Fragile Masculinity Quotes

“if
the very
idea
of
standing up
for myself
frightens you
so
damn much
then
i guess
the power
you thought
you held
over ome
wasn't that
impressive
in the
first place.

-fragile masculinity”
― Amanda Lovelace, The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One

“[Dr. Johnson thought that] Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.”
― James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

“[Speaking to a group of female students] Have you any notion how many books are written [by men] about women in the course of one year? (...) Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? (...)
Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women (...) were very angry (...) as they wrote (...) about the mental, moral, and physical inferiority of women. (...) Why were they angry? (...)
Possibly when the professor [imagined by V. Woolf as a prototype of patriarchal writer] insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. (...) Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch (...) of feeling that great number of people, half the human race indeed [=women], are by nature inferior to himself.
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. (…) That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished (…)

A Room of One´s Own, chapter 2”
― Virginia Woolf

“i’m not going to pretend
to be less intelligent than i am
so a man can feel
more comfortable around me
the one i deserve
will see my greatness and
want to lift it higher”
― Rupi Kaur, Home Body

“We need to be looking after young men a bit better before we start demonising them.”
― Matty Healy

“He going feel like a fool and there don't be no man yet born who can deal with feeling like a damn fool.”
― Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage

“These arguments bring to mind the long-running “My Strength Is Not for
Hurting” campaign by Men Can Stop Rape, an admirable project led by
feminist men but also an example of the fact that, apparently, one of the
most effective strategies for getting straight men on board with profeminist,
antirape messages is giving them space to celebrate their masculinity in the
same breath. From a queer perspective, this is one of the more discouraging
elements of the heterosexual tragedy: when straight men move toward
feminism, they almost always do so in ways that prop up the gender binary
that causes their problems in the first place! Straight men’s feminism—
when anchored in gender-essentialist ideas about “real manhood”—also
relies on the emotional labor of straight women who are compelled to
celebrate and reward men for putting their “masculine energy” or “male
strength” to a nonviolent use.”
― Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality