There is a very real distinction between a real man and a wimp. This isn’t made-up stuff, it is real and it is set in stone, it’s not something you can redefine to fit your whims. Nonetheless, understanding the distinction is extremely difficult, and if you go out into the real world and observe how people think, you will see that there’s a huge disagreement on what it really means to be “a real man”.
Masculinity is characterized by assertiveness. The masculine type is the type that asserts himself, his values, onto the world around him. He is the dominant type: he shapes the world to fit his needs, he does not shape his needs to fit the world. A real man, then, is a man who asserts himself, whereas a wimp is a passive man, a man who shapes himself to fit other people’s expectations.
Such a distinction, however, is imprecise because it conflates certain forms of fake masculinity, the so-called hyper-masculinity, with real masculinity. In other words, it does not make a clear distinction between what it means to be truly masculine and what it means to be hyper-masculine.
The problem lies in the process of assertion. All genuine assertion starts with one’s needs: before you can assert yourself physically, you must assert your needs into your own brain. In other words, you must be in tune with your needs, you must know yourself, you must be honest with yourself. This isn’t an intellectual process, but a physical, more precisely, an emotional process, a right-brain activity where the individual forces his own “true self” to stay on top of all other “selves”. What the individual does is force his emotions from the background, the unconscious, to the foreground, the conscious. He thereby becomes honest with oneself. Failure to do so leads to denial, where emotions become trapped inside various parts of one’s body. This state is not necessarily painful, it is only painful in the case of emotional rebellion, which is to say, in the case of the “true self” trying to break out free from the biological slavery. This rebellion can be controlled, leading to pleasurable denial, known as hedonism. The individual becomes peaceful and content, no longer desiring domination (or only desiring it as a means, not as an end.)
For real masculinity to be replicated, one must replicate the entire process, starting with asserting one’s needs into one’s brain. If this step is left out, and only the latter parts of the process are replicated, parts such as physical violence, hyper-masculinity, or fake masculinity, is the result. An example is a man trying to be angry without actually being angry (no drive for anger) or an angry man with a drive for sadness he cannot force into his consciousness.
The higher organism has higher number of drives, making it very difficult for it to remain connected to its drives. The pattern of its drives tends to be far too complex, far too irregular, for its brain to stay in tune with them. For example, drives can change very quickly, or be tightly interwoven, thus increasing the possibility of exaggeration.
I have a very precise understanding of the concept of posturing: every disconnection from one’s needs is a form of posturing. This makes my concept of posturing far broader than the popular one. Biological slaves, those who are detached from their needs, are forced into perpetual posturing, no matter what they do, how they change. In fact, biological slaves do not care about becoming biologically (and eventually physically) free, about becoming genuine/honest/who they really are, all they care about is pleasure and pain, how to maximize pleasure (maintain their biological slavery) and minimize pain (keep their biological slaves from rebelling.) As such, they merely change one form of posturing with another, depending on which one gives them the mental peace they need.
I live in the world full of biological slaves who are physically free. There is a lot of talk about how to become “a real man” but almost no talk about how to become genuine. All they care about is pleasure. Consequently, all of their talk is superficial, concerned only with the symptoms and never with the root.
Then there are the feminine types who define themselves in opposition to the hyper-masculine type. The two types can see each other’s mistakes, but they can never see their own mistakes. In a bizarre way, the two types complement each other. When a man who is not hyper-masculine tries to make a difference between what it means to be “a real man” and what it means to be a “wimp”, the feminine type will falsely accuse you of hyper-masculinity.
There is no way around it.