He-Man to Hypermasc: Power, Fantasy, and the Myth of Masculinity in 1980s America
Muscles. Camouflage. Action. Silence. Shame.
In the Reagan-era arms race of identity, American boyhood became a proving ground where power meant brawn, tenderness was taboo, and conformity to a hypermasculine ideal was the price of belonging.
He-Man to Hypermasc is a searing exploration of how 1980s media, politics, and pop culture manufactured a myth of masculinity that shaped—and scarred—a generation. Blending cultural analysis with queer memoir, Erick DuPree reveals how icons like He-Man and G.I. Joe weren’t just toys or TV heroes, but ideological blueprints for what it meant to be a “real man” in a decade of Cold War anxiety, deregulation, and shifting gender norms.
From Saturday morning cartoons to locker room rituals, DuPree dissects the powerful fantasies that fueled the American imagination—and what happened to the boys who didn’t fit the mold.
In He-Man to Hypermasc, you’ll discover:
How Reagan-era deregulation turned children’s entertainment into a hypermasculine marketing machine
Why cartoon heroes were built like bodybuilders—and what their bodies said about power and worth
What queer, sensitive, or fatherless boys saw in the shadows of “heroic” manhood
How masculinity became a performance of emotional silence and physical dominance
Why reexamining these myths matters for healing personal wounds and rewriting cultural narratives
Part media critique, part personal reckoning, and part cultural archaeology, He-Man to Hypermasc challenges us to confront the fantasies that shaped us—and to imagine new, liberatory models of masculinity beyond the battlefield and the bicep.