Quotes about Masculinity

As Robert Bly laments in Iron John, "Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man—they are called priests; the university wants a domesticated man—they are called tenure-track people; the corporation wants a . . . sanitized, hairless, shallow man.

In order to understand how a man receives a wound, you must understand the central truth of a boy's journey to manhood: Masculinity is bestowed. A boy learns who he is and what he's got from a man, or the company of men. He cannot learn it any other place. He cannot learn it from other boys, and he cannot learn it from the world of women.

The great divide lies between men as lovers and men as consumers. Does he seek her out, long for her, because really he yearns for her to meet some need in his life—a need for validation (she makes him feel like a man), or mercy, or simply sexual gratification? That man is a Consumer, as my friend Craig calls him. The lover, on the other hand, wants to fight for her—he wants to protect her, make her life better, wants to fill her heart in every way he can.

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.

Femininity can never bestow masculinity.

Most messages for men ultimately fail. The reason is simple: they ignore what is deep and true to a man's heart—his real passions—and simply try to shape him up through various forms of pressure.

The business world—where the majority of American men live and die—requires a man to be efficient and punctual. Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: to harness a man to the plow and make him produce.

The father is to speak into his son's heart deep affirmation. Yes, you do. You have what it takes. He needs a hundred experiences that will help him get there, and he is wounded and emasculated when he is kept from those experiences, or left on his own to interpret them, or when no one is there to help him in his journey toward initiation.

This is every man's deepest fear: to be exposed, to be found out, to be discovered as an impostor, and not really a man.

Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it. Even as a child, I noticed that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz spent her entire time trying to get back home to Kansas, and Alice in Wonderland dreamed her long adventure, then woke up just in time for tea.

Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

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.