I was immediately drawn to the title Masculinity in the Metacrisis, as the question of what it means to be a man has surfaced recently in our Between-Us groups*.

What I find challenging is not just defining masculinity, but even locating it in my own experience—beyond the culturally constructed roles many of us have been forced to inhabit like an ill-fitting suit.

When I look beneath those layers, I struggle to find any standalone identity that doesn’t, in some way, reference relationship—across the full spectrum of gender and sexuality.

As a gay man, I grew up in confrontation with the masculine ideals I was expected to embody. Intimacy between men felt natural to me, but within the rigid norms of my school and university environments, it was implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—taboo. Much of my energy went into calculating how much of my natural self I could safely reveal. Very little, as it turned out.

In that sense, my difference cast a bright light on something that may be present for many men but often goes unnoticed. The need to adapt, to edit oneself, to perform within an accepted range—this wasn’t optional for me; it was unavoidable.

What became visible was the extent of the compromise.

So I learned to perform. And I suspect this is not unique to me. I think most of us, as men, are performing much of the time.

If this is the case, the question becomes: where can masculinity be experienced outside of these scripts?

What makes this more complex is that the script itself has been shifting rapidly over the past few decades. We see the emergence of hyper-masculine postures on one end, and more softened, emotionally attuned versions on the other—often framed in culture-war language as “alpha” versus “woke.” These appear as very different expressions, yet both still carry the sense of being adopted, performed, or strategically inhabited.

In some ways, I’ve experienced the gay community as amplifying these patterns—often exaggerating them, sometimes playfully and explicitly as performance—which, rather than obscuring things, can make the constructed nature of these roles more visible. What is often implicit becomes explicit.

This gap—between what naturally arises and what is permissible—feels like a deep fault line. It undermines the very ground that men are expected to stand on. I sense this may be part of what lies beneath the growing mental health crisis we see, particularly among younger men.

It also points to the need for environments where something else can be explored—not as theory, but as lived experience.

In the high-attention relational spaces I’ve been part of for the last few years—groups of men and women together—this is exactly what begins to happen. These are not discussion groups, but conditions in which listening is cultivated, immediate judgment is suspended, and attention is placed on what is actually arising between us.

In that kind of field, something shifts.

The need to hold a position or be someone in particular begins to loosen. As attention moves away from managing identity and toward participating in what is unfolding, the usual reference points—how I should be as a man, how I might be perceived, what role I am occupying—lose their grip.

What comes into view is not a fixed essence of masculinity, but a more immediate responsiveness—qualities arising in direct relationship to what the moment is asking.

When I look inside myself, I don’t find a stable definition of masculinity. And yet, I also know—without question—that I am a man. That tension itself feels important, and worth staying with.

There are aspects of identity that are not known through definition or comparison, but through a kind of immediate coherence. I don’t know I am a man—or that I am gay—because I match myself against a set of criteria. I know it in the same way I know I exist: prior to explanation, and difficult to locate when I look for it directly.

And when I am in relationship with others—under certain conditions—particular qualities begin to appear.

In one meeting, a woman who has spent many years working with abused women spoke about how moved she was by the quality of presence the men in the group were bringing. She found herself unexpectedly at ease in the company of men she did not know in any conventional sense, yet felt deeply met.

In another moment, a woman was touched to tears when a man paused and allowed her to continue speaking as their voices overlapped. This was not something she had often experienced. Her history was one of being marginalised or spoken over. What moved her was not just the act itself, but the quality of attention behind it.

And yet, in a different meeting, when a disturbance arose in the field, it was the women—not the men—who stepped forward to name and address it.

Which raises a question:

What does it take for a man to stand in his natural authority—without defaulting to either dominance or acquiescence?

Not as a role to perform, but as something that arises in attunement with what the moment is asking.

This remains an ongoing exploration within our relational groups—not to produce a fixed definition, but to create the conditions in which men can begin to stand naturally in their full potential, in relationship with themselves, others, and the world.

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The title echoes a line from Divine in Pink Flamingos (1972), whose work playfully and provocatively exposed the performative nature of gender.

*Between-Us groups are small, high-attention relational spaces exploring shared presence and emergent intelligence.

'You Think You're a Man?' Being Before Performing