As a male man chap fellow, I have no clue what "masculinity" means, and I have essentially no interest in trying to define it. We're just individuals. Try to be the best kind of individual you can - learn empathy, show interest in others and help them. Maybe you'll meet someone to partner with, maybe you won't, but chasing some societal ideal of "masculinity" is almost certainly not the best way to be the best version of yourself, or to attract long-term partners.
Every romantic relationship involves attraction between different polarities a masculine and a feminine one. That's just how laws of attraction work in nature, regardless of the animal and we reflect that.
Don't be confused though, it has nothing to do with sexual orientations and there's perfectly happy heterosexual couples where the energies are inverted: males are more emotional, nurturing and females are more detached, analytical and less emotional or nurturing. We're all on a spectrum of that, it's not black and white.
That being said our brains have not evolved with society and genrally we still lean differently on the two sides of the spectrum.
Men are still attracted biologically to what will give them the most chances to procreate: young, healthy women; and women are still attracted biologically to what will give them the most chances to procreate: a strong man, the clan leader, as the role of the man is really most of the protector.
Now my thesis is that as society evolved the more masculine side of the spectrum is increasingly lacking in young men: less ambition, less purpose in life, less indipendence, increasingly abundant feminine traits like emotional neediness and such.
Thus, most women which are also empowered and basically do not need men anymore as a provider find it increasingly hard to find men that project the qualities of the clan leader.
When generalizations like this are made it normally implies a plurality of people - not everyone of course. Each individual will be different, but on the whole when you analyze a large group, a pattern will emerge.
Large scale analyses of Tinder or OkCupid or any other dataset of female-male interactions will tend to show these patterns.
Apologies, I meant it as a generalization, and as I prefaced in my post it has nothing to do with sexuality. The same phenomenon applies to any kind of romantic relationship.
Actually it's interesting you brought it up because as a member of the gay community I wonder whether you would agree or not that the different polarities are any less or more or equally evident in gay couples.
Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity by David D. Gilmore goes into the pan-cultural concepts of masculinity. It's a very approachable and deep dive into what defines masculinity across cultures and times.
TLDR: It's not that men are not women, it's that they are not boys.
Manliness is a social marker and is defined by a male's peers, "honor" societies, gangs, etc.
How that is seen is via the 3 P's, which are: Provider, Protector, Procreater.
With very few and rare exceptions, all cultures have these three things as markers of a man. You can have 2 of them in spades and still be seen as a man, but you can't just have 1.
Again, I'm trying to summarize a whole book here in a comment on HN, so if you're interested in discussing and learning more, I'd buy it and read it.
Are you bisexual? If not you are attracted to femininity or masculinity. I guess you are attracted to femininity so you don't recognize that masculinity can also be attractive.
Women tend to dream of a masculine man with feminine interests, same as men dream of feminine women with masculine interests. If you think that is a contradictory statement, no it isn't, pop culture is full of them. Angelina Jolie in Transformers is a good example, she is a mechanic who loves to work with cars, but still very feminine. Take that, and replace cars with some hobby popular among women and make him very masculine in all other aspects, and you basically have a dream guy.
Article about Angelina Jolie from Transformers if you haven't seen it:
Femininity or masculinity are defined by culture, and modern society has lost them on the road of equality. It's quite common with younger people to not have a clear definition of normal femininity and masculinity. After all, everyone can be everything and do everything, so there is no specific difference between the sexes to define the traits, beyond biology. And even biology is questioned in recent years because of trans.
I mostly agree with this, but it’s missing some details in how many younger people actually behave versus what they believe. A lot of young men and women will claim to not be particularly attracted to femininity or masculinity or believe in traditional views on gender expression while being attracted almost exclusively people who do present traditionally gendered traits.
I’ve met so many young men who say they don’t particularly care if the woman they date are feminine while exclusively pursuing relationships with women who are petite, have long hair, shave all their body hair, dress in almost exclusively feminine clothes like mini skirts, wears a ton of makeup and has very feminine mannerisms. I’ve also met a lot of you women who would say the same about not caring about masculinity in the men they date and then exclusively date tall, muscular, hyper masculine jock types or the bad boy, rebel without a cause artsy types. You’re absolutely right that they’ve changed the definition of masculine and feminine, but they haven’t changed their preferences to match.
I think a big part of the gender disconnect in modern dating is that many men and women have divested themselves from their traditional gender roles while seeking out partners that largely still conform to their traditional gender roles.
It's because there is no amount of intellectualization in the world that can defeat the genetics that you have from birth - and those genetics will always dictate your revealed preferences. You can virtue signal whatever you want, but unless you want to live a life in dissonance with yourself, you'll always fall back on what is programmed in your genetic code.
And this will continue at least until mass gene editing is commercially available :)
