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A personal confession by way of conclusion: I hated the phrase “man up” for a long time, and to be honest I am still pretty wary of it. What does it mean, exactly, to “punitively invoke the idea of manning up” (Conroy 2018)? Whether said in aggressive, combative, homophobic, misogynistic, or gently paternalistic contexts, the tacit or explicit message is that somebody is not being man enough and needs to fix that straightaway—even as the success conditions for doing so are left unexplained (Allan 2018, 175). Whatever initial force it might have seems inevitably to collapse under the slightest critical interrogation. When “man up” means conforming to toxic masculinity—stifling one’s emotions, responding violently to some provocation, speaking with an unearned and unwarranted sense of authority—so much the worse for it. When “man up” means having courage, taking responsibility, fulfilling obligations, and so on (Hemmer 2017), the follow-up question is why such things have been oddly and selectively identified as masculine rather than as gender non-specific good human behaviors. Do women man up when they rise to the occasion and fulfill some obligation they would rather skip? Do preschoolers man up when they eat their vegetables? Can a football coach rouse his players to man up, not to play through pain but to practice tackling to avoid helmet-to-helmet contact?

Feminist allyship masculinity does not ask us to man up, but to step up as men, to stand against patriarchal norms, cultures, and institutions in our capacities as men. As I hope has become clear, by this I don’t mean as breadwinners, as protectors, or as male halves of some biological, mythical, or symbolic duality. Contrary to how the phrase is often used, we will be men just as much whether we stifle doubt, command a room, or collaborate with others in contributing to feminist projects. I am reminded of Man up’s similarly fraught cousin Be a man!—perhaps an even worse candidate for feminist reclamation, not because men cannot be feminists but because of its accompanying assumptions that manhood is something that can be lost and that manhood regained is the solution to what ails us.

If there is a constructive role for “man up” as a reclaimed norm of feminist masculinity, it is if its normativity can be disentangled from the toxic gender essentialism that often accompanies it. Within an exhortation to man up is a normative judgment, not only that the speaker wants us to do such-and-such, but that we should. Some readers may want to give up on normative masculinity altogether, abandon all judgments of how men should act, and leave us to live unencumbered by expectations. But recall Mary Anne Warren’s critique of the polyandrogynous ideal where people avail themselves of traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine traits or roles without limit: it is too sweeping to be a viable feminist ideal. Giving up normative masculinity is consistent with men exhibiting the most vicious sorts of human character traits, so long as these traits are no longer tied to evaluative analyses of how men should be. This is why Warren’s preferred ideal of feminist androgyny retains a normative dimension, where virtues are distributed and enacted among human beings regardless of sex or gender identity (1982, 183). A feminist attempt to reclaim masculinity needs a normative dimension as well, some feminist vision and guidance for what we should do and how we should be.

In doing the work of feminist allyship masculinity, men across a diversity of social locations can contribute to and thereby authentically identify with emancipatory histories and communities. The call to step up in feminist allyship, to stand against cultures and institutions of oppression in a way that takes seriously our social locations as men and their attendant epistemic and practical implications, has normative and hermeneutical power to make sense of our social experiences in a gendered world. Engaging in allyship practices in a patriarchal society is a meaningfully gendered activity: not to be more of a man but to perform better masculinity, though not what drill sergeants, football coaches, or exacting fathers might have had in mind. We can make feminist masculinity be about standing against patriarchal cultures and institutions in our capacities as men alongside differently positioned others, and in so doing, envision and enact a healthier, revitalizing, and substantively feminist alternative to masculinity as traditionally configured.