manliness

If the human face and the hair that sprouts from it represents an index of manliness, cultural values did not always welcome the degree of manliness exuded by beards.

Scholars have suggested several mutually compatible theories to explain why manliness began to once again outweigh self-discipline and reserve as a value of expression, and why that manifested itself in the form of facial growth after more than a century of self-imposed drought.

According to that same survey, Black and Hispanic men look a lot more like Republicans than Democrats when it comes to ideas about their own manliness: 55 percent of Black men and 52 percent of Hispanic men also say they are “very masculine.”

Performative manliness, which is to say sexual insecurity, is practically the theme of the series, expressed in petty power plays and phrases unrepeatable here except by tortuous euphemism, when one man describes what he’s going to do to another man by way of humiliating him.

Everything from hooks and eyes and snaps and boning and anything you need to pull in all of your manliness and your man body to look like, as I call myself, an erotic clown.