Masculinity Mirage: The Toll of an Unattainable Standard
Photo by Mathieu Perrier on Unsplash
This essay marks the second essay in a larger project, Dead Reckoning. This project seeks to highlight voices that challenge the American blueprint for manhood—a script built on the paradox that to be a “real man” means to silence our own heart's needs for connection, freedom, and vulnerability. This old script is failing us and needs to be reimagined. Dead Reckoning exists to craft a new set of stories for men—stories that hold space for both the wounds we carry and the wounds we’ve inflicted. It is a place for honesty, reckoning, and the pursuit of a deeper, kinder, stronger and more humane masculinity—one that embraces complexity, confronts pain, refuses to settle for isolation and hatred.
“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (Gen 3:7)
I recently enjoyed a brief visit to Arizona with a friend. A few hours before our flight departed from Phoenix, we decided to take a walk through some desert trails in the north part of the city. The weather was perfect: mild, sunny, and ideal for meaningful conversation and sharp-edged banter as we meandered among the distinctive red sandstone formations.
In between dodging cactuses and selfie seekers, we started talking about our lives as men. My friend and I are recovering perfectionists, and this shapes how we understand ourselves. The exchange went something like this: One of us said, “I just never feel like I’m enough as a man.” The other replied, “None of us do. But that’s how manhood works. Nobody is ever enough.”
This brief exchange illustrates one of the painful ironies of being a man in this world: Masculinity is a mirage, not a destination. This pernicious illusion doesn't merely deceive our eyes; it torments our souls with the promise of an unattainable ideal. Like a sun-scorched traveler, we stagger toward a promised land that is perpetually beyond the horizon.
The masculinity mirage doesn't just set impossible standards—it ties your entire self-worth to achieving them.
The masculinity mirage is a cruel, bait-and-snare, trap: it sets an unachievable standard, but then makes your worth as a man dependent upon reaching it. As a result, when men inevitably fall short of that ideal, the failure isn't experienced as a simple setback, but as a fundamental deficiency of self. We haven’t just failed. We are failures.
Failure breeds shame, and shame pushes us into hiding. In this place of isolation, we are cut off from the very connections we need to heal and to be whole. Like the first human family, hiding in the shadows feels safer than walking in the light, where shortcomings can be seen and exposed (Gen 3:7-8).
As men, the masculinity mirage convinces us that emotional isolation can shield us from shame and exposure. But the truth is, isolation is not a shield, it’s a cage.
The masculinity mirage perpetuates the corrosive myth that authentic manhood requires detachment, steely aloofness, and "heroic" solitude that is disconnected from emotional awareness and expression (other than anger and sexual dominance, of course).
This mirage kills—and not only men. Everyone suffers when men pursue distorted and unattainable standards, collapse beneath crushing insecurity and shame, and then find themselves isolated—without the supportive connections needed to address the wreckage we’ve both caused and endured.
Men chase this shimmering illusion of “strength” and control across vast social wastelands, edging closer and closer to ruin with each step, all while damaging the true sources of nourishment around them. The relationships, communities, and institutions shaped by this mirage become spaces where genuine connection is sacrificed at the altar of performative strength, leaving everyone involved diminished, exhausted, and alone.
The masculinity mirage also places an unbearable weight on women, who have historically been assigned the role of "human givers" (1). This class of people “are expected to offer their time, attention, affection, and bodies willingly, placidly, to the other class of people, the ‘human beings.’ . . . the human givers are the ‘attentive, loving, subordinates’ to the human beings” (2). Women bear the hidden costs of men pursuing the mirage—depleting themselves to support an ultimately delusional and destructive journey.
Rage is both an ideal of the masculinity mirage and one of its chief symptoms. But that rage comes at a high price, especially for women. Too often, human givers are expected to tame and "civilize" men by absorbing their rage through exhausting emotional labor. This is an ancient and pernicious theme, present in everything from modern films to ancient mythology (3). Under the yoke of the human giver syndrome, women are summoned to draw men out of their self-imposed exile while simultaneously managing the fallout of their suppressed and unprocessed emotions.
The decision to stop chasing the mirage is not as easy as it might seem. We cannot simply resolve to halt the pursuit through sheer willpower. From infancy, men are culturally conditioned to believe that pursuing this illusion defines masculinity itself.
The mirage feels both natural and necessary, and that is why it is so hard to resist, and even detect. As men, our deepest instincts, thought patterns, ways of moving through the world, and social rewards all propel us to chase a dangerous and unattainable goal. Choosing to fight is only the beginning, because the mirage fights back.
The path to freedom begins where every other recovery from addiction begins, by admitting that our lives have spiraled out of control, leaving us chained to the exhausting pursuit of a mirage that will never ultimately materialize.
For the language of “human giver syndrome,” see Emily Nogaski and Amelia Nogaski, Burnout: The Secret of Unlocking the Stress Cycle (New York: Ballantine Books, 2019), xiii-xiv drawing ultimately from Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), XIX.
Ibid.
This ancient trope appears in ancient texts, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the prostitute Shamhat attempts to tame and civilize the beast-man Enkidu through seduction and sexual encounters. Shamhat echoes a pattern that would reappear through millennia of storytelling about how masculine maturation is achieved at the altar of female sacrifice.
