September 23: Stop grading masculinity on a curve against femininity.

Last Friday, at the Bliss Boogie Summit, Nick Blum said something that's been rattling around in my brain since.

"There is some degree of stoicism that comes with healthy masculinity."

And he's right.

But here's the thing:

Right isn't the same as whole.

In my opinion, that's the trap of talking about masculinity (or femininity, or androgyny, or honestly anything) as its own standalone category instead of as one piece of the larger human experience.

Yes, healthy masculinity includes stoicism.

Not the Brovosphere version, where a man shows nothing, hides everything, and calls his own numbness "strength."

I mean the original stoicism.

The philosophy about how humans, not just men, live well.

Find tranquility.

Act with virtue instead of performing it.

So when someone tells me "healthy men" should be stoic, my brain does a weird little math problem.

Compared to what, in women?

Living badly?

Constant inner turmoil?

Acting immorally?

Of course not.

That's the quiet cost of the binary.

We treat masculine and feminine like opposites on a line, when they're honestly closer to each other than either one is to a total lack of gender expression at all.

It reminds me of something I've said for years about dominance and submission:

They're not a continuum.

They're two side-by-side sliders on an audio board.

You can be high on both (hi, zev switches!).

Low on both.

High on one and low on the other.

There's no single dial.

Gender works the same way, in my experience.

Some people run high masculine, low feminine.

Some run high on both, at once or depending on the day.

Some barely register on either slider, and that's fine too.

And every single one of us, wherever our sliders land, benefits from living well.

From inner tranquility.

From virtue.

Not just the men.

So no, I'm not arguing with Nick.

I'm just refusing to let "healthy masculinity" remain code for the standard, with everything else filed under deviation—at least in my little corner of the world.

If you've been trying to figure out what living well actually looks like for you, not the internet's version, not your dad's version, let's talk about it.

Book a free 15-minute Big Ask call, and we'll pull your version out of the noise.

https://my.curiouser.life/15-minutes-big-ask

--
Rev Heather, aka Nookie, LUQ
https://my.curiouser.life
+1-855-712-5433 (toll-free)

P.S. Where do you land on the sliders? High masculine, high feminine, neither, both, depends on the Tuesday?

Hit reply. I want to hear it.