Masculine Ideal Quotes

My hero when I was 14 was Sonny Liston. No matter what kinds of problems you were having with your parents or at school, whatever, Sonny Liston would go and knock guys out, and that made it all right.

As a guy develops and practices his masculinity, he is accompanied by an invisible male chorus of all the other guys, who hiss orcheer as he attempts to approximate the masculine ideal, who push him to sacrifice more of his humanity for the sake of his masculinity, and who ridicule him when he holds back. The chorus is made up of all the guy's comrades and rivals, his buddies and bosses, his male ancestors and his male cultural heroes--and above all, his father, who may have been a real person in his life, or may have existed only as the myth of the man who got away.

The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

My daddy, he was somewhere between God and John Wayne.

I want a big man physically as well as intellectually. l want a man with the thigh muscles to give me a good frolic in the sack, the kind who'll tear hell out of a thick steak, and yet who can go to the ballet with me and discuss Hegelian dialectic and know what the hell he's talking about.

James Bond in his Sean Connery days ... was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans.

I have to admit, if Oprah were a man, I would marry her.

Even in 2014, when romance heroes are as varied as their genre, somewhere in them you can still always find the alpha male.

They all looked like a shampoo commercial, healthy and clear-skinned, perfectly proportioned, a group of handsome young men. Their clothes hung on them like they were glad to be gracing such supermodels.

Somewhere in our cultural subconscious, we crave these figures that are big and strong and unassailable, like masculine fortresses. It's like how the 9/11 firemen were venerated.

I'm not for every woman, you know. Because a lot of women - I mean, obviously, your first thing is, 'What do you want your guy to look like?' And I'm not the tall, dark, handsome guy.

Who is the pinnacle of male-ness in America? Leonardo DiCaprio.

It's funny: a lot of roles I do read for mention physical presence - like, 'built like a quarterback' - and for me, it's pretty boring because I don't want that to be the most important thing. I'm not trying to be Dwayne Johnson.