How to be a Man

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Redwing wrote:

A bit of a derail, but Grubber mentioned Yin Yang before, and I was looking into it. Obviously I'd heard of the concept, but I'd never really read into it more deeply. It's an interesting subject! I was also trying to work out a way to remember which is which, and came up with a mnemonic I'm not especially proud of:

Spoiler:

Yang rhymes with wang. Thus yang is masculine.

In my own embarrassment, I've at least managed to sear that into my memory.

And as another Australian voice, I'll add that "Manning up" is definitely a concept I've encountered. For the most part I think it is more of a Boy vs. Adult thing rather than a Man vs. Woman thing, but then I've never aimed it at anyone before so I can't speak to it personally.

I prefer "Grow up." myself. It's more patronising, which is one of my key weapons against my natural predators.

Well, technically, one would pronounce yang very differently from the English way of saying "wang," but I won't stop you from remembering it that way, haha. Crap, I'm going to remember it that way too now, aren't I?

Maq wrote:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Quoted for the sheer awesomeness of IF. I read this poem to my son when he was in hte special care nursery after all the complications of his traumatic birth.

I want to post a youtube of "Man Up" from "The Book of Mormon", but I'm afraid of offending. Google it if you're not easily offended.

DanB wrote:

Here's a brief comment piece in the UK's guardian about some negative effects of societal expectations around masculinity
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...

You can read the full report that comment piece is based on at:
http://www.samaritans.org/media-cent...

Interesting article. I came away with two main impressions. First, I'm kind of baffled about why society worships andrenaline junkies who abandon their families to go do stupid stuff like go up K2 in the middle of winter. If a father spends all his time at the bar or playing WOW, we call him a loser. But go off to the Arctic for seven months to avoid diaper duty and you're a national hero.

The other impression is there's a lot of really weird sexual vibes coming out of parliament. Maybe MPs think they're being macho when they say stuff "call me the thrasher," "take my big fist" or "I thumped a bloke," but from a yank's perspective it all sounds pretty homoerotic.

IMO we've gone a bit too far in the direction of "gender is whatever you identify as" and, in so doing, have lost track of some actual biological differences between men and women that could use better understanding.

For example various hormones have a dramatic effect on behavior and levels of these hormones correlate heavily with genetic sex. Anyone who has had hormone treatment can back that up. We should expect people who have had dramatically different hormones running through their bodies for decades to behave in different fashions. IME we're just not ready to figure that stuff out yet (we're still dealing with larger issues of cultural inequality and conversations like this are hard to have). However I think as we do it will lead to coming up some better ideas of what it means to "be a man" (or "be a woman") and that will mean backsliding on a few negative judgements that currently get leveled at traditional "male/female" behaviors.

jdzappa wrote:

The other impression is there's a lot of really weird sexual vibes coming out of parliament. Maybe MPs think they're being macho when they say stuff "call me the thrasher," "take my big fist" or "I thumped a bloke," but from a yank's perspective it all sounds pretty homoerotic.

You're mistaking Andrew Mitchell for (a) macho and (b) someone that anybody likes. He wasn't trying to be tough, he's just a privileged twat.

DanB:

I think that there's a close and frequently dysfunctional relationship between cultural norms, and cultural expectations, especially as far as gender is concerned. "IF" is a great poem, but if what the author meant by "Man," is "grown-up person," then s/he's sending some seriously misogynistic messages to some people by implying that only men can be adults.

As mentioned, I come from a culture where there is a definite third gender, and there are many social customs and mores surrounding that gender. There are expectations and roles as well. Third sex members are expected to be artistic, expressive, outgoing. For better or for worse, identifying yourself as "third gender" makes people want to ask you for fashion and beauty advice.

Men carry similar expectations, but as with yin/yang, there's a definite difference between masculinity and machismo. The line is also less-well defined and enforced. Overly aggressive behavior is viewed as a male failing, whereas overly passive a female one; but all people are expected to know what's in their best interest and to pursue those interests with initiative and verve. You want a guy? Go ahead and ask. No one's going to help you if you're too chicken to give chase. If another woman (or man) gets your man because they asked first, you have no one to blame but yourself.

