For all the talk about “performative masculinity,” masculinity cannot really be consciously performed as such. You are a man, or you are not. If not, any attempt at performance comes off as forced, weak, pathetic; if you are, you are free far beyond the bounds of empty symbolism. https://twitter.com/woke8yearold/status/1260394264909041664

This is why the attempt to locate masculinity in objects (cigars! Guns! Fast cars!) comes across as an attempt to pay for what cannot be bought, and attempts to make masculinity about this or that behavior cannot easily accommodate men with wildly divergent lives.

The priest who lives humbly and celibately for his flock is a man; the laborer who breaks his back for his family without complaint is a man; a 20 year old committed to raising a child he did not expect is a man; the scientist or academic who gives his life to learning is a man.

You cannot reduce what makes them so to a checklist, a how-to guide, or a speech; you certainly cannot reduce it to a tweet, and so I will not try. But you know it when you see it, in the “how” and the “why” far more than the “what.” It certainly will not be lost behind a mask.