Reclaiming Masculinity and Why The Marlboro Man Was a Weenie

Unmasking Toxic Archetypes and a Call to Wholeness

Incels, toxic masculinity and wankers like Andrew Tate get undue media coverage in a world where young men (and women for that matter) don’t have answers about what it means to be a man, or what masculinity ought to look like. They are being asked to navigate a labyrinth of contradictions. They are told that masculinity is inherently toxic, and in the same breath, shamed for any perceived softness or vulnerability. For some, they go looking to Andrew Tate types for answers. This post is all about why he isn’t a man you want to emulate or trust for guidance—and instead how you can embody true masculinity.

*Note: This post may be addressing young men, but the principles of integration apply to all humans, regardless of gender or identification. Adjust the meaning appropriately.

Cultural icons like John Wayne, the Marlboro Man and Tate have offered young men extremes: warrior or weakling, tyrant or doormat, conqueror or castaway. These images are not guides—they are cages. They reduce the complexity of being male to a performance, a posture, a mask worn to avoid shame or failure. Hypermasculinity is just another form of cosplay… a bunch of LARPing assholes. And beneath that mask, countless men are suffering needlessly, and starving for something real. We could add here that the entire world system suffers because of this facade. I’ll bridge that connection as we proceed.

What The F is Masculinity Anyways?

Before we can reclaim or redefine masculinity, we must understand what it truly is—and what it is not. Too often, these terms (masculine and feminine) are thrown around like fixed truths, yet their meanings shift across time, culture, and perspective. So what do these words actually mean?

1. Biological Roots: Form and Function

At the most basic level, masculinity and femininity have biological underpinnings. Male and female bodies are shaped by different hormones, reproductive roles, and patterns of strength, sensitivity, and development. Testosterone tends to increase physical strength and assertiveness. Estrogen supports bonding and cyclical rhythms. Reproductive cycles for example are tied to the cycle of the moon (where the word month comes from) and thus moon and night are often associated with the feminine. These are tendencies—not destinies. Biology offers the raw material, but not the story.

Yes, male bodies may lend themselves more readily to action, protection, or external motion. Female bodies may resonate more deeply with cycles, nurturing, and internal transformation. But this is only the outer layer… the soil, not the seed.

2. Cultural Construction: The Stories We Inherit

Much of what society calls “masculine” or “feminine” is constructed, assigned, reinforced, and policed by culture. From childhood, boys are often taught to suppress emotion, pursue dominance, and equate worth with achievement. Girls are often encouraged toward beauty, receptivity, and service to others.

These roles have served systems (military, religious, economic) not necessarily truth or wholeness. They produce predictability, not freedom. What one generation labels “manly,” another might dismiss as sensitive. These ideas are not universal—they’re inherited scripts.

How The Marlboro Man Was a Weenie

To illustrate just how powerful these cultural narratives are, we need look no further than the Marlboro Man. In the early 20th century, cigarettes were associated with effeminacy or even homosexuality, especially when compared to the perceived ruggedness of a cigar. In fact, the British slang “fag” reflects this stigma. Smoking cigarettes wasn’t considered masculine.

Marlboro, seeking to expand its market, set out to rewrite that narrative. They didn’t just advertise a product, they crafted an archetype. The Marlboro Man was born: stoic, sun-scarred, alone on the range. He didn’t ask for help. He didn’t cry. He didn’t need anyone. And he smoked Marlboros.

The campaign was wildly successful, not because cigarettes had changed, but because the symbol had. Cigarettes didn’t become masculine. The idea of masculinity was reshaped to accommodate the product.

But here’s the deeper point: nothing about smoking is inherently masculine or feminine. Just as working a farm doesn’t automatically confer manhood, nor does wearing a leather jacket or riding a motorcycle. These are costumes, external signals. Archetypes co-opted and flattened into branding.

What we see in the Marlboro Man is the illusion of authenticity… a mask built to sell. And many men today are still reaching for masks: the “bad boy,” the “alpha,” the “enlightened warrior.” These aren’t necessarily false in themselves. But when used to cover insecurity, shame, or the fear of rejection, they become distortions. They’re attempts to prove worth through performance, rather than embody truth through integration.

The task isn’t to destroy all archetypes. It’s to stop hiding behind them. True masculinity doesn’t need a cigarette or a cowboy hat to be real. It needs depth. Wholeness. A man in full doesn’t pose—he becomes.

3. Archetypal Energies: The Inner Landscape

Deeper still, beyond biology and culture, we find something ancient and universal: archetypes. These are not stereotypes, but eternal patterns found across mythology, dream, and the human psyche.

In Jungian psychology:

• The masculine archetype is associated with direction, structure, will, clarity, and the impulse to act. It penetrates, initiates, defines boundaries, and protects sacred space.

• The feminine archetype is tied to receptivity, depth, intuition, nurture, and the capacity to transform. It flows, feels, holds, and reveals hidden truths.

These are not “male” and “female.” They are energies—forces within all people, dancing in different proportions. When balanced, they create wholeness. When divided, they create conflict, confusion, and a fragmented self.