StGabe wrote:

IMO we've gone a bit too far in the direction of "gender is whatever you identify as" and, in so doing, have lost track of some actual biological differences between men and women that could use better understanding.

For example various hormones have a dramatic effect on behavior and levels of these hormones correlate heavily with genetic sex. Anyone who has had hormone treatment can back that up. We should expect people who have had dramatically different hormones running through their bodies for decades to behave in different fashions. IME we're just not ready to figure that stuff out yet (we're still dealing with larger issues of cultural inequality and conversations like this are hard to have). However I think as we do it will lead to coming up some better ideas of what it means to "be a man" (or "be a woman") and that will mean backsliding on a few negative judgements that currently get leveled at traditional "male/female" behaviors.

You're conflating Sex, Gender and Sexuality. Roughly;

sex: your genetic sex and by extension the biological results of that (hormone levels etc...)
gender: The learnt, societally cued and performed component of our self expression that models/performs a representation of your genetic sex
sexuality: the self-expression of the gender(things?) we are attracted to

There is obviously something of a complex interplay between those things but with very, very few exceptions almost all behavioural norms around gender are learnt. In light of that why shouldn't people identify as whatever they want? Although from a more general perspective why shouldn't grown adult be allowed to adopt whatever identity they wish, why should we be policing them?

StGabe wrote:

We should expect people who have had dramatically different hormones running through their bodies for decades to behave in different fashions.

Perhaps we should expect that but until we have evidence of it we should probably regard this type of hard, biological essentialist assertion as more truthy than true. Societal pressure is almost certainly at least as and probably a more powerful modulator of behaviour than hormones for a great range of behaviours. I would recommend Cordelia Fine's rather fun and excellent Delusions of Gender as a good and readable treatment on this subject http://www.cordeliafine.com/delusion...

LarryC wrote:

there's a definite difference between masculinity and machismo.

I'm not very convinced, machismo seems to be just the macho subset of expected masculine behaviours.

LarryC wrote:

"IF" is a great poem, but if what the author meant by "Man," is "grown-up person," then s/he's sending some seriously misogynistic messages to some people by implying that only men can be adults.

Yeah. Welcome to 19th Century British imperialism. It's Kipling, dude. That's like pointing out that you suspect Whitman may have possibly liked his muffin buttered on both sides. It's neither here nor there.

(e2a) Also you could render the language of IF gender-neutral and it'd still be the same goddamn poem so I don't have a freakin clue what you're talking about.

Yosemite?

I umm. I don't get the "muffin buttered on both sides" reference, and my pre-coffee google fu isn't helping.

Seth wrote:

I umm. I don't get the "muffin buttered on both sides" reference, and my pre-coffee google fu isn't helping.

He was gay, perhaps bisexually hedonistic.

DanB wrote:

You're conflating Sex, Gender and Sexuality.

I don't think I am. I agree that there is "something of a complex interplay between those things" and disagree that "with very, very few exceptions almost all behavioural norms around gender are learnt". I think that this way of talking about gender/sex itself leads to a lot of confusion by creating a false dichotomy.

DanB wrote:

Perhaps we should expect that but until we have evidence of it we should probably regard this type of hard, biological essentialist assertion as more truthy than true.

There is lots of evidence about sex difference. Much of it extremely uncontroversial. The problem is that it's hard to talk about it without being called sexist (see Larry Summers).

Here's a simple real world example. We neuter/spay millions of cats. When we do so we see consistent and strong behavior changes. Applying modern feminism to cats, we'd probably determine that behaviors like male spraying are social constructs and learnt (which leads to a funny mental image of "mama cat" encouraging her boy kittens to pee on the wall). We have millions of counterexamples to that. We know that exposure to hormones during certain developmental phases is almost the sole determinant of this behavior. Remove the hormones later and cats will stay spray. Remove them early enough and they won't.

