What Does It Mean to Be a Man?

"Some people feel so bereft of clear family standards, so unsupervised and ignored by the adults around them, that in order to push themselves to grow up, they hold themselves to idealized criteria of behavior and feeling that they derive from the larger culture. These standards, because they're abstract and not modeled by people known personally to the child, tend to be harsh and unbuffered by the humane sense of proportion."

"Perfectionism is the belief that to be considered something, one has to be its best representative, meeting all of the available criteria. So, for example, to be smart, a student may believe they need to have a perfect grade point average. The underlying feeling is: If you aren't the best, then you're the worst. Therefore, a boy may erroneously come to believe that a man embodies not only specific values but every possible manifestation of them, always."

Boys commonly learn ideas of manhood from idealized cultural heroes rather than from concrete family models. When clear family standards are absent, boys may adopt abstract cultural criteria that are harsh and unbuffered by humane proportion. Perfectionism leads to believing that to qualify as possessing a trait one must exemplify every criterion perfectly, creating all-or-nothing thinking. This all-or-nothing thinking can make a boy conclude that a man must embody every manifestation of values like courage in every situation. Consequently, many men struggle with self-acceptance about sexuality, height, or weight, sometimes developing issues such as muscle dysmorphia.

Read at Psychology Today