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Nonbinary Masculinity
I've often been told that I've a masculine brain. I'm not completely sold on the idea that brains can be masculine, or that if they could be, that mine is, but I am willing to entertain it for a moment. I think this is because of tendency to be analytical, and/or my affinity for traditionally "masculine" interests, such as maths, science or engineering. This is a fair observation - I do like those things! However, I don't feel terribly like a man.
I'm comfortable with the body I inhabit, but as time has gone by the label of 'man' has seemed to fit less and less well. It's not that a definitely am something else, at least there's nothing I've found yet that seems to fit better, but just a lack of fitting with whatever it is that a man is. As I've spent time experiencing the subject, I've come more and more to the position that the piece which isn't fitting isn't so much myself, as it is the concept of a 'man' in the first place.
The Male Caricature
Our media is not designed to show real people, but fictions. In our entertainment - our sitcoms, dramas and cartoons - we don't show real people, but archetypical characters we need to communicate the story. This is also true of non-fiction: our news, our reality TV, our documentaries also summarise, just that this time the stories have actually happened. Archetpyes has been around since we started telling stories, as there's no way to possibly relate the complexity of a real human person in a story to an audience in any sane amount of time.
Archetypes can be positive or negative, depending on the story. Mr Incredible's mountain of muscle places him squarely in the role of protector, the provider and the fighter - positive male archetypes. In the same story, Syndrome is has archetypically negatively male - he is vindictive, spiteful and jealous.
We have an epidemic of isolation and an abundance of media to turn to to numb it. We also have an ever-increasing rate of single parents, who are themselves forced to work ever harder to provide for their children. These come together to encourage the increasing exposure to fictional examples of men, caricatures and archetypes, rather than to examples of men in real life.
There is and always will be a place in our societies for stories - storytelling is our most human trait - but in my own Western culture I think our hyperactive media culture has replaced real men with these caricatures, to the detriment of all. When we say speak of a man today, I think it is more likely to conjure images of Captain America, of Rick Sanchez, or of Donald Trump, than it is to conjure images of one's father, friend or teacher. It is this idea of a man that I reject: an amalgamation of some set of masculine traits, rather than the father, brother or friend whom one personally knows.