Humans aren't cats, of course. IMO that just means that we can control our biological impulses better, but not that we lack biological impulses. It is uncontroversial that varying levels of testosterone/estrogen can have significant impacts on human behavior. There is also lots of evidence that exposure to these hormones during certain developmental stages leads to long-term behavioral tendencies. For example people have an extremely strong tendency to identify with the gender of their sex at birth even after surgery, later hormonal treatment and being raised as the opposite gender. I'll dig up a link to that research if you're interested. Basically there was a study of genetically male children with malformed sex organs where there was an attempt to modify their sex/gender to female with surgery and hormones. Even among children who had never been told they were genetically male, a large majority expressed a different gender before they were 18.

I consider myself a feminist and a proponent of equality under the law (and continued change of our culture towards more equal opportunity). However it's my opinion that modern academic/philosophical expression of feminism is overreaching a bit and needs to take a few steps backwards before moving forward once more. It's too focused on explaining everything in terms of culture and that leads to a lot of misunderstanding. In order to address differences in "male" and "female" behavior we have to understand all the sources of those differences rather than focusing on one half of them.

I was tenatively with you until I got to the part I quote below. I still think you're confusing sex, gender, and sexuality.

StGabe wrote:

However it's my opinion that modern academic/philosophical expression of feminism is overreaching a bit and needs to take a few steps backwards before moving forward once more. It's too focused on explaining everything in terms of culture and that leads to a lot of misunderstanding. In order to address differences in "male" and "female" behavior we have to understand all the sources of those differences rather than focusing on one half of them.

I think you need to clarify a few points for me. It seems dissonant to admit in one paragraph that a major difference between cats and humans is our ability to control our actions, and a desire to "move back" to addressing sex and gender differences according to those same instincts. Ignoring for a moment drastic examples like HRT, it is much more useful to engage in discussions about changing culture than it is in changing biology.

Additionally, I do not believe that - to take an extreme example - a rapist can blame an overabundance of testosterone on his animalistic actions. That is the base of the slope I see when you start talking about "taking a few steps back" from a cultural point of view.

Finally - and admittedly Cheeze has more literary knowledge than I on this topic - I am not aware of popular modern feminist thought that wants to *expunge* the importance of biology in the discussion. And where I see attempts to mitigate its importance, it's almost universally in response to unsavory theories like "boys will be boys" and "girls like dollies." There is absolutely no evidence of which I am aware that sustains traditional sexual stereotypes like females being more nurturing or males preferring the color blue.

StGabe wrote:

Humans aren't cats, of course. IMO that just means that we can control our biological impulses better, but not that we lack biological impulses.

What exactly is "controlling our biological impulses" other than a learnt (and practised) response? And where exactly are you learning this appropriate and controlled response from? The very point is that we take our biological selves and we learn how to "appropriately" express those impulses. Anyway, read that Cordelia Fine book for a really smart treatment on the actual limits of the the biological essentialist POV.

StGabe wrote:

It is uncontroversial that varying levels of testosterone/estrogen can have significant impacts on human behavior. There is also lots of evidence that exposure to these hormones during certain developmental stages leads to long-term behavioral tendencies. For example people have an extremely strong tendency to identify with the gender of their sex at birth even after surgery, later hormonal treatment and being raised as the opposite gender. I'll dig up a link to that research if you're interested. Basically there was a study of genetically male children with malformed sex organs where there was an attempt to modify their sex/gender to female with surgery and hormones. Even among children who had never been told they were genetically male, a large majority expressed a different gender before they were 18.

