You could get into a long debate about the many adjectives we’ve used to describe manhood in order to decide which are really the greatest characteristics of masculinity.

The truth is far simpler.

To answer the question, “what is good about masculinity?”, we need to remind ourselves that:

• Masculinity doesn’t exist. At least not in the way we think it exists. There is no timeless definition of manhood. It varies from culture to culture, era to era. It’s simply how we define manhood and how we define the relations of power among men and between men and women.

• That means that masculinity (like femininity) is a collective hallucination. It’s as if we’ve all taken the same drug and walk around imagining that masculinity is real. We might assume it is biological, we might think it comes from being male or female, but in truth, each culture makes it up.

• Our contemporary ideas of manhood simultaneously do two things: First, they help individual men cement our roles at the top of social hierarchies. They help individual men take advantage of enormous privileges that men as a group enjoy. So, if you’re raised to be assertive, strong, and decisive, if you’re trained not to experience (let alone show) weakness or pain, you’re more able to lord over women or other men in the home, at work, in sports, in politics, in fights, and at war. The ways we raise boys to be real men is basic training for a world of (relative) power and privilege. And, when you don’t have power and privilege, you stoically accept your lot and don’t complain because obviously it’s you who are the problem, not the system.

• The second thing it does is this—and here’s the great paradox I’ve written about for the past three decades:  the very ideals that confer and represent power and privilege, are a death trap for men. They are a source of enormous pain, isolation, and fear. The reasons are many: To demand that any human not feel or express pain is impossible. To push boys (and men) to ceaselessly prove we’re real men leads to a constant dialogue of self-doubt about making the masculine grade. It leads many men to hide their authentic feelings and to fear closeness to other men lest they discover your supposed weaknesses. No wonder men are more likely than women to kill ourselves, be addicted to alcohol and other drugs, and fail to get physical or emotional help when we need it. No wonder we die younger.

Which takes us back to the discussion on what’s good about masculinity.

The answer is very simple: Pretty much everything. After all, to be courageous or emotionally strong, to be dedicated to a task, to be physically strong, to see yourself as a sexual creature, to provide for others, are all, simply, human attributes and ones shared by women and men.  All of these (and more) are part of our human birthright.  All are important for our survival.

The Devil, Though, Is In the Details

Devil One are the qualities that got voted off the island. All those things a given culture associates with femininity get denied to men. Men mustn’t over-concern ourselves with nurturing activities. Men mustn’t show weakness or vulnerability. Men mustn’t show love for other men. Men mustn’t be too empathetic. By denying such things (and more) men rob ourselves of huge parts of our human birthright. We become half the men we really could be.

Devil Two is that men learn early on to obsessively pursue the attributes we associate with manhood and avoid the things associated with femininity. Too many men become driven. Too many live in fear (especially when we’re teens and young men) of not being a real man. Too many men learn to disassociate ourselves from many things we feel and to obsessively pursue an iron-plated masculinity. In other words, masculinity isn’t just a gender definition, it is a fear-based construction.

Devil Three is the assumption that women don’t share the positive qualities we associate with manhood. Furthermore, male-dominated cultures have denigrated and belittled the qualities we associate with femininity.

So, rather than talk about what’s good about masculinity, I’d rather encourage both boys and girls, men and women to do two things:  To celebrate and nurture the human qualities that are good for us all. And, secondly, to allow for true individuality: yes, some of us will be more one thing or another. Let’s let our boys and girls be those things without wedging them into the miserable world of pink and blue.

What do Marilyn Monroe, love, a male high school teacher, and, well, you, have in common?

The answer: more than you might imagine.

And although that answer will be different if you are a man or a woman, and depending on whether you’re attracted to women or men, it has had a riveting presence in most of our lives.

My first novel, The Possibility of Dreaming on a Night Without Stars—which has just been reborn as an eBook—sets out to explore that very question and a slew of other tough and heartfelt questions about love.

Over this past year, I got to do something few writers ever have a chance to do: rewrite a published novel. And in doing so, I found myself re-immersed in the dazzling and troubled world of one of the last century’s icons of the perfect woman and the more quotidian but equally troubled world of a fictional man. (Of course, Marilyn Monroe herself said that MM was but a fiction, a role she forced herself to play over and over again.)

The Possibility of Dreaming… is about men and the search for love. Years ago, it struck me that D.H. Lawrence’s great book of the 1920s, Women in Love, had been terribly mistitled: it seemed much more about men in love or, at least trying to be in love, struggling with love, searching for love, and sustaining love.

The thing is, too many men have too long pretended that a preoccupation with love should be women’s business. Romantic comedies get labeled chick flicks. Too many men are raised to distance themselves from feelings and so don’t learn an authentic language of emotions; thus, they find it difficult to express and meet their deepest emotional needs; thus too many don’t have sufficient empathy to fully sense the emotional needs of others.

As a result, the hard work of nurturing relationships too often gets left exclusively to women and too often is disparaged with words like: “why do we have to talk so much about it!” I wanted nothing to do with this and set out to write an entertaining but also thoughtful novel that had a man in the central place trying to figure out love.

After all, far too many men (just like far too many women) stumble miserably when it comes to love. At least some times in our lives, we find ourselves in relationships based on false promises or superficial images of perfection; or that gnaw away at us because she or he is far different from the manufactured images that surround us in movies and advertising; or which lack trust or the deeper connection that we crave but perhaps can’t articulate; or that trip over old baggage that sits forever in the front hall; or simply that get mired in stale patterns, routine, and boredom. It’s all made worse because our culture encourages a mall version of love where you shop for the attributes you supposedly require in someone to love.

I don’t want to give away the plot, but let me just say The Possibility of Dreaming on a Night Without Stars starts in the early spring with a story from a crazy old hitchhiker who says that not so long ago he saw Marilyn Monroe in a farmhouse somewhere in Ohio. As bizarre as this might be, the tale plants itself in Eli Schuman’s mind and won’t let go. The more he thinks about Marilyn, the more obsessed he becomes. Off he goes in search of this icon of the perfect woman.

Eli is actually involved in two summer-long searches. You see, the divorced Eli has been long searching for a perfect woman for himself. Now, you and I know that any of us, male or female, looking for the perfect woman or the perfect man is in for a perfectly miserable time. Eli, though, has yet to figure this out.

It’s when he meets a woman who unexpectedly challenges his idea of perfection that Eli’s deepest journey really begins. As my editors at Viking/Penguin wrote when they first published The Possibility of Dreaming on a Night Without Stars: “It is a road of longing, elation, hopefulness, despair, reckless abandonment and ultimately, an almost delirious rush towards self-discovery.”

As Eli (and I expect all of us learn at some point), love isn’t just discovered, prepackaged in perfection, but is made. That a life together is where two people have already been and not what lays in store. That the future is but a commitment not to be consumed by fears that someone better might come along.

(The Possibility of Dreaming on a Night Without Stars is available for $4.99 as an eBook for Kindle, iPad/iBook, Kobo, Nook, and other eReaders from Shopkeeper Press. To read reviews, download a free excerpt, or order a copy, click here.)