So You're a Wuss: How to Be More Masculine Starting Today

Testosterone: The Male Hormone

Testosterone is one of the essential ingredient that separates the birds from the bees. It’s what kicks in when you go through puberty and become a man, increasing muscle mass, deepening your voice, and promoting the growth of facial and body hair. In adults, it’s well-established that healthy testosterone gives you plenty of physical energy, promotes muscle health, and even helps regulate how you respond to victory and defeat. It is, for all intents and purposes, the masculinity hormone. Here’s how you can promote healthy testosterone naturally.

Caveat: I ain’t no doctor.

Eating Right:

• Eat eggs, meat, and fat. You grew up being told to avoid eating cholesterol. But guess what your body uses to make testosterone: cholesterol. You know how Rocky trained by straight up drinking raw eggs? He was on to something. If you’re afraid eating all that cholesterol will make you have high cholesterol, refer to this video. Take counsel of your common sense and your doctor, not what the media said in the early 80s. Avoid trans fats, but other fats including even butter and coconut oil are perfectly fine. Low-carb diets and “slow-carb diets” will generally be good.
• Don’t eat soy. Soy is full of phytoestrogens, and you might recognize that word “estrogen” as what wikipedia calls “the primary female sex hormone.” I’m not saying eating soy will make you a skinny wimp, but if you want healthy testosterone, you’ll get your protein sources from food that doesn’t turn you into a skinny wimp. - Thanks to the meta-study posted by /u/MegaFox, I’m suspicious of this one. Soy as a supplement may blunt testosterone (source 1 source 2) and previous studies that showed an effect make it appear to be minor. I’m personally going to avoid it, but feel free to research and make up your own mind.
• Basic rules include eating vegetables, lower-glycemic starches like sweet poatoes, plenty of animal protein (pecs) and avoiding sugar and processed carbohydrates including chips, crackers, breads, etc.

Exercising Right:

• Don’t be a treadmill bunny. In other words, lift heavy weights. Be STRONG. We’ve known about the effects of resistance training on testosterone for a long time. And no, this doesn’t mean you do some curls and you’re done. Focus on compound movements like squats and bench presses and dead lifts.
• Interval train. High intensity intervals might have a more powerful effect on testosterone than steady cardio. You can do cardio, but don’t think it’s going to fix your testosterone all by its lonesome.

Sleeping Right:

• Invest more time in sleeping if you find yourself tired. It’s okay. It’s time put to good use. Sleep helps increase testosterone levels when you are awake. It’s far better than staring at a computer well past midnight.
• Shut off screens at night. It’s winter, so that means you’ll spend a lot less time on the computer…but it will be worth it.

Further Reading

• Art of Manliness, How to Increase Testosterone Naturally
• Mating Grounds, How to Naturally Increase Testosterone

Learn From the Marines

Although a significant portion of Marine boot camp is spent on making men ready for combat, following orders without question, and the like, ask yourself this: have you ever met a former Marine who didn’t seem completely masculine? True, if you’re going to join the marines, you’re probably interested in masculine pursuits to begin with, but in the marines, you learn the following:

• Stand up straight.
• Speak loudly. If you don’t scream “Aye, aye, sir!” at the top of your lungs in response to an order, you get yelled at for being a pussy. I’m not saying you should do the same, but you need to develop a cutting, powerful voice because no one is listening to that squeaky mumbly shit you have going on now.
• Be decisive in all your actions. Marines in boot camp are ordered to powerwalk from A to B, to speak as soon as they’re spoken to, to do everything with the utmost enthusiasm and energy. The next time you’re indecisive about getting up and taking a shower, remember how all the poor saps in boot camp have to pick up their garbage like their life depends on it and get to work. Make it a habit in your life as well and you’ll notice a ton of benefits.
• Frame control. You are expected to keep your utmost composure and posture while drill instructors scream at you; if you can’t handle a little social pressure, how will you ever handle bullets flying at you in combat, after all? But the result is that you develop a stronger sense of internal confidence and identity because you’ve taken the worst the drill instructors can give and never broke. My recommendation? Work on your ability to stay poised even when you do things you’re afraid of, like approaching women, and you’ll develop a similar sense of self. Better yet, join a sport full of men and give each other shit.
• Get focused. The drill instructor will scream at you if you don’t pay attention to every word he says and miss an order, even if it’s something as simple as picking up trash. This requires paying total attention to what a person is saying to you. Stop doing two things at once. Batch your activities. When you’re running, run. When you’re working, work. When you’re listening, listen.
• Get clean. The Marines don’t even let you keep “lewd” pictures on you, but on the Internet in the free world, you can click over to one easily. What is this doing to us? Is it really good that we have a constant visual feast on display, that we judge women we see in real life based on what we just saw in ideal lighting and in ideal makeup and in ideal shape on the Internet? If you want to feel like a man around women, you’ll have to disconnect from this world of insane hyperdopamine and get yourself clean again. If you won’t NoFap, at least consider going /r/PornFree.
• Choose your zone of influence. The Marines separate themselves from their families and are allowed only one brief phone call - prescripted - back to home for the first few weeks. If you have a weak and enabling zone of influence, cut yourself off from it and focus on learning to be your own man.

