Male Bonding Quotes

“Women eat ice-cream, men toast marshmallows.”
― Dianna Hardy, Cry Of The Wolf

“I'd never understood why hurting animals for fun was considered an early warning sign of serial killer behavior, while fishing and hunting were seen as healthy male bonding activities.”
― Jack Heath, Headcase

“Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and shit-faced with your neighbor every now and then.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Ball busting [a friendly form of humor]...contains a fundamental flaw, one that has done immeasurable harm to the male psyche, and basically eliminated dance and music as potential outlets for bonding.

That is the use of the term 'gaaay.'

It's a form of self-policing, some fucked-up safe word that got called out if any behavior approached a level where it felt intimate or affectionate. Really anything that felt 'feminine,' and that list was long.

It was not used to describe romantic attraction to another many--though it certainly insulted that entire idea in an inexcusable way--but instead was used to reinforce what Niobe Way, a psychology professor at NYU, calls the 'crisis of connection' among men. We so fear being called -gaaay- for making connections that are 'feminine' that we sacrifice intimacy for casual banter.

It's a huge disconnect, perhaps the central one at the heart of the problems of with modern male bonding. And unlike many 'male' things, it cannot be blamed on genetics. It's cultural. It's learned.”
― Billy Baker, We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends

“Homo sapiens is a creature that over vast areas of the earth, in the countries and continents and centuries that the history books and the newsreels neglect because nothing ‘interesting’ has happened in them, has succeeded in living the moderate and mainly cooperative life to be expected of cousins of the hedonic apes. Almost all men spend most of their lives in this way. Most men spend all their lives in this way.
But because all our governance is based on male bonding, and male bonding on at best a low-powered rumbling of aggression, accompanied by the hallucinatory visions which keep that aggression alive, we are constantly in danger of seeing our communities revert at intervals into the horrible agonic semblance of a troop of baboons. Baboons, moreover, with their finger on the button that can fire off an H-bomb.”
― Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman: The Classic Study of Evolution

“Tyler studied him over his coffee. "From what I've seen so far you're not much of a time-waster.
And you're not so bad, for a suit."
With a half-laugh, David lifted his own coffee. Steam from it rose and merged with the mist.
"Coming from you, that's a hell of a kudo."
"Damn right.”
― nora roberts, The Villa

“It also strikes me that male-to-male bonding can create a gender role conflict, as it challenges the myth of full independence. Heroism is an exception. In fact, heroism has a long tradition as part of manhood. Bonds formed through natural disaster or war are exceptions to the typical “self-reliance” rules. These are op-portunities for men to experience a type of connection with each other that is ordinarily prohibited by the “rules” of manhood.”
― Mary Crocker Cook, Codependency & Men

“The author observes that the friendship of John Hay and Charles Francis Adams benefited from a physical distance that required correspondence, meaning that feelings only implied in person had to be explicitly expressed.”
― John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes : The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt

“I have not in this book discussed homoerotic behaviour, and that particular form of male bonding and female bonding loosely called ‘the homosexual community’. These large subjects require extensive treatment. But, very briefly, it should be said here that there may be analytic and practical profit in seeing male homosexuality as a specific feature of the more general phenomenon of male bonding. For a variety of obvious and more subtle reasons, male homoeroticism is socially organized differently and occurs more frequently than the female variety. There are a host of other differences which, in part, reflect the biologically based patterns which must accompany such a profound matter as seeking erotic contact, establishing sexual identity, and defining sexual role. The effect of homoerotic relationships in work, political, and other groups is of considerable interest in terms of many of the questions I have raised in this book. From a strictly biological viewpoint, there is no good reason for forbidding or even discouraging homoerotic activity, though in terms of Euro-American family structure and sexual attitudes there may be sociological reasons. As I have tried to indicate, there are important inhibitions in much of Euro-American culture – if not elsewhere too – against expressing affection between men, and one result of this inhibition of tenderness and warmth is an insistence on corporate hardness and forcefulness which has contributed to a variety of ‘tough-minded’ military, economic, political, and police enterprises and engagements.

Of course, a fear of homoeroticism is not the only reason for this – a number of others have been described here too. But homoerotic activity has been widely and powerfully defined as aberrant (though as Kinsey has suggested, about half American males have had homosexual activity, while at least a third have had experiences culminating in orgasm). Much guilt and uncertainty must plague many of the participants in these relationships. So must the insecurity about possibly being or becoming ‘queer’ or ‘bent’ among other men who may feel drawn to their colleagues and friends in ways I have described but whose repertoire of explanations of their feelings is overwhelmed by their community’s assertion that men tender with each other are unmanly and unreliable. It remains a worthy subject of exploration to learn more about the dynamics of tender male interchanges, both for the sake of scientific understanding, and perhaps for providing information on the basis of which greater sympathy and opportunity may confront persons often harassed and disdained by themselves as well as others. That this may accompany a changed ideal of manhood, of corporate structure, of political acumen, and of the role of hard dominance, is not accidental but intrinsic to the whole argument of this book.”
― Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups