You can run through the auto-complete of various search engines with expected (grow beards) and unexpected (eat cupcakes) results. You could probably do a search on Twitter and quickly lose your faith in humanity…
Yep.
Hell you’ve probably heard the phrase every couple of days for your entire life. Real men open doors, real men cry, real men _______. There is a desire, I think, to get away from the macho toughness of old, or to at least supplement it with depth and perspective. When you think about the qualities that men are supposed to embody in this day and age we’ve replaced toughness with an ability to act with the brute force and/or compassion necessary, stoicism with honest reactions, bravado with sincerity, and many others.
But at what point do we begin to realize that these aren’t so much things that real men do or should do, but things that decent people should do. No gender has or should have a monopoly on things like honesty, sincerity, and responsibility . Even something as archaically defined as toughness is something that men can’t make a sole claim to own.
Real men define their gender in their own way and do things that suit them, the same as real women, real trans individuals, and real people in general. Creating this pass/fail scenario for any gender is stupid and designed to promote the inequality that still lingers.
Alexander Bauer, Author 