What Exactly Does It Mean To Be “Man Enough?”
I grew up in the 1980s with a quiet but persistent fear that I wasn’t “man enough.” My father was absent—a blank space where I imagined a guiding presence should have been.
In his place stood my mother: loving, devoted, and deeply anxious. Her constant watchfulness left little room for the rough-and-tumble freedom that other boys seemed to thrive on. Without a father to model masculinity, I drifted unanchored, unsure how to belong to the world of boys, much less become a man.
Psychologists tell us that boys raised without fathers often struggle with gender identity and self-esteem (de Lange, 2023). But I didn’t need academic validation—I lived it. While the neighborhood boys raced down hills on their bikes or tackled each other on muddy fields, I came home with tidy lunches, clean fingernails, and a backpack full of books. My mother tried valiantly to fill both parental roles. She taught me to be kind and careful, praised my imagination, and protected me fiercely. But she couldn’t teach me how to talk to boys, how to take a punch, or how to decode the unspoken rules of masculinity.
That gap became painfully obvious in grade school. “Being one of the guys” wasn’t just about having friends—it was a performance. It meant playing sports, hiding your feelings, roughhousing, teasing, proving your strength. It meant knowing how to laugh at someone else’s expense without flinching. I didn’t just fail at this script—I didn’t even know the lines.
And the boys noticed.
They were cruel. Not always with fists, but with smirks, jokes, exclusions, and the kind of silence that screams. They watched how I held my hands. Noticed how my voice sounded different. Saw that I flinched from contact, lingered by the art supplies instead of the basketball hoop. I wasn’t just effeminate—I was a threat.
My very presence challenged the brittle performance they were all trying so hard to uphold. I was a reminder that masculinity, as they understood it, was fragile. And fragile things must be defended or destroyed.
At the time, I didn’t have the language for what I was experiencing. I only knew that my difference—my queerness—made people tense. Shoulders stiffened when I walked by. Laughter turned sharp. If they laughed with me, it was always with an edge; if they laughed at me, it was to reassert their own place in the hierarchy. I wasn’t just not one of them—I was the thing they didn’t want to become.
Our culture reinforced everything they felt. The masculine icons of the era—He-Man, G.I. Joe, action stars with impossibly broad shoulders—offered boys only one model of manhood: strong, silent, heterosexual, dominant.
These weren’t just cartoons and action figures. They were propaganda. They taught us that being a man meant wielding power, suppressing emotion, and never showing weakness. He-Man’s battle cry wasn’t just heroic—it was instructional. Be this, or be nothing.
And I wasn’t that. I didn’t even know how to try.
By the 1990s, even the alternative paths to masculine identity—like shop class or vocational training—were disappearing. For generations, boys who didn’t fit the athletic or academic molds could still find dignity in learning trades or building things with their hands. But as education shifted toward standardized testing and college prep (U.S. Department of Human Resources, 2004), even those options vanished. The definition of manhood narrowed further still.
Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t failing at being a man—manhood itself, as it was handed to me, was failing me. It was a brittle, one-size-fits-all version of masculinity that left no room for softness, emotional depth, creativity, or queerness. It offered no language for a boy like me. No protection. No possibility.
So it begs the question: What does it mean to be “man enough”?
Is it about dominance? Stoicism? Physical strength? Is it something earned through silence, pain, and performance? Or is it something quieter, more complicated—like the courage to live truthfully in a world that demands conformity? Maybe being “man enough” means choosing integrity over acceptance. Maybe it’s about reclaiming the parts of ourselves we were taught to hide.
And yet, even in adulthood, the question lingers.
Within the gay male community—the very place I hoped might offer freedom from rigid gender expectations—I encountered a new form of the same old prison: the fetishization of masculinity. “Straight-acting,” “masc4masc,” “no femmes”—these coded terms circulate freely on apps and in bars, reinforcing the idea that being desirable means being as close to straight, as far from feminine, as possible. It’s a strange and painful irony: the same masculinity that excluded me as a child is now something I’m expected to emulate to be loved.
Once again, I’m told that tenderness is weakness. That flamboyance is a liability. That softness makes me less of a man, even in queer spaces.
But I’ve lived long enough to know better now.
The traits that once made me a target—my sensitivity, my introspection, my refusal to perform—are no longer burdens. They are my compass. They inform how I move through the world, how I build relationships, how I make meaning. They’re not signs I failed at masculinity—they’re signs I rejected the false version of it I was offered.
The boy I was didn’t need to be harder, straighter, or louder. He didn’t need to contort himself to survive. What he needed—what every boy needs—was someone to tell him there are many ways to be a man. That you can be brave and still cry. That you can be strong and still afraid. That you can be beautiful, broken, tender, loud, quiet, flamboyant, fierce, and still, always, man enough.
And most of all, he needed someone to tell him that who he already was… was enough.
Works Cited
Agility PR Solutions. (2021). He-Man PR blunder and gender stereotypes.
https://www.agilitypr.com/pr-news/public-relations/he-man-pr-blunder-and-gender-stereotypes/Booth, O. (2018). The '80s man: Stoicism, strength, and shame. ShortList Magazine.
https://www.shortlist.com/news/the-80s-man-stoicism-strength-and-shameBradley University. (n.d.). The Body Project: G.I. Joe and the construction of masculine ideals.
https://onlinedegrees.bradley.edu/blog/the-body-project-g-i-joe-and-the-construction-of-masculine-ideals/de Lange, G. (2023). The psychological effects of father absence in male development. The Washington Stand.
https://washingtonstand.com/commentary/the-psychological-effects-of-father-absence-in-male-developmentU.S. Department of Human Resources. (2004). Educational trends in vocational programming: 1980–2000. San Francisco, CA.
