THE WORLD HAS many societies and cultures, and masculinity certainly isn’t conceptualized the same in all of them. There are many ways to be male, and it’s always bothered me greatly that in the U.S. and the West generally, those ways are assumed to be simple, largely biological, and as represented in Western literature and indeed Western science.

One doesn’t have to enter the toxic “men’s rights” territory to explore all this. One only has to be interested in the enormous variety of maleness across our world.

So I think this is all very good, particularly good to the extent that it starts cutting away biology from culture (something anthropologists have been working at for a century or more).

