I’ve recently been looking at source materials from over the millinea and into historical rhetoric of what it means to be a man. Women are rarely mentioned, thought it could be argued that this is due to subjugation. It’s not until 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-wave feminism (where the identity of femininity gets fleshed out into the imagery that we often associate with modern femininity) when this rhetoric starts to shift to what men are NOT, which almost always amounts to NOT feminine.

But can men, lovers of femininity, have a gender identity beyond femininity, in the same way women have established a distinct gender identity separate from masculinity? It seems like any community online that claims to champion masculine identity convolutes that with quelling radical feminism. It seems as if the male identity is muted by a perceived threat of female identity. It seems as if this sub is more about spotting radicalized feminism than it is about men’s rights and identity.

So I’m at a bit of a loss/having trouble when it comes to modern sources for concepts of the male identity that run adjacent to feminism, and don’t include femininity in their definitions. Does anybody have any materials they’d recommend I read?