I am quite aware of all of that stuff. Nobody is arguing that there is not something that it is to be biologically male and identify as said. Personally I'm with the psychological script view of all of this. We have certain emotions, impulses, psychological states and we express them by acting out scripts that we've learnt from the society around us. Society gives us a range of scripts that define maleness (from wearing trousers all the way to being a provider) or femaleness which at a very, very young age we begin to internalise. No one polices gender roles quite as strictly as toddlers. And little wonder that if your impulses feel like they'd better fit the other gender's scripts you will feel (psychologically) frustrated.

If we really wanted to use science/research to define quintessentially male and female traits I can't imagine that many would stand up to much scrutiny. For the Victorians the colour Pink was for men. The Greeks thought trousers on men were utterly laughable, so much so that it features in their comedies. It's even hard to define men as "naturally" providers when for many indigenous people's men bring in the least calories per day for children (and grandmothers bring in the most typically).

Seth wrote:

I was tenatively with you until I got to the part I quote below. I still think you're confusing sex, gender, and sexuality.

I think you need to clarify a few points for me. It seems dissonant to admit in one paragraph that a major difference between cats and humans is our ability to control our actions, and a desire to "move back" to addressing sex and gender differences according to those same instincts. Ignoring for a moment drastic examples like HRT, it is much more useful to engage in discussions about changing culture than it is in changing biology.

Finally - and admittedly Cheeze has more literary knowledge than I on this topic - I am not aware of popular modern feminist thought that wants to *expunge* the importance of biology in the discussion. And where I see attempts to mitigate its importance, it's almost universally in response to unsavory theories like "boys will be boys" and "girls like dollies." There is absolutely no evidence of which I am aware that sustains traditional sexual stereotypes like females being more nurturing or males preferring the color blue.

The major difference between cats and humans when it comes to behavior is that cats aren't under the illusion that they have free will. We don't actively control our actions, but we think we do.

As to evidence of traditional sexual stereotypes, you may find this interesting: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...

It's not saying all gender stereotypes are nature, and not nurture, but the study suggests they swing stronger toward nature than we'd like to believe.

Mixolyde wrote:

The major difference between cats and humans when it comes to behavior is that cats aren't under the illusion that they have free will. We don't actively control our actions, but we think we do.

Obviously not the thread for this, but I vehementlly disagree with your assertion.

What exactly is "controlling our biological impulses" other than a learnt (and practised) response?

Applying this logic to depression would lead to the conclusion that depressed people can simply learn not to be happy or (using some of your reasoning later on in your post) that their unhappiness is simply a result of a acting out a cultural script and could be cured by changing our culture to not include expressions of unhappiness.

I think applying that sort of reasoning to mental illness would be horrible and in the case of understanding gender I think it's fairly counterproductive. It leads to the idea that we should figure out how to fix cultural constructs of "male" (and "female") rather than trying to understand men and women (their differences and similarities).

For example, in an article that was posted above the author stated:

"hegemonic masculinity is characterised by attributes such as: striving for power and dominance, aggressiveness, courage, independency, efficiency, rationality, competitiveness, success, activity, control and invulnerability; not perceiving or admitting anxiety, problems and burdens; and withstanding danger, difficulties and threats".

While it's not entirely wrong to look at this in terms of culture and a "hegemony" many of those behaviors (not all) are consistent with what you'd expect from a man exposed to a higher than average level of testosterone for a period of time (go look at the side effects of androgen replacement therapy). Applying a purely cultural diagnosis to this "problem" just isn't a very productive way to understand the issue IMO.

StGabe wrote:
What exactly is "controlling our biological impulses" other than a learnt (and practised) response?

Applying this logic to depression would lead to the conclusion that depressed people can simply learn not to be happy or (using some of your reasoning later on in your post) that their unhappiness is simply a result of a acting out a cultural script and could be cured by changing our culture to not include expressions of unhappiness.

I'm not sure that you're right there. In the case of depression, the impulse is (let's say for the sake of argument) to cry, the culturally-learned response to controlling that impulse involves holding back the tears until you're alone and no longer in public, then crying.

The control we're talking about here is not choosing which impulses to experience, but rather choosing how we respond to those impulses.