4. Mythic Expressions: The Language of the Soul

Cultures across the world have long used myth to express these inner dynamics. In Celtic lore, we see Brigid—the goddess of the hearth and the forge, poetry and protection—embodying both feminine and masculine qualities. Lugh, master of all crafts, is radiant, precise, and deeply relational. The Morrígan, fierce and prophetic, dissolves the idea that feminine means soft or passive.

These deities reveal that masculinity and femininity are not roles, but languages of being—ways of relating to the world, to the body, to others, and to the divine.

Masculinity, then, is not simply being male. Femininity is not simply being female. These are symbolic languages—archetypal energies—that shape how we love, lead, fight, create, and transform. To know them is not to choose sides—but to walk the spiral path of integration, where fire and water, sword and chalice, form and mystery meet.

Real, Sacred Masculinity

If toxic masculinity is the shadow—rigid, insecure, performative—then sacred masculinity is the integration of strength with soul. It’s not about how loud you speak or how hard you punch. It’s about how clearly you know yourself, how deeply you listen, and how fiercely you protect what is worth protecting.

Sacred masculinity is not domination, it is devotion. It is a willingness to carry weight, not for the sake of ego, but for purpose. It is rooted, not reactive. Present, not performative. Where toxic masculinity fears the feminine, the sacred masculine honors her. He is not diminished by her presence… he is deepened by it.

In Jungian terms, sacred masculinity emerges when a man integrates his shadow and confronts the anima (feminine) within. He does not exile feeling. He doesn’t avoid vulnerability. He enters the underworld of his own psyche, confronts the parts he’s been taught to reject (fear, tenderness, longing) and brings them home.

We see echoes of this in myth. The Dagda, the great father of the Tuatha Dé Danann of Irish Mythology, was strong beyond reckoning, but his strength served nourishment, fertility, protection. He carried a club that could kill with one end and bring life with the other. He wasn’t stoic. He wept for his children. He wasn’t aloof. He loved fiercely. His power wasn’t hollow… it was holy.

Then there is Lugh, the light-bringer, a warrior not of brute strength but of skill, grace, and wisdom. He excelled in every art: music, diplomacy, battle, storytelling. He is the integrated man—the one who can build as well as break, who knows that true power lies not in destruction, but in discernment.

The sacred masculine protects, not controls. Leads, not dominates. He doesn’t seek submission, but communion. He is the sword that draws a boundary, and the steady hand that lowers it when peace is possible.

This is the path that modern men are called to walk, not back to the Marlboro Man, nor toward an emasculated neutrality, but into a wholeness that holds both fire and stillness. Sacred masculinity is a return, not to the past, but to the soul of what it means to be a man—one who stands not above others, but firmly within himself.

The Sacred Feminine Within the Masculine

To become whole, a man must meet the feminine not just outside himself, but within. This is where true transformation begins. For too long, the masculine ideal has been carved in stone: emotionless, independent, unmoved. But stone does not grow. And a man who cannot feel, cannot evolve.

In Jungian psychology, the anima is the feminine soul-image within the man—the wellspring of emotion, creativity, vulnerability, and relational depth. She appears in dreams, myths, and projections—often in the form of the muse, the lover, the guide, or the mysterious other. But until she is integrated, she haunts. She becomes the woman he chases but cannot love fully, the part of himself he fears but cannot name.

To ignore the anima is to remain trapped in the shell of masculinity. To integrate her is to unlock the full range of human experience. It is to cry without shame. To nurture without apology. To sense, to soften, to hold, not just others, but one’s own inner life.

This integration is not weakness. It is the alchemical marriage, the sacred union of sword and chalice, sun and moon, flame and water. It is what the Celts knew well: that a man could be a warrior and a poet, a king and a weaver of dreams.

We see this reflected in myth. Even the fierce warrior Cú Chulainn was trained by a woman—Scáthach, a shadowy figure of wisdom and initiation. She did not just teach him to fight; she taught him to see. To know. To descend into the depths of his power and emerge changed.

In the same way, the sacred feminine within a man is not there to soften him into docility, but to deepen him into wisdom. She does not erase his strength—she refines it. She shapes his fire with water, tempers his action with reflection, and opens his heart to love—not as conquest, but as communion.

To reject her is to become brittle. To embrace her is to become whole.

The Cost of Disconnection: When Masculinity Becomes a Mask

“Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.” - bell hooks

When a man is cut off from the sacred feminine within himself, from his capacity to feel, to grieve, to relate deeply, he doesn’t become stronger. He becomes harder. And eventually, that hardness cracks.

This is the quiet crisis beneath so much male suffering. Behind the armor of control and stoicism lies isolation, depression, and an aching hunger for authenticity. But because emotional openness is often framed as weakness, many men never express what’s inside. They turn instead to performance—success, sex, strength—as currency for worth. They trade vulnerability for validation. They perform “manhood” instead of inhabiting man.

