He-Man to Hypermasc: The Cultural Mythology of 1980s Boyhood
For many children of the 1980s, masculinity wasn’t simply something learned from fathers or peers—it was broadcast in full technicolor through Saturday morning cartoons, action figures, cereal box prizes, and toy commercials that felt more like ideological programming than entertainment.
From He-Man to G.I. Joe, Rambo, and even The A-Team, these figures offered a single, unyielding message: To be a boy meant to be tough. To be a man meant to conquer. And to be anything less was to risk invisibility—or ridicule.
As an anthropologist and queer adult who grew up immersed in this media landscape, I now look back on these icons not just with nostalgia, but with a critical lens. These weren’t just cartoons. They were myths—tools for transmitting culture, values, and gender norms across a generation. But for queer kids, the story they told came with consequences.
1980s media didn’t just entertain—it instructed. It laid out the blueprint for how to be a ‘real man,’ and made clear what happened if you didn’t measure up.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency brought with it a return to "family values," Cold War patriotism, and a muscular vision of leadership that trickled down into nearly every aspect of American life. This was the post-Vietnam era—a time of national insecurity, economic upheaval, and fears of moral decay.
Cultural theorist Susan Jeffords (1994) famously described this moment as one of "remasculinization," where Hollywood, media, and advertising sought to rebuild the image of the strong, silent, all-American man. Suddenly, the soft, sensitive men of 1970s cinema (think Kramer vs. Kramer) were replaced with action heroes, mercenaries, and warriors who communicated more through muscles than dialogue.
Cartoons followed suit.
He-Man didn’t just defeat Skeletor—he defended the universe. G.I. Joe didn’t just fight bad guys—he embodied state-sanctioned militarism, complete with weapons, uniforms, and clear hierarchies of power. Even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were named after Renaissance artists, but only came alive through combat and brotherhood. In Reagan’s America, masculinity was less about character and more about control—over the body, the enemy, and the self.”
These heroes weren’t just on screen—they were in your toybox. And their bodies mattered.
Mattel’s He-Man figure had a 60-inch chest and 32-inch waist—on a 7-inch body. These proportions weren’t just exaggerated—they were impossible. Toy design, in this context, became a form of ideological design. A boy’s physicality was supposed to mirror that of his action figures: impenetrable, muscled, hard.
For queer boys, especially those already aware of being different, these toys became a kind of measuring stick. I remember standing in front of the mirror as a child, trying to puff out my chest like He-Man, or lowering my voice to sound like Duke from G.I. Joe. These weren’t innocent imitations. They were attempts at survival.
The action figure became a shrine to the male body: strong, straight, and square-jawed. For many queer kids, that shrine became a site of shame.
Of course, what was most striking about these myths of masculinity is who was left out. There were no visibly queer characters. No soft boys. No dancers, artists, or gentle dreamers—unless they were comic relief, villains, or coded as deviant.
Psychologist Ken Corbett (2009) has written about how boys are often socialized into a very narrow form of masculinity—what he calls the “boy code.” In 1980s media, that code was rigid: aggression, stoicism, heterosexuality. Anything outside that range was suspect. And if you were visibly different, the culture had its punishments ready: bullying, invisibility, or pressure to perform.
Many queer kids coped by performing a version of masculinity that was more mask than identity. Others, like myself, found solace in the margins: in She-Ra, in Jem, in the misunderstood villains whose difference felt familiar.
“For queer children, the 1980s offered two options: disappear—or disguise.”
Fast forward to today, and many of those same tropes have simply migrated platforms. Instagram “fit-fluencers,” Marvel superheroes, and dating apps all continue to valorize the same hard-bodied, emotionally distant man of the 1980s—just now with filters and follower counts.
The fantasy persists: to be masc is to be desired, to be central, to be safe.
Apps like Grindr and Scruff echo this ideology with their user tags (“jock,” “masc,” “military”), visual hierarchies, and unspoken economies of desirability. The Reagan-era hero has been reborn—not as a cartoon, but as a curated selfie with #masc4masc in the bio.
Anthropology teaches us that myths are not lies—they are cultural truths in symbolic form. And if myths shape us, we also have the power to reshape them.
What if we reimagined He-Man not as the strongest man in the universe, but as the most emotionally attuned? What if his power wasn’t measured in muscles, but in his capacity to listen, to nurture, to protect without dominating?
What if G.I. Joe wasn’t just a soldier, but a peacemaker—one who knew that real courage sometimes means refusing to fight?
And what if the stories we told boys didn’t rely on toughness as a baseline for belonging?
What if queer boys weren’t written in as sidekicks, punchlines, or villains—but as heroes from the very start? Protagonists with rich inner worlds, capable of loving, leading, and crying without shame. Not despite their difference, but because of it.
“Imagination shapes identity. If we cannot see ourselves in the myth, we learn to disappear from our own story.”
Growing up in the 1980s, I didn’t have language for what I was feeling. I only knew that I didn’t fit. That I was too soft, too emotional, too much in all the wrong ways. I didn’t know then that what I was measuring myself against wasn’t real.
What I did know was this: I wasn’t “man enough”—a phrase that haunted me like a shadow, tightening around my voice, my posture, my sense of self. It taught me to hide.
But now, as an adult—and as an anthropologist—I see with new eyes. I know that the problem was never my masculinity. The problem was that the version handed to me was narrow, brittle, and transactional. It was never designed to hold softness, queerness, or complexity. It was built to exclude.
That is the invitation we extend to the next generation: To build a masculinity expansive enough to hold tenderness and strength, vulnerability and confidence, stillness and action. To offer boys of all kinds—especially queer boys—the freedom to be whole. To imagine themselves not as the exception, but as central characters in the myth of manhood.