Jonman wrote:

The control we're talking about here is not choosing which impulses to experience, but rather choosing how we respond to those impulses.

I don't see how that statement is any different than telling someone with depression (or schizophrenia for that matter) to just learn to respond better to their depression.

Jayhawker wrote:
StGabe wrote:
Jonman wrote:

The control we're talking about here is not choosing which impulses to experience, but rather choosing how we respond to those impulses.

I don't see how that statement is any different than telling someone with depression (or schizophrenia for that matter) to just learn to respond better to their depression.

It's the difference between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and saying "Cheer up!"

Which is a world of difference.

Jonman wrote:

It's the difference between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and saying "Cheer up!"

So you're saying that being male is a disease to be cured then? I mean I'm not sure I disagree with your statement here but I think it kind of dovetails with what I'm saying. We should understand what being male is rather than trying to prescribe what it should be. Rather than cognitive therapy, in this case, I think we're looking at figuring how to empower both male and female perspectives/behaviors rather than normalizing to something in between.

Let me put it this way: engaging in cognitive behavioral therapy is a choice of the patient and it may not be the best choice in a lot of cases. I'm ok with that characterization because it doesn't presuppose a judgement as to what the person should be it just offers them a tool to try and be different. There's difference between that and how we're talking about gender in a manner where there's a "right" way for people to behave and judging individuals if they don't behave that way.

StGabe wrote:
Jonman wrote:

It's the difference between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and saying "Cheer up!"

So you're saying that being male is a disease to be cured then? I mean I'm not sure I disagree with your statement here but I think it kind of dovetails with what I'm saying. We should understand what being male is rather than trying to prescribe what it should be.

You were the one who conflated depression and gender, not me. I'm saying nothing of the sort

It was also you that brought up the idea of "controlling our biological impulses." CBT is a set of techniques designed to do just that, and that's why I brought it up.

The issue that's pervaded this thread from the start is that there is no one monolithic thing that is "being male". Understanding what "being male" is means accepting that it covers a wide range of behaviors and experiences, and as such, it's difficult to generalize in any direction about it, ESPECIALLY that there's a "right" and a "wrong" way to express one's maleness.

Jonman wrote:
StGabe wrote:
Jonman wrote:

It's the difference between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and saying "Cheer up!"

So you're saying that being male is a disease to be cured then? I mean I'm not sure I disagree with your statement here but I think it kind of dovetails with what I'm saying. We should understand what being male is rather than trying to prescribe what it should be.

You were the one who conflated depression and gender, not me. I'm saying nothing of the sort

It was also you that brought up the idea of "controlling our biological impulses." CBT is a set of techniques designed to do just that, and that's why I brought it up.

The issue that's pervaded this thread from the start is that there is no one monolithic thing that is "being male". Understanding what "being male" is means accepting that it covers a wide range of behaviors and experiences, and as such, it's difficult to generalize in any direction about it, ESPECIALLY that there's a "right" and a "wrong" way to express one's maleness.

You guys took "controlling our biological impulses" out of context and in retrospect I wish I'd phrased that differently. I meant to allow that we're more complex creatures than cats, not state that we have magical free will that lets us ignore the biological basis for our behavior.

And I'm not conflating gender with depression. I'm pointing out that the way we're treating gender (when we talk about it as a social construct rather than a biological phenomenon) is inconsistent with how we treat other behavioral differences caused by hormones/chemistry. I agree with your statement about cognitive therapy because it's consistent with my original point. It acknowledges a biological basis for depression rather than trying to recast it in terms of learnt behavior or social constructs.

The issue that's pervaded this thread from the start is that there is no one monolithic thing that is "being male". Understanding what "being male" is means accepting that it covers a wide range of behaviors and experiences, and as such, it's difficult to generalize in any direction about it, ESPECIALLY that there's a "right" and a "wrong" way to express one's maleness

Also I totally agree with this. However I'd say that there are still significant differences that we'll see expressed over populations of men versus women and we should expect and understand these. While it's important to know that any specific man or woman might express their gender differently, if we're looking at larger problems (like trying to increase male/female participation in certain professions) then we're going to need to look at these differences over larger populations.

