61. Every woman knows that any man engaging in street harassment can switch to anger very quickly and that anger goes to rage and their rage is their masculinity being threatened. We're scared for good reason.

Rose McGowan

#62. At the heart of the matter of masculine excess is a great longing for the love and approval of a father, a man who can tell another man that his masculinity is splendid enough and he can now relax.

Frank Pittman

#63. The more people, as you know, are able to be on whatever spectrum of femininity and masculinity they are on at that moment, that opens the door for women to not have to be the opposite of what the supposed traditional male is.

Kathleen Hanna

#64. Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how tobe men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.

Frank Pittman

#65. Thus, gender ideology no only creates ides about femininity but it also shapes conceptions of masculinity.

Patricia Hill Collins

#66. To insult a friend implies that you respect his masculinity enough to know he can take it without acting like a crybaby. The swapping of insults, like the fighting between brothers, becomes the seal of the male bonding.

Frank Pittman

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

Jack Donovan

#68. 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

#69. My uncles, who are farmers in Minooka, Illinois - I grew up with them and their pickup trucks and mustaches, and to me that was masculinity: big hairy sweaty guys who could pick up a bus.

Nick Offerman

#70. At the heart of mature masculinity is a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for, and protect women in ways appropriate to man's differing relationships.

John Piper

#71. I've worked in pubs for years and you get people challenging you. Challenging your masculinity.

Carl Froch

#72. Vlad didn't show off his seething masculinity by wearing fewer clothes. Instead, he wore more to taunt people with what he didn't allow them to feast their eyes on.

Jeaniene Frost

#73. Getting rid of a man without hurting his masculinity is a problem. "Get out" and "I never want to see you again" might sound like a challenge. If you want to get rid of a man, I suggest saying, "I love you ... I want to marry you ... I want to have your children." Sometimes they leave skid marks.

John Wayne

#74. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

Norman Mailer

#75. Ask Bond-watchers of a certain age about the six actors who have slipped into Bond's Savile Row suits in the Broccoli franchise, and they might say it's really Connery and five other guys - since he, being first and being Sean, stamped the role with his sulfurous masculinity.

Richard Corliss

#76. No need to continually insist upon your unshakable masculinity.

Veronica Roth

#77. Making coffee has become the great compromise of the decade. It's the only thing "real" men do that doesn't seem to threaten their masculinity. To women, it's on the same domestic entry level as putting the spring back into the toilet-tissue holder or taking a chicken out of the freezer to thaw.

Erma Bombeck

#78. Our goal should not be to reshape masculinity but to eliminate it. The goal is liberation from the masculinity trap.

Robert Jensen

#79. To be secure everywhere is the mark of sophistication, to be unshakable is the mark of courage, to be permanently in love with every person is the mark of masculinity or femininity, to forgive is the mark of strength, to govern our senses and passions is the mark of freedom.

Eknath Easwaran

#80. Geffrey Davis interrogates masculinity- as brother, son, father, lover-to examine the sources of love's enduring and failed aspects ... I admire Davis' emotional vocabulary, his attentive generosity and tenderness. Keep your eye on this gifted newcomer.

Robin Becker

#81. Because society places a value on masculinity, gay men aspire to it. If you go to a gay club and the doorman says, 'You do realise this is a gay club, don't you lads?' you get all excited because you think, 'Wow, he thought I was straight!'

Graham Norton

#82. I love that word. Gaydar. So clever."
"I'm afraid mine is broken," Burke said. "It never occurred to me that you were gay."
"It's because I'm teeming with masculinity," Gaither joked.

Michael Thomas Ford

#83. A transvestite spends her entire life trying to look as feminine as possible and I have clearly spent mine celebrating my masculinity.

Vin Diesel

#84. [Asiaticus responds] Ask your sons, Suillius. They will testify to my masculinity.

Tacitus

#85. While there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.

Joyce Carol Oates

#86. When I'm talking to groups that are all men, we talk about how the masculine role limits them. They often want to talk about how they missed having real fathers, real loving, present fathers, because of the way that they tried to fit the picture of masculinity.

Gloria Steinem

#87. What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity and money? What if their attitude was not "the boy has to pay," but rather, "whoever has more should pay.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#88. By playing these games about "arbitrary" gender roles, we have not succeeded in outlawing masculinity, but we have robbed it of much of its vocabulary. There are not very many acceptable ways to speak "masculine" anymore. We are all in denial, and the results are not pretty.

Douglas Wilson

#89. The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

Jaron Lanier

#90. I have known a number of Don Juans who were good studs and who cavorted between the sheets without a psychiatrist to guide them. But most of the busy love-makers I knew were looking for masculinity rather than practicing it. They were fellows of dubious lust.

Ben Hecht

#91. Genesis tells us that from the very beginning, masculinity, femininity, and sex are created by God and bound to Creation.

Rod Dreher

#92. Freud says, Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling. Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.

Camille Paglia

#93. I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an
oblique consideration will be found here of man; it's up to him to say
where his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us once
men have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.

Helene Cixous

#94. The construction of masculinity and femininity was driven by the need to sell products.

Benita Roth

#95. You're asking for trouble, woman." At the gruff tone of his voice, I raised my head and met his dark, chocolate-brown eyes, rimmed by long lashes that didn't take an ounce away from his masculinity. I wanted to drown in those eyes.
"I like trouble, remember?

Suzanne Johnson

#96. 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.

Ellen Willis

#97. Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.

V.S. Pritchett

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

Robert Jensen

#99. Well, you know what? If that guy can do it, I can be myself too, and if that rapper can be himself and be free and be happy and still hold masculinity and love people and love flowers and just be happy being alive, well then, I can do that too.

Lil B

#100. Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

H.L. Mencken