Tips:

Create a grueling routine. If you want Marine strength, you’re going to have to get yourself to do difficult things and not listen to the internal voice that says “I can’t do it.” Create a tough morning routine. Wake up early. Challenge yourself. Live up to that routine every day and make success contingent on one simple principle: did you quit or did you persist? Persist more every day. Win that victory every single day.

Warm up your voice every day. Speak loudly to yourself in the mirror. Get used to the idea that you’re talking just a little above what would normally considered to be “polite.” Get comfortable with drawing attention to yourself in this way.

Lessons from Stoicism

They say that to be manly is to be stoic, but they usually mean “stoic” as unflinching and quiet. Truth be told, there’s more to /r/Stoicism than that. Stoicism is about acknowledging reality for what it is and learning to condition your thoughts in order to live an independent and happy life in spite of it.

• Accept suffering. Marcus Aurelius, author of Meditations, tells us that it is possible to be comfortable and live in pleasure…but that this is not what we were made for. Free yourself from distractions and embrace the day’s work and pain knowing that this work has value. Stop procrastinating and wondering what you can be and start accepting that growth and improvement means suffering. Give up the suffering of indecision and embrace the suffering of decision.
• If you are unhappy, it is your fault. Your attitude is your personal responsibility. Your thoughts are what make you happy, not your circumstances. Yes, it would be easier to be happy with money and women and power. But it will still be your responsibility to be so. Jim Carrey has said that he wished everyone could have fame and wealth so they could see that it isn’t the answer. Be your own answer.
• End the hedonism. We live in fortunate times. We have access to nonstop porn, entertainment, junk food, etc. - we can live the hedonistic lives that only Roman Emperors enjoyed, once upon a time. Has that made us happier? Has it made us stronger? I would argue the opposite. Says Epictetus, of Hercules: “What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges? Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules. And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?”
• It’s okay to not know everything. Be content to be humble and a learner, because the reality of life is that we know very little and we are constantly learning. Be content not to know everything and remain in a state of learning, humble before people who can help you.

To Do Is To Be

If you spend most of your day working in a cubicle, sitting at your computer at home, looking at porn, calling it a day for some half-ass sleep, eating junk food, and never getting outside to exercise because it’s a little cold and rainy, do you really expect the end-result will be a manly man?

Of course not. To do is to be. You’re a man because you were born that way, but that doesn’t mean you’ve done all you can do with the gift of masculinity. Muscles are not rights. They are earned by use. So it is with being a man. If you never get out and experience the world as a man would, don’t expect to feel all that manly.

• Connect with nature. Learn survivalism or bushcraft. Camp by yourself once in a while and experience what it means to be exposed to the elements a little more than you’re used to. Go for a run in the mornings without earbuds to distract you from the pleasant sunrise.
• Adopt a manly hobby. Even if you’re not interested in it. Try a few out. I recommend learning how to make something. Ron Swanson makes chairs. What can you make beside a trip to the drive-thru for something someone else cooked you? Experiment with classes in a more extreme hobby to live up to the risk-taking badass you know in your heart you truly are.
• Stop apologizing for being a man. Part of being a man is knowing what you’re about and following through with it no matter what other people say. There’s a reason Marines often have a strong sense of self; if you can put up with a nasty-looking drill instructor screaming in your face for months at a time, you can put up with it when some stranger pokes fun at you on social media. Apologize when you fuck up and be humble about yourself, but never apologize for having a strong sense of yourself and your identity.

Stop Being Such a Goddamn Pushover

• Don’t ever do favors for women because you’re attracted to them. As /u/AlphaXpipubs will tell you, what is the sexiest word you can say to a woman? “No.” If you cow to some woman’s whim just because you want her to approve of you, you’re not “giving to give.” You’re giving to get. It’s BS, and you know it’s BS, and she knows you know it’s BS, which is why it doesn’t inspire lust or respect from women.
• Make it clear that your decisions aren’t up for questioning. If you’re eighteen and you want to move out, don’t let your parents tell you you can’t. If you’ve made a decision like not having kids and your wacky aunt won’t let it go, tell her in no uncertain terms that she needs to stop because the decision has already been made. You are a man, you’re the captain of a ship of one. What you say goes.
• Learn a martial art. Not for fighting purposes, but for confidence purposes. You’ll want to carry yourself like a man who knows how to handle himself, and in the process, you’ll learn how to assert yourself better without having to resort to violence.