I think viewing depression and a lot of mental illness as a form of learnt behaviour is a damn sight more optimistic than chalking it all up to being innate. What hope would that give you? At least if it's learnt then there's the hope of learning new patterns and behaviour. I'm pretty sure that CBT is entirely predicated on that notion.

StGabe wrote:

You guys took "controlling our biological impulses" out of context and in retrospect I wish I'd phrased that differently.

If we took it out of context then you are literally going to have to explain exactly what else "controlling our biological impulses" might mean, other than using higher cognitive functions to modulate, express or repress biological impulses.

StGabe wrote:

I meant to allow that we're more complex creatures than cats, not state that we have magical free will that lets us ignore the biological basis for our behavior.

Bit of a false dichotomy this. No one was arguing for "magical free will that lets us ignore the biological basis for our behaviour". I'm pretty sure I specifically said that our biology leads us to various psychological/hormonal/biological states and we express those states through patterning we've internalised (often subconsciously) from the society around us. I actually think this is a fairly optimistic view of human psychology because it tells us that we can learn new behaviours and that we can learn new expressions for our psychological states. Perhaps men are indeed more likely to end up in aggressive psychological states; if we understand that the expression of that state is learnt then we can provide alternative useful or productive scripts, something I think society is pretty poor at providing at the moment.

StGabe wrote:

And I'm not conflating gender with depression. I'm pointing out that the way we're treating gender (when we talk about it as a social construct rather than a biological phenomenon) is inconsistent with how we treat other behavioral differences caused by hormones/chemistry.

I'm pretty sure my POV on this is pretty consistent across behaviours and psychological states. And to be frank a model where we have an innate biological self and our expression of that is cued and parametrised by things we learn from the environment (society) seems to me broadly applicable across just about all higher mental process; from acquiring language to gender to mental illness.

StGabe wrote:

I agree with your statement about cognitive therapy because it's consistent with my original point. It acknowledges a biological basis for depression rather than trying to recast it in terms of learnt behavior or social constructs.

No one's denying a biological basis for something like depression (or gender for that matter), clearly people's genetics predispose them to all sorts of psychological outcomes. Yet many people biologically predisposed to something like depression don't end up expressing depression; it strikes me that their environment would be a good place to look. In the wikipedia article on CBT Aaron T Beck's cognitive theory of depression chimes almost entirely with what I'm saying.

StGabe wrote:
"hegemonic masculinity is characterised by attributes such as: striving for power and dominance, aggressiveness, courage, independency, efficiency, rationality, competitiveness, success, activity, control and invulnerability; not perceiving or admitting anxiety, problems and burdens; and withstanding danger, difficulties and threats".

While it's not entirely wrong to look at this in terms of culture and a "hegemony" many of those behaviors (not all) are consistent with what you'd expect from a man exposed to a higher than average level of testosterone for a period of time (go look at the side effects of androgen replacement therapy). Applying a purely cultural diagnosis to this "problem" just isn't a very productive way to understand the issue IMO.

ok I just looked up the side effects for ART and not one of them mentioned increases in the those "hegemonic masculine" behaviours, here's the first 3 links I found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androge...
http://www.andropausespecialist.com/...
http://men.webmd.com/guide/testoster...
This report even suggests that low androgen levels increase anger outcomes
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/20/us...

Seriously though look at that list; why should we accept that these are acceptable male traits? Even if 'not admitting to anxiety' is a direct consequence of being biologically male we know that's not healthy. Shouldn't we redouble our efforts to teach men to healthily express their anxiety? I firmly believe that it is in our capacity to define what is in that list, to throw away the things that are harmful and unproductive. To be frank, with the possible exception of aggression, almost all of those look to be learnt behaviours from where I'm standing.