Turn on the TV, watch kids’ cartoons or most films, and you won’t have to look hard for the message that nice guys finish last, while tough guys get the girl, and, more importantly, gain the respect of other men. In the heterosexual safari that is Channel 4’s latest Married at First Sight we saw a woman called Morag spend the whole UK season demeaning and berating her new husband, Luke, for being more of a boy than a man, lacking in muscle and not being aggressive enough. Did she perhaps hanker after more of a “toxic masculinity”, the experts queried, while reassuring her that a calm, attentive and reliable man is the definition of masculinity. Maybe so, but we could well ask why that definition hasn’t become the norm. Meanwhile, toxic masculinity is now a buzzword, and a term most of us will recognise – it describes a set of predatory, bullish and bullying, sexually aggressive, sexist and homophobic behaviours in some heterosexual men. But, arguably, this is a misleading term, as it absolves society of taking responsibility for the everyday gender norms that form the bedrock of the messaging that some men take to extremes. If we want to divert that course, we need to look upriver, and change that messaging. While there is rising public attention to men and masculinity right now, this is not a new phenomenon, nor a new field of study. Men’s search for masculinity is an old, and cruel, mission. The loss, gain, winning of it, or coming of age into it, dominates our culture; and always has, forming the basis of plays, poetry and novels for centuries. While the control of women – particularly sexual ownership and control – are frequent measures of masculinity, women, in a way, are collateral in what is, ultimately, a quest for male approval. This is a kind of male gaze for men; it’s their imagined version of an ideal, more masculine man, who stands in judgment in their mind. Masculinity, to put it simply, is whatever is considered appropriate and expected for men in your circle. It is a set of learned behaviours, easily taught and assumed easily adopted. Acknowledging that these behaviours are learned is not the same as saying they aren’t real, however, or that they don’t have real effects, or that they don’t form important parts of people’s sense of self or identity from a very early age. Indeed, they do. Gender, including masculinity, is something that is worked upon and it is hard work. In fact, if it came so naturally, then men would not increasingly spend so much time, money and effort on fashion, grooming, dieting, training and exercise. There are so many different recognisable types of behaviours, styles and roles considered socially appropriate for men in different groups and communities; which is why the plural term masculinities is now used. For example, there are recognisable gay masculinities, urban masculinities, young masculinities or working-class masculinities. Within this plethora of possibilities there is another type of masculinity that is rarely represented, and that is female masculinity. If masculinity is a set of cultural expectations for men, which varies across history and around the world, and contains roles, styles, mannerisms, attitudes, bodily comportment and appearance, then it does not necessarily follow that these would be the preserve of male bodies only. Any body could do masculinity. Women and female-bodied people have been doing masculinity for ever of course, from the historic female husbands and soldier boys with secrets, to butch lesbians, transmasculine queer people, gender non-conforming tomboys and Black masculine butches, known as studs. Masculinity as style and essence can be worn and embodied by those who had to make it their own, by those for whom it was never meant and so were never taught. Often there are still punishments for this trespass, for what is seen as a colonisation of the realm reserved for one sex only. Masculine women, butch lesbians and transgender people on the masculine spectrum are targeted for double glances at best, and for worse when those scrutinising glances work out who is what, and who is not what was expected. For some, female masculinity is independent of men’s versions, with its own history, often rooted in lesbian identities and communities. It is another way of being a woman, and living that identity, as valid as any other. Others feel less of an affiliation to lesbian legacies, preferring to see their own sense of masculinity as just that, as a version of being masculine, rather than a version of femininity or a more unusual way of being a woman. In that sense, the familiar experience of being read by society as male or as a man, is not a misgendering experience, but one of mis-sexing; where the gender is read correctly, but a sex is incorrectly assumed to follow. Such assumptions come from our strict binary system, where male is supposed to equal masculine heterosexual, and female is supposed to equal feminine heterosexual. Clearly not everyone fits into such binaries; but those lives are obscured in a society that struggles to recognise them. For those creating their own female masculinity, there is more room and fewer rules; not being brutalised into a conventional masculinity from birth brings a freedom to explore masculinity without so much of the suffocating, negative baggage that men are increasingly openly talking about. In this new wave of public focus on men and masculinities, men are rightly identifying the expectations of gender as contributing to poor mental and physical health, social isolation, addiction problems and violence. Let’s hope that this critique can be extended to the dominant representations of masculinity in our media and culture, too, which sets those expectations in the first place. We should all remember that boys will not be boys: they will be adults and will become partners, fathers, carers, friends, lovers and colleagues, with the capacity to be as humane as the next woman. As the king of butch scholarship and female masculinity, Prof Jack Halberstam, has pointed out, transmasculine people, butch lesbians and queer masculine women have more of a chance to think very carefully about what kinds of masculine people we want to become. Maybe men, in this climate of change, could learn from that, too. Finn Mackay is the author of Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars and is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England in Bristol