"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by Wyndham
Add to List
