Life & Wisdom Quote by Wyndham Lewis

Lewis takes a wrecking ball to the cozy myth that masculinity is nature’s default setting. The provocation is in the engineering metaphor: “made,” “propped up,” “ingenuity,” “collapse.” Manhood isn’t an essence; it’s a construction project with bad weather built in. By insisting that even “primitive society” had to labor to manufacture “men,” he’s not romanticizing some premodern authenticity. He’s arguing the opposite: the more basic the social order, the more obvious the scaffolding. Masculinity has always been a performance with high maintenance costs.

The scare quotes around “men” do most of the political work. They suggest an artificial title conferred by others, not a biological fact. Lewis’s sting is equal-opportunity: he denies that maleness automatically earns the cultural rank of “a man,” just as he denies that “woman” is a simple, stable category. In that symmetry is the subtext: gender hierarchy depends on constant reinforcement, not natural superiority.

Context matters because Lewis wrote in a period obsessed with virility and decline: post-Victorian anxieties, the shock of World War I, and modernism’s hunger to expose the machinery beneath respectable surfaces. His line reads like a skeptical footnote to all the era’s stiff-upper-lip pageantry. The real threat isn’t effeminacy; it’s fragility. The “collapse” he predicts is less personal failure than structural: when the props change, the pose can’t hold, and the whole idea of “a man” wobbles like a badly built monument.