Jung called this the danger of persona—the mask we wear to gain social approval. When a man’s identity is welded too tightly to that mask, he forgets who he truly is. He becomes a role. A shadow of himself. And in that shadow lives shame, anger, and the fear of being found out.

Without integration, the shadow of the masculine takes over:

• Power becomes control.

• Confidence becomes arrogance.

• Leadership becomes domination.

• Sexuality becomes conquest.

• Silence becomes repression.

Worse still, this internal fracture often plays out in relationships. When a man cannot accept his own tenderness, he may reject it in others. When he cannot sit with his pain, he may project it outward—through criticism, violence, or withdrawal. He seeks wholeness through others because he hasn’t found it in himself.

But the psyche longs for balance. And if a man refuses to meet the sacred feminine within, she may appear in dreams, in breakdowns, in sudden floods of grief or rage. The unconscious does not forget. It waits. And it will find ways to bring him home—gently or violently.

The path forward is not to toughen up, but to soften into strength. To learn the language of the heart without losing the spine. To stop performing and start integrating. Because only when a man reclaims the parts he was told to bury, can he stand whole in the world—not as a mask, but as a fully embodied soul.

Toxic Masculinity, the Environment, and the Machinery of Modernity

Toxic masculinity is not just a personal wound. It is a collective pathology—embedded in our economies, institutions, and landscapes. It manifests in boardrooms and bulldozers, in oil rigs and military campaigns. It is the unspoken creed of modern industrial civilization: conquer, extract, dominate, expand. And beneath that drive lies a warped vision of masculinity that equates control with worth, growth with power, and submission with weakness.

This is masculinity severed from the feminine, cut off from care, interdependence, and restraint.

1. Economics as a Masculinized Machine

The dominant economic model, especially under neoliberal capitalism, is built on hypermasculine traits: endless competition, winner-takes-all hierarchies, conquest of markets, and denial of limits. Growth is the holy grail—even when it devours the planet. Vulnerability, whether in people, ecosystems, or economies, is exploited, not protected.

This system doesn’t reward balance… it rewards domination. And it trains men to measure their worth in productivity, profit, and accumulation. Not presence. Not integrity. Not care.

Neoliberalism didn’t just transform markets—it reshaped identities. It commodified even the self. The result is a crisis not just of economics, but of meaning. Men are taught to become brands. Souls become performance metrics. Relationships become transactions.

2. Environmental Collapse as a Masculine Crisis

The Earth, too, has been feminized—and thus, in the logic of domination, made disposable. Nature is no longer a living system, but a “resource.” The forests are timber. The mountains are ore. The rivers are channels for commerce. The air is a dumping ground.

This mindset mirrors toxic masculinity: feelings are suppressed, softness is despised, and the goal is always control.

The climate crisis is not just a technical problem—it is the direct consequence of a worldview that values action over reflection, dominance over interrelationship, profit over protection. It is the global fallout of masculinity untethered from the feminine, from limits, from empathy.

3. The Sacred Masculine as Antidote

This is why reclaiming the sacred masculine is not just about healing men—it’s about healing the world. The integrated man understands restraint. He doesn’t plunder what he should protect. He doesn’t build empires. He tends ecosystems. He doesn’t conquer the lan. He walks it with reverence.

To challenge toxic masculinity is to challenge the very foundations of modernity as it’s currently built. It is to say: enough to extraction. Enough to endless expansion. Enough to the myth that more is always better.

The new masculinity doesn’t fear limits. It respects them. It doesn’t need domination to feel powerful. It finds power in responsibility—to the Earth, to the future, to the web of life itself.

A New Myth for Modern Men

We stand at the edge of a dying myth—a myth that told men they must never break, never feel, never yield. That their value lies in conquest, that emotion is weakness, that domination is destiny. This myth is cracking. And beneath it, something ancient stirs.

A new story is emerging. Not really new… but remembered. In this story, the integrated man does not fear the feminine. He partners with her. He does not guard his heart with iron walls. He tempers it with flame. He carries strength not to posture, but to protect. He builds not to consume, but to create space for life to flourish.

This man is not ashamed to cry. To bow. To love deeply. To walk away from power when it costs him his soul. He is not perfect—but he is real.

This is not the age of the lone cowboy, nor the alpha male prowling for dominance. That myth has burnt out. This is the age of the guardian, the listener, the initiated man—the one who walks with fire in his chest and stillness in his hands.

He is the warrior who plants trees. The builder who listens to dreams. The father who teaches not just with words, but with presence. The brother who says, “You don’t have to carry it alone.”

He is not above others. He is not beneath them. He stands among them—rooted, awake, whole.

This is the new myth. Or rather, the old one reborn. The spiral path. The sacred return.

And to every young man wondering who he is and where he belongs, let this be the blessing:

You are not lost—you are arriving.
You are not broken—you are becoming.
You are not too much, too soft, too strange.
You are the one the world has been waiting for.

Carry your fire.
Fill your well.
Let no mask bury your face.
Let no voice louder than your own define your worth.

You are man—not because of what you conquer,
but because of what you choose to love.
And protect.
And build.
And become.