What Makes a Man

A simple reflection on masculinity, legacy, and children.

Enzo, the middle boy, on his “surfing board” at Topsail Island in September.

I’ve been trying to figure out the answer to this question since I cut my hair at 17 and traded in my skintight jeans and studded belts for something my dad was more willing to tolerate when he took my brother and me to the annual Hunting and Fishing Expo in Edison, New Jersey, where for one weekend every year the Indian people were suddenly outnumbered by dudes in pick-up trucks with camo overalls, unkempt beards, and tobacco under their lips.

That rough-and-tumble sort of masculinity never appealed to me. I was more interested in the version I got from stories Nono told me about 1950s and ’60s Argentina and the Lost Generation writers—Hemingway, Fitzgerald—Mr. Sweeney had my junior-year English class read about. “I am going to get married young, father children, drink brown liquor in a leather wingback chair, wear a tailored suit on dates, and collect old stuff,” I’m sure I wrote on notebook paper that is (hopefully) long disappeared.

I wanted to be a grandfather before I was 20.

When my friends had me over during family parties, I picked the oldest guy in the room who didn’t want to talk politics and offered him a beer and a blank tape onto which he could share his life story. I offered Nono a blank canvas until way beyond the point when I realized the version of masculinity he was teaching me about was warped. In the version he preached, you married a good woman, but you didn’t have to love her as long as you put money on the table and kept from hitting her. You fathered children you were never around to see because you had other, manlier things to tend to, like working late and crisscrossing the country following your favorite soccer team. You clocked in at your job every morning before the butt-crack of dawn and drank wine with every meal (these things were appealing). But you also gave up every chance at real friendship because you were too busy fighting, hogging the spotlight, or too afraid of being called a nancy if you showed some vulnerability.

I often return to the question of what it means to be a man, whether in my mind or my statements to the public and on social media or Substack. I’ve explored it here before in terms of general stereotypes of masculinity—owning tools, working a blue-collar job, preparing meat, and knowing how to take apart a car engine or a gun. But even in the broader categories of physical strength, courage, mastery, and honor, I don’t break the 50^th percentile.